Avoiding He-Said and She-Said

By Elaine L. Orr

It goes without saying (but I will) that authors want readers to know who is doing the talking in their books. There are ways to do that well and ways to distract your reader from your story by doing it clumsily.

A couple of points.

1) If you have to ascribe conversation to a character, consider doing it by beginning the segment with action, then have the character speak. For example:

I didn’t smile. “Those aren’t ready yet. How about a pumpkin muffin? You can pay me tomorrow.” 

From the kitchen, Linda called, “Always a pleasure for a good customer.”

2) The similar option to avoid is using action and also specifying who said something. 

Mr Hawthorne," I said, taking a hammer from the toolbox, "it's time to find that box of nails."

3) It is often appropriate to simply say he said or she asked. I use this at  least a couple times in each chapter when writing in first person. I asked, I said.  The key is not to do this many times a page. Or designate the speaker by name, just not every time.

4) Clarity is key, of course. When two people converse, a reader can follow who said what for a number of lines of dialogue -- as long as each person's dialogue begins a new paragraph.

5) When more than two people converse, it's important to ascribe almost every person's speech -- within reason. If one character asks another a question and they answer, it's generally clear who replied.

6) My personal pet peeve is authors who try to convey emotion when designating the character talking. This usually involves adverbs, the bane of good writing.

"It's time to go to the parade," Jan said, gleefully.

"Funerals always make me cry," I said sorrowfully.

Remember the adage, show don't tell. Jan can turn a somersault to show her glee.

By the way, when it's your book, do what you want. Just keep the reader in mind.

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To learn more about Elaine, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.

Copyright and Learning to Write in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

By Elaine L. Orr

Every author I know has wondered how AI will affect the publishing world and how our work could be used without our permission. Note I said 'used,' not republished.

We've heard about artificial intelligence (AI) for years. What has changed is the more recent advent of generative AI that creates text (books, in our case), images, videos, or music. It trains by 'reading' our work. 

I recently joined the Copyright Alliance, which has many resources on the broader topic as well as excellent materials and videos on AI and its impact on authorship. It's free, always a good thing. I've learned a lot.

What Does ChatGPT do With My Writing?

ChatGPT has learned well from analyzing my work. I asked it: Can you write something in the style of Elaine Orr's Jolie Gentil cozy mysteries?

ChatGPT said: Got it — you’d like something in the style of Elaine Orr’s Jolie Gentil cozy mysteries. Those books usually feature:

• A small-town setting (Ocean Alley on the Jersey Shore).

• A smart, witty amateur sleuth (Jolie, an appraiser and reporter).

• A circle of friends and community members who add humor, warmth, and sometimes conflict.

• A mystery that’s light on gore, with clues tucked into daily life.

• Plenty of banter, food, and small-town gossip.

I can create a fresh cozy mystery concept (not copying Orr, but inspired by the tone and structure). Here’s a short sample opening that could grow into a series:

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Sample Cozy Mystery Opening (in the style of Jolie Gentil books)

Chapter One – Baking to Death

The ChatGPT sample went on with a brief chapter 1. Not bad, though I stay away from things such as cupcakes and other baking -- they're somewhat overused, and I'm a lousy cook.

I asked ChatGPT a couple of other questions about how it would develop characters or story lines, and was shocked not just at the decent responses but the speed. Scary good.

All of this was free, but after a couple more questions, I reached the end of the free...speculation, for lack of a better word.

What Does ChatGPT tell you about what it's doing?

Note some of the phrasing in the the above. It said, "Got it — you’d like something in the style of Elaine Orr’s Jolie Gentil cozy mysteries.?" The italics were theirs, I suppose somehow saying they aren't directly ripping off my work? And I suppose they aren't.

Can You Use ChatGPT to learn about writing?

The system (I don't know the neutral reference for an AI program!) also develops outlines, character sketches, clues, character arcs and more. If you were a novice writer, you could tell it to write a mystery about (for example) "a couple in a mountain town who discover buried treasure and are pursued by the people who buried it."

In fact, I just told it that. This was the response:

Here’s a short mystery story draft based on your idea:

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The Treasure in Ashwood

The mountain town of Ashwood was the kind of place where snow muffled sound, and secrets lay deeper than the pine roots. Emma and Daniel, a young couple fresh from the city, thought they were starting over when they bought the old Miller cabin. They hadn’t counted on what they’d find buried beneath the sagging porch.

