My Writing Life (such as it is): Guest Post by Naomi Rand

Why do I write? Because I can't not. Simply put, that's it. I get up every day, put on a pot of espresso, (which, currently features three scoops of Haagen Daz ice cream, a habit that I began during the pandemic, and I haven't seen any reason to break). Then, I go to my writing area, which used to be your standard desk, then became a standing one, and is currently, a bed. Not the one I sleep in, the other one, (insomnia rules). I make myself comfortable, and prop up my laptop on my lap, and I sit there, hoping for inspiration, but while I do I write seventeen versions of the same sentence. Eventually, something kicks in, and then the next few pages of my new mystery take shape.

Hours pass. That's the best part. Hours where I'm not me, worrying about whatever I'm worrying about at the moment. Though, crucially, if I'm eating at home, it's important to break after an hour or so, and check in with my better half, who's the cook, so we can discuss the most crucial decision of the day. What's for dinner. Once that's settled, it's back to work. 

After that, it's back to my current quandary, what happens next, and what do these people say to each other that will be maybe witty, or pithy, or at least entertaining and move the plot forward. The mystery I'm writing currently is about a mother and daughter who've kept secrets from each other. Then, all hell breaks loose on the film set where the daughter's working, and they need to team up. What happens next? That's the quandary. 

I wish I outlined. I've tried and failed. Instead, I exercise. First, I take a walk, (currently in Greenwood Cemetery, which is the location I'm using for my new mystery, and blocks from my house). It's got great birding, and insane looking mausoleums, and Boss Tweed and Basquiat's graves. It's very quiet, lots of dead people, but very few living ones. So, my whirring mind eventually comes up with the germs of the next idea. Then, I jot it down, and head to the pool where I swim a mile and hammer out the details.

After which, there's a drink, and dinner.

Then, it's time to watch something, (Riot Women was a favorite recently, so now I'm exploring everything Sally Wainwright's written), and then, I read whatever it is I'm currently reading. I just finished Whistler, Ann Padgett's latest, (highly recommended), and am now reading Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke for my book group. Then, to sleep. And being a woman of a certain age, I'm up again at three, to worry some more, but eventually I get back to sleep, and wake at six or so, and then, there's coffee to look forward to, which is, in my humble opinion, the ambrosia of the gods.

It's a life, folks. And it's what makes me happy. Or, at least, keeps me sane.

We all write about ourselves in one way or another, so everything I write has me in it. My current mystery, out now, Goodbye to Me, is no exception. It takes place in 1968 in a gritty, very different New York City. The main character, Freddie, who works as a bike messenger, comes home to find her foster mother, dying, and a strange man, dead in their apartment. She needs to stay one step ahead of her pursuers and solve the mystery of why her foster mother was targeted. She and her best friend/crush, Celia, race through the city I grew up in. They go from the old Times Square, where I skipped school, to haunt the arcades, to the boat basin which used to have actual houseboats that people lived on, bobbing in the, then toxic Hudson, the Museum of Modern Art where my best friend and I would go, religiously to see whatever movie was screening that Saturday, to Bloomingdales where I spotted Faye Dunaway getting into a cab, looking so beautiful it took your breath away.

Writing is life.

And, in my case, life is writing.

***

Naomi Rand is the author of the Emma Price mysteries, The One That Got Away, Stealing For A Living, and It’s Raining Men (Harper Collins) and the novel, Surviving Amelia (Bink Books). Her forthcoming novel Goodbye to Me will be published in June by Bink Books. She has stories in three great collections, Brutal and Strange: Stories Inspired by the Songs of Elvis Costello (Down and Out Press), Crime Plus Music (Three Rooms Press) and Hard Boiled Brooklyn (Bleak House Books). Her fiction and literary criticism have appeared in numerous publications including The Flexible Persona, Other Voices, Melus, Cutbank, The Florida Review, The Spirit That Moves Us Press, Invisible City, and The North Dakota Quarterly. Her personal essays have appeared in The Huffington Post and Ravishly, and she's written a book review column, numerous articles for national publications and, once, long ago, a pregnancy guide. Now she lives in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn with her husband, David. When she's not writing, swimming, or walking, she's planning her next great meal. www.naomirand.com

The Importance of Getting Up and Walking Around: Guest Post by William Shaw

William Shaw is an award-winning pop culture journalist, who has written regularly for the UK's Observer and Independent, as well as the New York Times. He is the author of the Breen and Tozer series and THE BIRDWATCHER. Shaw lives in Sussex, England.

William Shaw:
The Importance of Getting Up and Walking Around

You can’t overestimate the importance of getting up and walking around a little.

If you think writing is all about sitting at a computer and banging out words, you’re wrong. My kids, when they see me wandering around the house, or strumming an instrument with a vacant expression on my face, snigger and say, ‘Yeah. Writing again, is he?’

But most of the ideas don’t happen when you’re sitting down at a desk.

And it’s doubly true of crime writing, because crime writing is as much about creating an atmosphere as it is about problem solving. How do you get your protagonist from A to B without C knowing? Surely C would know that B murdered A because he was in the next room. When I wrote The Birdwatcher I let people know right away in the first two paragraphs that William South, the hero and good guy, was a also murderer. This was a fantastic opening, but it left me with a host of structural problems to fix about how long I could delay the reader knowing who he had killed. As a result, I had two plots, one in the 1970s and one in the present day and for a while they were tangling together without really working.

The Birdwatcher took a lot of getting up and walking around, but it worked.

I finished the book at a writing shack I have down in the English county of Devon. It’s off-grid and there are a lot of low-level tasks that need doing, like stoking the fire, or putting rainwater into the filter. I write for a while, putter around, write some more. There is a limit to the amount of writing I can physically do there because my laptop works off a single solar panel. I was doing the washing up which requires getting rainwater and heating it on the stove first when realised I had figured out a way in which the two plots came together like I had meant it all along.

The thing is, I can’t even remember thinking the thought. It was just there.

Psychologists call it the creative unconscious. They’ve even proved how well it works. Back in 2006 two Dutch scientists, Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs, did an experiment in which they gave participants three minutes to think of as many uses as they could for a simple object like a brick or a paperclip.

Half the group were given the chance to complete the job uninterrupted. The other half were given a second task – such as counting backwards in threes. Both groups produced a similar number of ideas, but the ones who were distracted produced ideas that were more divergent – or, to put it another way, more creative. In other words, not thinking directly about something can produce more interesting results.

We haven’t a clue how this works; we just know it does. It’s reassuring to realise that the brain is much weirder than you might imagine it is. Fans of Artificial Intelligence who imagine we’re approaching the singularity take note.

That day I ran out of the shack whooping with glee. What a great ending, I thought. The funny thing is, it’s not even like I can give myself credit for thinking of the solution. It just happened.

***

From Book Reporter:

 

The Birdwatcher by William Shaw

A methodical, diligent and exceptionally bright detective, William South is an avid birdwatcher and trusted figure in his small town on the rugged Kentish coast. He also lives with the deeply buried secret that, as a child in Northern Ireland, he may have killed a man. When a fellow birdwatcher is found murdered in his remote home, South's world flips. The culprit seems to be a drifter from South's childhood; the victim was the only person connecting South to his early crime; and a troubled, vivacious new female sergeant has been relocated from London and assigned to work with South. As the hero investigates, he must work ever-harder to keep his own connections to the victim, and his past, a secret