When I
wrote my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, I didn’t really have any goal other than to see if I could
come up with a mystery good enough to show to other people. Because it was the
first time around, I did it on a wing and a prayer, plodding forward with the
idea in my head until it was done. I had no experience or basis to compare the
effort to.
The result
was a book that has garnered decent reviews and decent traffic for a first work
by an unknown author. But when I was finished with it, I knew I could have done
better, and, knowing at least some of where I stumbled along the way, made some
effort to change the way I wrote the next one.
So the
second time around I did more outlining — not just of the plot, but also
putting down details of the setting and the characters before I sat down at the
computer and began writing. I’d done a plot outline for the first book, but the
second outline was considerably longer and more detailed.
Pick One Thing and Work It
I also
decided to try to focus on improving in one specific area, and chose character
and dialogue. With that in mind, I looked at my grab-bag of story ideas and
went for the one that was probably most dependent on character and atmosphere
to carry the story forward. The result was the second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, which should be up
on Amazon in four to six weeks.
As I’ve
mentioned before, this is essentially an English country-house mystery, in
which a group of people — some known to each other, some strangers — are
brought together in an isolated setting. Tensions simmer, and eventually
someone ends up dead. Because Americans don’t, by and large, do country-house
weekends any more, I made the setting a remote fishing lodge, at which the
guests are thrown together by a stretch of unremittingly bad weather.
Starting
afresh with the same protagonist, but otherwise a different setting and
different cast of characters, I had the freedom to invent anew and be only
slightly limited by what I had written in the first book. I even gave my lead
character a different fishing sidekick and had some fun developing the new
sidekick’s persona.
Diagramming the Plot
There’s no
telling what the readers will think, but I felt there was some improvement and
plan to follow much of the same process for the third one.
Which, by
the way, is already started, with a goal of being in print (or at least in
e-book) by the end of 2015. At the moment I’m only 90 percent sure about the
title, so I won’t be giving that out yet, but I can tell you three things about
it:
1. It will
take place in a different setting from the first two books and will have a new
set of characters;
2. The
exception being that Gordon and one of the sidekicks from the first two books
will reprise his role;
3. The
focus for improvement will be the complexity of the plot and the ingenuity
involved in unraveling the mystery.
This time
I’m doing a formal story board and calendar for the action to ensure that
everything falls into place as it should and diagramming the plot with even
greater precision than before. Perhaps this is an exercise in literary
Coue-ism, but if you’re not improving, you’re going backwards. I even know what
I want to work on in the fourth novel, but let’s get this one done first.