It was Daniel who uncovered it first—a rusted tin box, sealed tight with wire. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, lay stacks of old bills and a small velvet pouch filled with raw gemstones that shimmered even in the weak afternoon light. Neither spoke for a long moment. The silence between them wasn’t awe—it was fear. Someone had buried this. And someone might come looking.

That night, the wind howled across the ridges, and Emma swore she saw headlights lingering too long on the road below. By morning, muddy bootprints trailed near the cabin, leading back toward the tree line.

They decided to keep the treasure hidden, but word in Ashwood spread quicker than frost. At the diner, an old logger leaned across the counter and muttered, “Best bury back what ain’t yours. Folks around here remember where they left things.”

Soon, strangers began to appear—two men in heavy coats, asking questions, their eyes too sharp, their smiles too thin. Emma recognized one of them from an old photo in the town archives: a man declared dead twenty years ago in a mine collapse.

The couple realized the treasure wasn’t forgotten loot—it was blood money, hidden away by men who had never really left. Now they were being hunted, not just for the cash, but for knowing a secret meant to stay buried.

And in Ashwood, the mountains kept their own kind of justice.

---

Would you like me to expand this into a full-length short story (3–5k words) with detailed scenes, dialogue, and a twist ending, or keep it more like a tight novella-style mystery outline you can build on?

Yikes!

Then you could pick either option they provide or just exit. It took ChatGPT about five seconds to write this short piece.

I note you can learn from ChatGPT because you could tell it to develop the novella-style outline and see how it does it. 

People use generative AI for many things, but it still shocked me that it could write a story and do it so fast. 

If you've used it, feel free to comment. 

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To learn more about Elaine, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.

Writing Across Sub-Genres -- is it worth the time?

By Elaine L. Orr

I have created two series that are essentially cozies but do not feature an amateur sleuth. One is the Logland series, set in central Illinois, a small college town. The sleuth is a police chief named Elizabeth Friedman. She and her all male crew are very serious about their work but not worried about what's around every corner the way police in more urban areas have to be.

I started the project as a stand-alone and wanted to write something really funny. Among the early scenes is a call to a fraternity house that is rowdy and has a goat that munches its way through the dining room. I like the mystery and, as I tend to do, really enjoyed the characters and didn't want to let go of them.

There are two more books, Final Cycle and Final Operation. I think Final Cycle is one of the best books I've ever written. But I understand now that I can't really market the books well as police procedurals or as cozy mysteries. Readers want one or the other. The books get good reviews they just don't sell a lot. 

So, undeterred by marketing evidence, I introduced a new series last week. It's the Shore Shenanigans series, set in the same Jersey Shore town as my Jolie Gentil series. The former is a pure cozy series, albeit with a real estate appraiser as the sleuth and a bit more involvement in the town's business community than you might see in some other cozies.

The sleuth in the Shore Shenanigans series is George Winters, formerly a reporter for the local paper and now a private investigator. I actually thought it through over a couple of years and had him get fired from the paper, work with an insurance company as an investigator so he would qualify to be a PI, and then get his PI license. It's rare that I plan that far in advance.

George will find mysteries to solve among the guests at Mayor Madge's Cozy Corner B&B, as he does in the first book, Fired Up and Feisty. It features senior citizen high school alumni who seemed to have some scores to settle among themselves.

The crimes will matter as well as the people who are killed and the potential suspects. However, they can't be gruesome stories and the sleuth needs to interact with other people. I like Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries, and many others of that era, but the PIs spend a lot of time in their own heads. Readers don't necessarily look for that these days. 

Other characters from the Jolie series will appear from time to time, but won't feature in the crime solving. Those characters have well established roles in the town, and the link between the two series will create good synergy. Or so I think.

Not to compare myself to Louise Penny at all, but the Inspector Gamache books also have a cozy element by featuring the town of Three Pines and its residents. You would be hard pressed to find more quirky characters. But as a police inspector, he clearly handles more violent crimes than I intend to write about.

I would be interested in what readers and other writers think about using someone other than an amateur sleuth as the key figure in a cozy series. You are welcome to throw tomatoes, but if you have any ideas on how to make it work (and let readers know that), it would be even better.

