The Hardest Way to Write a Short Synopsis

Try to condense a long one.  That was the comment of  Tony Perona at an Indy Author Fair, in Indianapolis.  He, S.M. Harding, and Terence Faherty led a session on marketing the mystery.  Harding suggested telling yourself you have to summarize your story in something like 300 words, no matter what.  Her advice was met with skepticism, and there was a time I would have been skeptical, too.

How can the complexity of your mystery, the depth of the characters, the beauty of the setting be told in a few hundred words?

Try. If you can't make your point cogently, it will be hard for someone to want to read your book.

The synopsis is your hope to hook a potential agent or publisher. These busy people need to be able to capture the idea of your story quickly (including the ending). You want to surprise your readers, not your publisher.

What finally helped me learn the art of condensing something I was very close to was to force myself to write what I thought should go on the back cover of a paperback.  That's the chance to convince a bookstore to stock your book and a reader to plop down the money to buy it. True, the purpose is to entice rather than inform, but the rigor of condensing is similar.

I looked at the initial  synopsis that I wrote for Appraisal for Murder, first in the Jolie Gentil series. It read more like a summary. Once I wrote the lengthy piece, it was hard to part with some of the words, and took a long time to cut the length. 

Now, I start with the book flap version, so to speak, and add as few words as possible.

The more you practice writing brief synopses, the easier it becomes.

Keep in mind that there is a difference between a product description (the blurb you write for Amazon or BN to promote you book) and the synopsis for a potential agent or publisher. As with all writing, audience is everything.
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No Pulitzer -- You Decide!

There were three finalists for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:  Train Dreams, by Dennis Johnson; Swamplandia, by Karen Russell; and The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace.  No prize was awarded.  Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, said that, "The three books were fully considered, but in the end, none mustered the mandatory majority for granting a prize, so no prize was awarded."  That's the only explanation.

This has not happened since 1977.  Prior to 2012, the longest time between nonselections was between 1920 and 1941.  In 1941, the committee recommended For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.  However, the president of Columbia University (which administers the Pulitzers) said the book was offensive, so there was no award that year. 

The Muncie (Indiana) Public Library wants to pick up where the Pulitzer jurors left off.  The Kennedy Book Club is reading the books (one per month in September, October, and November) and we'll vote.  It's the least we can do.

We just finished Train Dreams, one of the most memorable books I've read.  And it's a novella.  We're on to Swamplandia.

I'll keep my friends posted.  All advice is welcome as we make this very weighty decision.  And we will decide.
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"Any Port in A Storm" Coming September 17

Jolie Gentil and friends are busy putting the finishing touches on the 'Talk Like a Pirate Day' fundraiser for the food pantry and trying to figure out who's breaking into some of the houses Jolie appraises. When Jolie realizes a new face in town is leading high school kids into trouble in those houses, she's mad and lets him know it.  But Hayden offers to help her mind her own business, and a lot of people at the fundraiser hear her give him what for.  A hurricane's on the way to disrupt the fundraiser, and when a corpse turn up under the pirate ship the next day, Jolie's looking like a suspect.

Scoobie's pirate limericks can't solve a crime, so Jolie and her sometimes buddy local reporter George Winters look for the murderer and try to figure out who's trying to frame Jolie.  They need to stay ahead of whoever's mad at her and off the radar of the local police who tell Jolie -- for the hundredth time -- to butt out. For a cozy mystery with a dose of humor and a touch of romance, join Jolie and friends in Ocean Alley.

September 19th is the annual Talk Like a Pirate Day -- check to see if your local community has a fun event to celebrate.  If you can't find one (and even if you can!) join the celebration in Ocean Alley.

Book cover design by Patty G. Henderson. 
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Unique Beard Blue-Ribbon Winner at Iowa State Fair

By Elaine L. Orr

Creativity comes in many forms.  Some people write books.  Some people enter their best calf in the state fair, others bring super-sized tomatoes.  Not Don Larkin.  For three years running his creatively decorated beard has won the blue ribbon for most unique beard at the Iowa State Fair.

This year's beard was a triple-decker ice cream cone, which he says is Fairlicious.  It's also patriotic -- note the red, white, and blue flag on the cone.

The beard decorations began in 2010, with a nod to the product the state is most famous for -- corn.  Larkin deemed that year's remarkably realistic ear-of-corn beard as "Hick on a Stick."  He and hair stylist Lori McNew of E-Clips salon in Newton, Iowa spent a lot of time designing his ear of corn, which was created with beads and bottomed off with a corn husk.

