Treasure Tuesday: Guide to Fiction Writing by Phyllis A. Whitney

The day of reading, writing, and books. *****

This is my favorite writing book, even though Phyllis is a plotter and I'm a pantser. She is such a plotter that by the time she sits down to actually write, she's merely connecting the dots. it's worked well for her. She wrote over 70 novels. I've thought about being a plotter. It seems like an efficient way of doing things. But then the other chaotic side of me says "why would you want to know what happens?" Still, when I wrote my cozy mystery "Turtle Soup Studios" it might have helped to know who did it and why. I was as clueless as Holly, my protagonist. Still even for a pantser like me, Whitney has a lot of good stuff in this slim book. While she talks about research, notebooks, planning, suspense, characters and other writerly stuff, she weaves in her own background and uses her books as examples of how she does things. The most important thing, is her notebook. She describes how she sets up her binder, the different categories she uses, and what goes into those categories. At the time that she wrote this book, writers were still writing on typewriters so she used an actual binder. You can still do that, or you might adapt it for your computer. One of the most helpful sections was about naming characters. She keeps lists of the names of all the characters she's ever created. And she aims not to have two characters with the same initial in the same book. I try and do the same thing, however in my Orchards series, that's impossible. There are just too many people running around that mall. Each book will only focus on a handful of them, but all those characters still exist, even if they don't make it to all the books. Normally though, this is a good tip. Oh - I think I'll do a blog post on naming characters. It's been awhile since I picked up this book and I had remembered it as doing what Stephen King did...having one half of the book biography and the other half writing advice. But looking through this gem, that's not what she did. It's just that her voice is so strong in here that I thought I was reading her biography but I didn't really, just some stories she told alongside her writing advice. I got this book years ago and it's no longer in print. But if you happen to stumble on a copy, in a used book store, at the thrift shop, at a writer's auction, while digging through your ancestors belongings, grab it and don't let go.