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To learn more about Elaine, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.

Showing Grief and Continuing the Story

By Elaine L. Orr

Compelling stories lead readers to grieve. In the sixth Harry Potter book, Dumbledore fell from a parapet. Who would survive that? But it was a magical story. I held out hope. Then Harry entered the headmaster's office and there was Dumbledore, in a picture frame, just like all the other dead headmasters. I sobbed for a couple of seconds. 

Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes made me feel sad, but it infuriated my mother-in-law. She finished it because I recommended it, but she hated the deaths of Angela McCourt's young children, especially the twins. She told me never to recommend a book like that again!

But what about characters themselves? Catcher in the Rye initially seems to be a story of extreme detachment from life and an adolescent's sarcastic view of the world. It is that, but the basis for nearly all of Holden Caufield's feelings and actions stem from his brother Allie's death -- though Holden himself doesn't truly grasp this. 

In the Potter series, Severus Snape carries one of the most extreme burdens of grief in modern fiction. It's only near the end of the series that his unrequited love for Harry's late mother is shown to be the tragedy of his life. As a reader thinks back through the series, it's clear that his near-hatred for Harry (the son of the man who won Lillie's love and a child who dares to have her green eyes) is rooted in grief.

How does a perhaps less deft author portray grief well? As any student would say, grief needs to be shown, not told. There are obvious indications: people sob at a funeral or throw themselves over a closed coffin.

But how can a character indicate his or her grief after people have gone back to their daily routines? Their grief may be so extreme that they don't, but it's the less obvious expressions of sorrow that build a real-life story. The woman who eats less and loses weight is almost a cliche. What about the one who signs up for every fitness class she can find so she's exhausted at night and able to sleep? The reader may spot the symptom before the character.

Grieving people can lose interest in activities that they always liked, become forgetful, stuff their faces as opposed to reduce their appetite, and go over spoken (or unspoken) conversations obsessively. 

The symptom I'd like to write better is what I think of as the clarity of death. When a family member or colleague dies, suddenly we know what's important and what's not. We want all the unimportant stuff to just go away -- phone calls to return, houses to clean, or that committee report that is suddenly too stupid to write.

As you might infer, the clearest symptom of 'death clarity' is impatience. A character might be able to hide some feelings of annoyance, but the writer needs to figure out whether to display them in daily irritation or an explosion of temper. Or both.

Ruthanne Reid's article in The Write Practice Blog, "Show Don't Tell: How to Write the Five Stages of Grief" offers a comprehensive picture of subtle and very direct expressions of sorrow -- immediate and long-term. 

As a mystery writer, I want the story to go forward and don't usually spend enough time on the sorrow of family and friends who've lost someone. It's a key component of making the reader care about the crime and the need to solve it. If it's not clear why someone should care about the victim's death, then all the reader has to do is flip to the end to see who done it.

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To learn more about Elaine, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.

Blogging versus Online Content Strategy

By Elaine L. Orr

Some months I don't feel like posting, but I don't want to let go of a blog I started at the end of 2011. When I'm in a 'why do I do this mood,' I look to other bloggers for enrichment. 

Inevitably, Jane Friedman's name and content pop up every time. This time, her updated post on "How to Start Blogging" appeared. She notes a blog may not help too much to promote an author's work, so it's important to be sure it's something you want to do.

Consistency is key. Why would people read your blog (which is now often termed simply content) if they can't rely on you doing it regularly? The second year I did the Irish Roots Author Blog, I had 54 posts. Fifty-four! Most were short and many were direct promotions of my books or sales. I don't use the blog for such direct marketing now. Hopefully, mentioning my work in the context of a post's topic does bring readers.

My numbers fell off. In 2016, there were sixteen posts. I did have a hip replacement and knee surgery that year, but surgeries aren't a good reason not to blog. It was more that I had to squeeze the writing itself into less time because writing does not compete well with opioids. Maybe for some people...

I finally settled on trying to do thirty posts a year. I don't always make it, but the goal is helpful. If nothing else, I may publish three posts near the end of the month -- like this month.

What I balance (in my mind) now is whether to post only about writing. Can't do it at the moment; I get too angry at what's going on in the United States. If I don't let some of my opinions out in the blog they may come out in less appropriate places. Like when I want to yell at someone in a store who doesn't believe in equality. (T-shirts are a giveaway.) I like the concept of treating people fairly. 

