Wasted Days & Wasted Nights by Mary Connealy, Guest Blogger

Mary Connealy is an author, journalist and a teacher. She releases three books with Barbour this year, is a columnist for the Lyons Mirror-Sun, and an occasional book reviewer for the Sioux City Journal. She lives on a farm in Nebraska with her husband, Ivan and their four daughters, Joslyn, Wendy, Shelly and Katy.

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

I’m better now, but time was I wrote for a long time before I got to the beginning of a book.

I’m going to talk today about how to pick your beginning, but also how to not let it drive you nuts when you get told, often by a contest judge, that your book hasn’t started yet on page fifteen.

I’ve heard this called an ‘inciting incident’ and I like that. Incite is a word you hear attached to riot. Incited a riot.

That’s what you want for your beginning. Something big and fast paced and high stakes. But I used to write along telling my story and at some point it would all sort of click and, especially when it came to characters, I’d suddenly find a key to them and it would all be real. It wasn’t uncommon for that CLICK to come at around page ONE HUNDRED.

So, I’d go back and rewrite. Often throwing out huge chunks of the story to recreate the character as I now knew he really was.

It was painful to do, toss away all that work, cut thousands of words. I am a Nebraska ranch wife and as such I’m pretty conservative in many ways. No one needs to tell me to shut the light off when I leave a room, or turn the thermostat down and put on a sweater, or buy a car that gets high gas mileage. That’s something I’ve been doing from birth and not because I’m a ecology freak trying to save the planet. It’s because I’m cheap and because waste bothers me.

So wasting all those hours, throwing away all those words, it’s like just tossing out the mushy apples in the fridge when it would be so easy to just make apple sauce. It’s like throwing out three stale slices of bread instead of making bread pudding or stuffing for a roast chicken.

It is not natural.

And then I got a hold of a mindset that helped me handle it better.

I’ve read a lot about character charts or ‘interviewing your characters’ or creating background sheets for your characters. And I realized that’s what I was doing. All that writing that had to be tossed out was NOT wasteful, it was necessary. It was an exercise I needed to do to create my story.

So the next time someone in a contest critique tells you ‘your story doesn’t start until page nineteen” (that happened to me once—and she was right—but it took me a few years to figure that out) don’t get upset, don’t feel like your time was wasted. Just pick a new spot to start, farther on down the road of your story.

What you’ve written becomes back story and chances are it’s all important—it’s just not FIRST.

