About Caroline Taylor: She is the
author of What Are Friends For? (Five
Star Mysteries, 2011) and Jewelry from a
Grave (Five Star Mysteries, 2013).
Her stories and essays have appeared in several online and print publications,
including The Corner Club Press, The Dan River Anthology, The
First Line, The Green Silk Journal, Notes Magazine, The
Storyteller, Wild Violet Literary Magazine, and Work Literary
Magazine. She is a member of the North Carolina Writers' Network,
Sisters in Crime, and Mystery Writers of America.
My writing group has embarked on a
bold adventure: writing a novella. We agreed that the novel would be a mystery
and that we would critique each chapter, just as we do the stories we’re usually
working on. We drew numbers to see who would write the first chapter. I was
number one.
Piece of cake, I thought—and a
yummy one at that. After all, I share the opinion of many writers that the best
part of being involved in publishing is the actual writing. I decided that the
first chapter had to be open-ended enough to allow the next writer to take the
story in any direction he or she wished. However, I discovered certain
limitations: Because the first chapter introduces the main characters and establishes
the setting, I would be restricting the options of what others could write
about.
Some writers work better if given
a prompt—as in a prescribed theme or first line. Others prefer to let their
imaginations take them to exciting realms where amazing things can happen, and
a story emerges to describe the journey. Either approach works, but the first
one works better if you are suffering, as I was, from writer’s block. Other
than launching a story that fit the mystery genre, I had the whole world to
choose from. That piece of cake was tasting more and more like a crust of stale
bread.
Luckily, the idea for the
novella’s first chapter finally came to me in a dream. (Ah, muse! Thy name is
Thalia.) It involved the death of a belted cow, many of which can be found in
the fields surrounding the village where I live. I love those belted cows, but,
as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once said about writing: “Murder your darlings.”
I’ve sprinkled the chapter with
enough characters to allow for numerous red herrings. But, in full recognition
that our novella can’t just be about the murder of a beloved beltie, I’m
leaving the real crime—and the real villain—up to the next writer. Any new
characters who are introduced will have to have some connection to the ones
mentioned in the first chapter, or the novella will become incomprehensible. As
for whodunit, that’s going to be the fun part. I’m betting there will be fierce
disagreements over who that person will be and what motivated him (or her) to
commit the crime.
With ten writers in the group,
meeting once a month, we should have the first ten chapters written by October.
Then we’ll have to decide if we’ve got the makings of a plausible and coherent
(not to mention entertaining) novella on our hands—a blockbuster of epic proportions!—or
whether we’ve bitten off more of that piece of cake than any of us can swallow,
let alone chew.
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