I just hit more than 20,000 views in the last month, so perhaps controversy is a good policy in terms of readership. 

The index to The Irish Roots Author Blog has five categories -- reading, writing, publishing, marketing, and musings. The latter are my favorite posts. Blogs can be what we want them to be.

Start one.

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To learn more about Elaine, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.

Why Do Readers Like Some Books More than Others?

By Elaine L. Orr

To be clear, I have no idea why readers like some books more than others. 

I like the kind of mysteries I write, and I like to read those others write. But I've been surprised that books I think will grab attention (and sell well) may move off the shelves slowly, while one I thought would draw fewer readers is very popular.

When I moved to Illinois I decided to write a book set in central Illinois, and did not intend to make it a series. I've never laughed so much when writing as when drafting Tip a Hat to Murder. I liked the characters so much it became the first book in the three-book Logland series. And the only one to have more than 100 reviews. I think the second book, Final Cycle, is one of the best of the forty or so mysteries I've written.

Reviews are good, but the series is not a true cozy series. The primary sleuth is a small town, female police chief and I describe the series a 'police procedurals with a cozy feel.' I suppose that tells readers the books aren't as gritty as other police procedurals, so readers who like those books don't pick up the series. Conversely, people who read my amateur sleuth mysteries aren't looking to read about a professional crime solver. 

There is a goat in a fraternity house dining room early on in the first book, and that's a bit off topic for me, too. So is t he occasional swearing (mild words). 

The message I get is don't try to mix sub-genres. Readers can't focus as easily -- in my opinion. While I wanted to write something with a sleuth who had a reason to investigate crimes. the books' structure also means there is no other profession or hobby to focus on. My family history series draws readers with that interest, my Jersey shore real estate appraiser gets in all kinds of trouble when she goes into uninhabited houses. And she's really involved with the local business community. A police chief is sort of always on duty.

However, I still laugh when I think of future books, so I plan to add to the series. To attract more future readers I put the three-book series in a box set on Kindle Unlimited. People have a chance to get acquainted with the books an I can occasionally offer the box set free. There's always more to learn about what to write.

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Reading to Soothe the Soul

By Elaine L. Orr

I was fortunate to be introduced to books very young and to have been around adults who enjoyed books. Reading is the best stepping stone to a writing career, and there was a library in walking distance. I doubt it was 600 square feet, but it was heaven.

When a friend recently entered an Alzheimer's care facility I noted the activity calendar showed people read books to residents so I asked to join the reading team. It's a fascinating opportunity. People from a wide variety of careers (physicians, teachers, book publishers, homemakers) have very little comprehension of what's going on around them, but they like to be read to.

I choose books for very young children, and started with Billy Goats Gruff. My only criteria is that the books have to tell a story rather than just amuse. Attention spans are very short. 

Every now and then something in a book will click a memory in a resident. Last week, a story mentioned (only in passing) collecting syrup from maple trees. Suddenly a man I'd never heard speak raised his head and described the process to tap a tree, hang a bucket to collect sap, and use the sap for syrup. Then he ducked his head and grew quiet again.

I pick relatively short books with good illustrations and walk around the room to show the pictures. The natural ham in me tries to act out character voices.

The library in Chatham, Illinois has a large selection of used books and children's books are usually fifty cents or a dollar. I decided to buy the books in case a resident wants to keep one. Occasionally they do.

Sometimes I'll take a second book that's a jumping off point for conversation. One about truck stops let us talk about taking vacations when cars traveled on two lane roads rather than interstates. Mostly I mention things they might have seen and get some appreciative nods. The key thing is never to ask the residents if they remember something. Some folks can perceive that they used to know more than they now do, and it would be frustrating to ask what they can recall.

Today it's almost 100 degrees in central Illinois, so I took The Snow Monster by Jodi Dee -- a story about a little girl who likes to eat snow and mistakenly made a wish about eating all of it! We can then talk about blizzards and making snowmen as children.

It may sound as if I'm doing something noble. I'm not. As with most forms of volunteering, I get a lot more out of reading than the residents do by listening.

If you're interested in doing something similar, check with a memory care facility. The one I go to likes to have readers in the hours before lunch and dinner, because the residents are waiting to eat and it makes the time go faster. You'll get more than you give.

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