The Freedom of Finishing by Mar Preston

I’ve just sent off my sixth novel to my editor and my two best and trusted writer friends. I am hoping to get insightful comments that help me better this mystery. It is the second in my series about a Kern County Sheriff’s Detective investigating a murder in the far from tranquil village where I live.

I’ve turned it over after two years work on it. After four unpublishable novels which served as an apprenticeship in learning how to write, then five modestly successful crime fiction novels, I thought I had the process down fairly well. This last one has almost defeated me.

Perhaps it was one I did really want to write but felt I had to. Four previous novels were set in Santa Monica and featured an SMPD detective. But my bestselling novel had been a standalone set in my mountain village. I thought it should be the debut of a series.

It’s advanced slowly through many fits and starts. I tried outlining which is against my nature. I changed the killer half way through. I gave the killer a sidekick. The only constant through this agonizing process was that the story took place in a cat sanctuary. I knew the animal rescue world and it unfailingly intrigues me.

In the meantime I wrote and published 3 eBooks on the topic of Writing Your First Mystery. The book, still untitled, just wouldn’t come and I had now put so much time into it, I couldn’t abandon it. Finally I summarized the process in a 4th eBook called Finishing Your First Mystery, now in the process of publication. I worked at the wretched novel almost every day for two years. Of course there were lapses, but not many.

Quoting one of my favorite writers, Neil Gaiman: Creative work is often a slog and the only way you'll really get good at it is to finish what you start even when it's not going well. You'll end up learning more from that experience than if you quit.

Gaiman is right. I feel some sense of satisfaction, it’s true, even if I can’t say yet it’s ready for publication. By now I know it will be finished and I will feel pride when I hold it in my hand.
More than anything I feel the freedom of finishing. My first waking thought is not dread at what lays ahead of me when I open the file for the day. I can play at writing. Blogs, do some long-needed promotion, write a catch up email to my friend in Australia, pick up the phone and have a long gossipy conversation with a friend, start a new novel.

I’ve learned again that writing a novel-length piece of crime fiction is a marathon endeavor. My good friend tells me I always say I will never do this again at the finish of a novel. I don’t remember that but I believe her.

A story is already bubbling in my mind, this one in Santa Monica.

Writing Your First Mystery is available free here on my website.

Quotes for Writers (and others)

My friend, Jan Christensen, recently did a blog on helpful quotes she’s collected. Hers are on writing advice and I loved the post!

It got me thinking about the mishmash of quotes I’ve collected over the years. On the chance that some of them may interest you, I’ll throw a bunch out here. These aren’t all writing advice. Many are inspiration (I seem to need that often). Some are just funny (I need that, too.)

“Write like a shark. Keep moving or you die.” My paraphrase from a Neil Gaiman article. This one is currently taped to my monitor.

Others are gathered into files with various names because I forget I already have a file for quotes.

This one resurfaced on the Short Mystery Fiction list recently:

"Writing is a lot like prostitution. First you do it for love. Then you do it for money. Then you recruit others." --Moliere

This one also came from a discussion on the Short Mystery Fiction List.

I'm thinking literary focuses on the moment when the character changes, and the genre focuses on what the character does with that change. --Stephen D. Rogers

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." --Pablo Picasso

"It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop." – Confucius

"You have seen, but you have not observed." --Sherlock Holmes

"I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now -- only the place where the books are kept." That's my favorite Steinbeck quote. --Elaine Viets

“Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Courage does not always roar. Sometimes, it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying I will try again tomorrow.” --Old Irish Saying

"Change is a dragon. You can ignore it, which is futile. You can fight it, in which case you will lose. Or you can ride it.” -- Arianne Wing on the closing of the world-famous Imperial Dynasty restaurant in Hanford, CA; quoted in The Hanford Sentinel, Dec. 17, 2005.

"No one in this world is useless if he lightens the burden of it for someone else." -Charles Dickens

"I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better." --Ernest Hemingway

"Every time you sit down to write, you should be afraid of losing the reader at any moment of any page."-- Playwright William Gibson:

What are your favorites for inspiration, guidance, amusement?

All photos public domain from morgueFile.com