The state may be recognized for corn, but the Iowa State Fair is perhaps best known for its butter cow.  Never one to dodge an opportunity for attention, since 2011 was the 100th anniversary of the butter cow, Larkin and McNew created "Butter Beard."

Larkin puts a lot of thought into his beard entries.  "No one in my immediate family has ever won a blue ribbon at the Iowa State Fair, and I wanted to end that non-streak.  I don't grow corn or make butter or ice cream, but I can sure can wear them."

The fair has always been a family event for the Larkins, with siblings coming from Michigan, Missouri, and Indiana to experience it again and son Joe taking photos.  And what does Larkin do with those blue ribbons?  He gives them to his mom.

Copyright 2012 by Elaine L. Orr.  Don Larkin is her brother-in-law.

Ice cream beard photo by Joe Larkin
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Family Reunion Yields Writing Projects

I returned yesterday from my annual sojourn to southwest Missouri for the annual Orr Reunion.  It celebrates a group of families that came to the U.S. between 1832 and about 1890 and had the foresight to begin getting together in 1937. I've written about the many diverse descendants in Orr, Camptell, Mitchell and Shirley Families: Descendants of Paul Orr and Isabelle Boyd in Ireland and America..  The best part is collecting the stories.

The book flap notes: From linen weavers and grain mill operators of Aghadowey Parish in Northern Ireland to the cities and plains of North America came the descendants of Paul Orr and Isabelle Boyd. While some did stay in Ireland, many came to America between 1832 and 1864, some in the mid-1880s. They worked in steel mills in Pennsylvania, helped build churches in Massachusetts and Missouri, farmed throughout the Midwest, taught school everywhere, and fought in two world wars on behalf of their country. Some died in the U.S. Army or its Air Corps, others in the RAF. The grain mills on rivers and creeks became flour companies in Missouri and they moved from one-room school houses to universities. The index of nearly 2,400+ names and many locations tells you how to find them, the stories told by their descendants bring the people to life. They began life in America in Lawrence and Jasper Counties in Missouri, Allen County, IN, and the Philadelphia, PA and Boston areas. The Ozark Prairie Presbyterian Church of Mount Vernon, MO is modeled after Aghadowey Presbyterian Church.

Wilma Baker with her late husband Bill, 2004

For many years two of our our attendees have been Wilma (age 93) and Mary Isabel (97).   Mary Isabel always gets the flowers for being the oldest attendee.  Mary Isabel has identified dozens of people in unmarked photos, and Wilma has been sorting through the historical info her late sister (Mary Eleanor Coffield) collected.  Mary Eleanor was a dedicated teacher, active civic volunteer, and collector of family and local history materials.  Wilma kept telling her to sort through her many books, articles, and family history documents, but Mary Eleanor seemed to always have something better to do.  Really, who wouldn't?

Mary Lou Orr gives flowers to Mary Isabel Matteson.

Each year, Wilma gets more sorting done and brings photos and newspaper clippings to the reunion. At first she did it out of a sense of duty, but she soon saw how much some of the materials meant to others in this large family.  For the first time, after the reunion I went to her house, about forty miles away.   Laying across a double bed were neatly organized piles of historical information.  I carefully scanned a number of things, assuming she would not want to part with them.  Wrong!

I wasn't sure what she had should leave Southwest Missouri, but her final point was compelling.  She has no children and was the last of five siblings.  "When I go, this will all be thrown away."  Not on my watch.

It's more important to look ahead than behind, but it is rewarding to find out that a great grandfather and his daughters made some of the finest linens in their part of Ireland, or that a distant cousin is credited with many of General Electric's first advances in refrigeration technology.  Not that they would have used the word technology.

Much of Wilma's material relates to the Stemmons family of Jasper and Lawrence Counties, MO, and some is handwritten from the late 1800s.  It details family history back to the 1700s.  Accepting such materials creates an obligation to share it, so I see more family history books in my future -- they will be shorter!

Note: Wilma Coffield Baker died in December 2012. It appears she was right to insist that I take the materials. She was a neat woman and wonderful musician.
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Midwest Writers Workshop is Invigorating

I spent three days at the annual Midwest Writers Workshop in Muncie, Indiana, and it was time well spent.   This is my fifth time and there is always a good mix of sessions on writing and marketing, and this year you could do a 45 minute one-on-one session on social networking.

