From Lynn Slaughter
After months of being unable to meet due to Co-Vid, our chapter met on-line last Saturday, January 9th, followed by a fabulous workshop presented by award-winning crime thriller writer Libby Fischer Hellmann. I felt like a kid wanting to scream from the rooftops, “WE’RE BACK!”
It was so good to see familiar faces I hadn’t laid eyes on in months and to introduce our new board members who’ve been working hard behind the scenes: V-P Carol Preflatish; Secretary Susan Bell; Program Coordinator Elaine Munsch; Treasurer Sheila Shumate; and at-large board member Linda Rees (who got us on YouTube!).
I miss seeing members in person so much, but I have to say that the advantage of going on-line for meetings and events has meant we can include other chapter members and interested writers. Within twenty-four hours of announcing Libby’s workshop, we had well over our 100-person Zoom limit wanting to sign up. Thank goodness we were able to make a recording of the workshop available to all those interested (view recording here Libby Fischer Hellman Workshop). Special thanks go to Susan Bell who handled registration and made this all possible technically. Linda Rees also helped me get the word out—and out it went!
Libby’s workshop was chock full of strategies to build suspense in our work. In addition to paying attention to hooking our readers with strong opening sentences and chapter endings, she advised continuously raising the stakes in the body of our works to increase readers’ emotional investment. She advised paying attention to:
- creating complications
- using time limits (the ticking bomb, etc.)
- thinking of the worst-case scenario and making it worse
- tempting protagonists with situations involving morality, ethics, and values
- isolating the protagonist with no help around
- including the antagonist’s POV from time-to-time
- avoiding all-good, all-bad characters (“The bad guy always thinks he’s a hero in his own story”)
- avoiding sudden resolution (deus ex machina) that comes out of nowhere
- using structural misdirection, such as red herrings in mystery fiction
- stretching time in dramatic scenes
- using variations in pacing so that there are “pools of calm” between action sequences
- limiting back story
- creating urgency in action scenes using short sentences, no adverbs, and crisp dialogue
- avoiding dwelling on violence (“A little goes a long way”)
Libby included interactive writing exercises, and I loved working on them and listening to the creative responses of several volunteer participants. All in all, it was a super-stimulating event, and I am very grateful to the Speakers Bureau of Sisters in Crime for making her appearance possible—not to mention our former president, Beth Henderson, and all others who worked on the grant that brought us Libby!
Meantime, a small group coordinated by the amazing Susan Bell has been spending Sunday afternoons working on scripts for three short “who-done-it” plays set in a 1920s Speakeasy. If all goes well, we hope to present these at the Frazier museum once we get through the current pandemic. Currently, Susan Bell, Elaine Munsch, Linda Rees, Patience Martin, Lorena Peter, Jeanette Pope, Miki Reilly-Howe, and I are working on a script called “Iced at the Easy,” with a premise created by Jeanette Pope. I think this may be the closest I’ll ever get to working in the writing room of a television show! Everyone throws ideas in, and somehow, the work gets done, interspersed with a whole lot of laughter.
Our next chapter meeting will be on Saturday, February 13. At eleven, we’ll critique new work by Elaine Munsch and get a tutorial from Susan Bell on how to track changes in documents. Then, at twelve, we’ll have our business meeting, in which we’ll discuss our spring retreat to address where we go from here as a chapter. At one, program coordinator Elaine Munsch has arranged for a guest speaker presentation by Mark J. Downing, local author of a paranormal Sherlock Holmes series. Mark will talk to us about “putting on the Sherlock hat to write in the Victorian frame of mind.” Susan will be sending out the Zoom link to members. If you’re a visitor and would like to attend, please contact Susan at: susancbell@yahoo.com
I also want to encourage anyone who hasn’t yet bought a copy of the anthology, Mystery With a Splash of Bourbon, to pick one up. Edited by Susan Bell and Elaine Munsch, it includes stories from several of our members. It’s available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, and wherever good books are sold.
Finally, if you’d like to learn more about some of our author members, I’d love for you to go to my website, www.lynnslaughter.com, and check out their guest blogs. So far, they include: Linda Rees, Beth Henderson, and Carol Preflatish. Upcoming blogs will feature: Elaine Munsch (January 23), Susan Bell (February 13), and Jeanette Pope (February 27).
And that’s all I have to say for now. To think that when I started writing this “endless blog,” I doubted I had much to say!