You need it. Now you’ll weave it into your story, bits at a time, in dialogue and sentence tags.

~~~

My book Wrangler in Petticoats released this month.

DRUMROLL PLEASE—

TODAY.

Wrangler in Petticoats

Ride into the Rockies where love peaks between a tough Texas tomboy and a passionate artist. On her way to Montana, Sally McClellan’s party is attacked and robbed. But then artist Logan McKenzie saves the badly wounded cowgirl who has been left for dead. Can this landscape painter tame the tomboy without breaking her spirit? Sally doesn’t know much about ribbons and lace, but Logan’s presence makes her want to connect with her feminine side. Will this fractured female discover a way to capture the artist’s love—or find herself captured and killed by outlaws?

In honor of that I am giving away one free copy to one commenter here on Novel Journey, so this is no time to lurk.

Seekerville

Petticoats & Pistols

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Guest Blogger~Funny Lady Mary Connealy

Mary Connealy is an author, journalist and a teacher. She releases three books with Barbour this year, is a columnist for the Lyons Mirror-Sun, and an occasional book reviewer for the Sioux City Journal. She lives on a farm in Nebraska with her husband, Ivan and their four daughters, Joslyn, Wendy, Shelly and Katy.

Comedy is Serious Business.

I’ve been trying to write a blog giving advice about how to write comedy for a while and you know what?

It’s a hard, serious business.

Have you ever heard the expression, ‘The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s apathy.’

Only someone we really care about can deeply hurt us. It’s that the love is betrayed that flips a person to hate. I think of this as having your feelings open. And when you’re open, things can slip in.

Comedy is like that. It opens your feelings and then, when the reader is . . . you might say vulnerable. . .you can flip those feelings to something else. Deal with something really important, revealing, dark or heavy, through the humor.

This is a scene in Doctor in Petticoats that, I hope, opens the reader up with comedy, in a very serious situation, then once they’re vulnerable, lets me make them feel something much more powerfully than if I’d just played it straight the whole time.

It also lets me reveal a very troubled hero, but also make him sympathetic.

The set up.

A stagecoach wreck. Lots of people hurt. My heroine, Beth, needs the help of a man who, though she doesn’t know it, is a burned out Army doctor. He’s come to believe everyone he touches is harmed.

Beth has been mostly ignoring him on the stagecoach ride, but now she needs help and he’s the only one who can give it.

Doctor in Petticoats

Beth surged to her feet. “We need help over here!”

She stomped to the man’s side and, carefully considering her approach—or maybe not so carefully—she grabbed the man’s filthy flattened black Stetson off his head and swatted him with it.

“Hey!” He turned as if surprised to see her.

“I didn’t exactly sneak up on you, now did I?” She waled on him again.

He shielded his face. His once-white shirt tore up one side at his sudden movement. “Will you stop that?”

“Do I have your attention, you miserable worm?” Beth threw the hat at his head.

He held his arms over her face, the bedraggled white sleeves rolled up nearly to his elbows, and glared through his wrists at her. His eyes narrowed.

“You get up off the ground and help us, you worthless skunk.”

“Get away from me.” The skunk’s eyes flashed like he had rabies.

“I need help. I don’t care how hung over you are, how lazy you are or how stupid you are. Right now I need some muscle, and I know you’ve got it. Get on your feet and get over there and help us, or so help me I will rip your arm off and beat you to death with the bloody stump.”

The man’s eyes seemed to clear. Maybe she’d pierced the alcoholic fog. “I’m not drunk.”

Interesting that he hadn’t protested being called stupid or worthless or a skunk. . . what else had she called him? She’d lost track of her insults somewhere along the line.

“Oh, puh-leeze, you expect me to believe you’re this worthless without the help of whiskey?” Beth jammed her fists on her hips and straightened away from him. She had to get some air. “If that’s true then I might as well shoot you here and now. Do the whole world a favor.”

The drunk’s eyes slid from her to the writhing man. Beth had always been sensitive to others. Her ma had told her many times that was her finest gift.

Right now it felt like a curse.

Beth saw something so vulnerable and fragile in the man’s eyes that she almost regretted asking for help. It wasn’t fear or laziness or stupidity or drunkenness. It was as if Leo’s suffering ate into this man’s soul.

What horror had Alex seen to put such a look in his eyes? Beth couldn’t give him the break he so desperately needed. “I can’t do it without help. Please. We can end Leo’s suffering.”

“He’ll still hurt. Dislocated shoulders take a long time to heal.”

Beth realized what the man had just admitted. He knew something about healing.

“I. . . I can’t. I can’t help him.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“I do.”

Beth was afraid she might have to tackle him. “I’m not giving you one.”

Alex turned, stared at her. Their eyes locked. Seconds stretched to a minute, maybe longer. Growing slowly, a sensation Beth had never felt before almost made her let go, back away. Those eyes, it was as if he was looking all the way into her soul. She felt strength drain from her as if he was drawing on reserves within her, soaking up courage like desert ground in a rainstorm.

Alex watched her, drew from her. Finally, his eyes fell shut. Beth saw tears along the rim of his lashes.

Then he started nodding. He physically changed. He seemed to grow taller, his shoulder’s squared, his chin came up. When he opened his eyes a new man was there, or maybe an old man, the man Alex Buchanan used to be before he crawled inside a bottle.

Beth could see what this was costing him. As if he paid for this courage by stripping off his skin with a razor.

He’d awakened something in her while their eyes were locked, something brand new.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

She’d never been so proud of anyone in her life.

Mary again: Any comments about comedy? What style of comedy do you like? Three Stooges? Noel Coward? Dialogue, slapstick, situational? Do you like comedy in a book or isn’t that the reading experience you go for.

Tell me the funniest book you’ve every read and if you leave a comment you’ll get your name in the drawing for a copy of Doctor in Petticoats.

Find Mary Online at: Seekerville; Petticoats & Pistoles; Her blog; or Her website

 

Doctor in Petticoats

Doctor Alex Buchanan is a wanted man--a deseter from the army stalked by a bounty hunter--but he'd rather be dead than inflict any more pain on his patients. 

Beth McClellan is idealistic, believing the nursing training she received will be enough to help her serve as doctor to her home town in West Texas. 

When Alex and Beth meet in a stagecoach accident, they find that they work well together. But are his demons and her dreams too deeply rooted for either of them to pay the price required for a future together?

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