Terence Faherty shared his concept of "two for one," talking about the two streams of plotting that he finds essential for his two mystery series (P.I. Scott Simon and failed seminarian Owen Keane) .  He plots out the murderer's story before the protagonist's, since the former is hidden from the reader during most of a mystery.  I always develop the bad guy's motive and back story, but I found Faherty's concept so helpful that I got home and wrote a three-page 'story' for my main bad guy.  And I wrote it from another character's point of view.  It was very instructive.

D.E. (Dan) Johnson discussed what he calls the heavy lifting of writing good fiction.  Simply put, it's that setting is not just a place, it needs to work as party of a tapestry that includes characters and plot.  A well thought-out setting can contribute to tone, tension, and (in a mystery) misdirection.  I have not read Johnson's books, all set in Detroit, and intend to.  From a quick glance at them, it almost looks as if the city is another character in the books.

There is always a great deal of marketing and how-to-publish info at Midwest Writers (#MWW12).  A continuing helpful reference for me will be Jane Friedman's blog on publishing.  The workshop offers five-minute pitch sessions with agents (four this year) and Chuck Sambuchino of Writer's Digest gave an instructive, and humorous, presentation on giving an effective one.  You'll want to check out his new book, Red Dog Blue Dog: When Pooches Get Political.

This mid-size conference is instructive and informal, with many opportunities to interact with faculty and other participants.  Come next year.
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Language Can Wound Even if You Don't Think So

In 1985, the Section for Women in Public Administration sponsored and Marie Rosenberg Dishman and I wrote a booklet entitled The Right Word: Guidelines for Avoiding Sex-Biased Language.  The goal was not to beat people over the head with a pound of political correctness (in fact the PC term was not yet in use), but to offer alternatives to those who wanted to replace some long outdated terms.

I have written several other articles on the topic, and my favorite anecdote remains one from the first female astronaut, Dr. Sally Ride.  She was a commentator when Discovery Astronaut Margaret Rhea Seddon, a physician, helped craft a device used in an attempt to retrieve a satellite.  It entailed several stitches made with a string and a sail maker's needle. A male astronaut, acting as Mission Control communicator with the shuttle, complimented Dr. Seddon on her "seamstress" work.  Ride said she wanted to correct that comment, and did so with a smile.  "That was the work of a surgeon," she said.

Gentle humor is an aid in many situations.  When it comes to sex-biased terms, some changes were just plain easier.  There is no longer a need to call a female aviator an aviatrix or an usher an usherette, and you would probably be locked out of  the office if you called your administrative assistant a 'gal Friday.'

There are other terms in relatively common use that could be offensive and we don't think about it.  Someone who has deviated from a long-held tradition or office policy might be said to be "off the reservation."  Think about it.  That term undoubtedly arose when Native Americans were forced onto reservations more than a century ago.

And what about the term "white trash?"  We know it's meant to be insulting.  Is a user saying people who are not white are more likely to "be trashy" and only some especially sloppy white people are?  Ninety-nine times out of one-hundred that insult is hurled with no racial intent, but it's still a hurtful term.

What brought such uses to mind recently was a series of emails among some fiction author friends.  One had circulated a draft of a new book cover, and several of us tossed humorous darts at the publisher (who since revised the cover - it was really awful!).  A couple of the others said the man on the cover was "so gay."  The man was the woman's boyfriend, so bad artwork or not, he was supposed to be heterosexual.

These were comments made among friends, not meant as hateful barbs.  Maybe the term was so 'neutral' to a couple of the other authors that they would use the expression around gay or lesbian friends.  However, I'm not sure a gay young man who was bullied in high school would find it funny, nor likely would his parents.

Taking the term away from a discussion of someone's appearance, it's impossible to ignore that the term "that's so gay" is now used to refer to something that is dumb or an excuse that is poor.  Clearly, it's an insult.  Why do we ignore the use when we would call out a colleague who uses terms such as 'spic' or 'kike'?

The thinking is likely, gee, I know they don't mean any harm, or I don't want to be a spoil sport.  It can be uncomfortable to be a 'language police officer,' and sometimes you have to pick your battles.  The best lesson can be in the form of a question.  When you ask someone why they use a term or phrase, it makes them think.  They may come to understand that language can offend whether it is intended to be demeaning or not.
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