The Fun Parts of Writing

 Q: Action, comedy, dialogue, sex, or violence - which of these do you find the most difficult to write and why?

from Susan

 

I like writing dialogue the most, and humor finds its way into my work without my pushing it. Happily, reviewers agree that’s kind of a given with my books – not joke humor but mostly a sly side-eye at human behavior. Dialogue seems easy to me because I write like I think (see side-eye) and I hear dialogue as conversation first. The only thing I have to do in edits is get rid of the “Well”s and the “Okay”s because real conversation is full of them but they can clog the manuscript if used more than a couple times in an 80,000-word novel.

Action is fun because it’s cinematic and arises from my fertile imagination. I can see, feel, hear, taste, and smell what’s happening even if it’s never happened to me, at least like it does in a crime fiction story.  Action has to move the story forward, which means I sometimes cut a scene I enjoyed writing after the first draft because it was a diversion from what readers need to see. In my dreams, I get to write the action scene in “West Wing” where Allison Janney, having been fired from her Hollywood job and lost her glasses, walks straight into her own swimming pool while talking to someone on the other side of the pool. Genius! 

The two that I have to think about are violence and sex. You can’t write crime fiction without writing some violence. The first time I wrote a chaotic scene with a gun, in Murder in the Abstract, I asked a fellow writer and friend, Kirk Russell, to read it and tell me if it was anywhere near believable. He assured me it was good, which made writing the next one and the next one easier. The violence in my seven novels is not always the same – it could be guns, it could be a hostage situation, it could be a car coming at my protagonist. It won’t be torture or rape because that’s beyond my ability to imagine without turning away immediately, and I need to be sure about why the violence is in the story and how I can write it without getting squeamish.

Speaking of squeamish, yes, sex scenes are the hardest for me. In fact, I don’t write them. My books are all first person or close third, so it means following the protagonist into the bedroom (or the kitchen floor), and I’ve never found the place where that adds meaningfully to my story. It’s not love or lust that I avoid – there are plenty of characters in my books who experience or fend off both. And tingling physical attraction to even a stranger or hopes of making love to an adored person are sweet and keep characters real.

I do come across good fiction in which sex scenes are integral or essential to the core story, but I still remember reading a crime fiction novel by someone I admire in which an extended number of sweaty sex scenes seemed to have been dropped in at one point from nowhere. They didn’t have anything to do with the tense story and the woman in them had no sustained role otherwise. I never figured it out and I was hesitant to ask the author, who would have taken it as a negative bit of criticism rather than a simple question of why.

My WIP at this moment has a lot of everything except – so far – sex. I’ll have to think about that. She’s a new protagonist for me, so I have room to play with her sexuality. Challenge to self: Is her attraction to cute guys something that can be important enough to write about in detail? TBD.

My two latest, from Severn House, both with good reviews and feedback!