Sharon is The Calgary Mystery Lady. Originally from the southern United States, she came to Canada a long time ago. As a child, she read adventure stories, science fiction, and mysteries, and knew more about bush pilots than she did about social graces. It took her a while to realize that the guys always got the best adventures and the best lines, a situation she set out to remedy by making up her own stories.
After a couple of real life adventures—one involving being in the U.S. Army and one working in public health in northern Alberta—she realized it was easier to write about adventurous women than be one. Her Vietnam veterans series takes place in the early 1970s. For her three veterans—two women and one man—returning to civilian life is murder. She is also working on an as-yet-unsold series about an American woman who moves to northern Alberta looking for adventure, and boy, does she find it. Waiting in the wings is a stand-alone about a flight nurse, who has to prove she didn’t kill her patient before the police prove that she did.
Sharon also teaches writing and memoir workshops and has a burning ambition to help writers stop using their word processor like a typewriter. Sharon's website is at http://www.wildwindauthor.com/
1) Where do you write?
At my computer or dedicated keyboard and under water.
I do all of my serious writing on computer, but when I’m stuck or trying to work out a particularly tricky bit, it helps if I get wet. It might be doing the dishes, or going swimming, or even just splashing around in the bathtub, but there’s nothing like water for helping me flesh out ideas.
2) What do you write with or on?
MacIntosh all the way! I’m on my third or fourth Mac—I’ve lost count—and I tend to use one until it gets old and decrepit and the motherboard crashes, then I go out and find that technology has, once again, galloped so far ahead of me that I have to learn the machine all over again.
I also have an Alphasmart [before you ask, the address is http://www.imagemedia.ca/]. Alphie is a dedicated keyboard about the size of a large TV-dinner. All I can do on it is type text. No games. No graphics. No e-mail. No distractions. It’s a terrific machine for keyboarding when away from home or sitting in bed. After I’ve written, I connect it to my computer, which sucks the text out and I’m ready to work with what I’ve written on the big machine.
3) What font?
I’m so obsessive compulsive about fonts: for the non-fiction, Times New Roman, 12 point for the text and 10 point for footnotes. Arial, 12 or 14 point for titles and headings. For the fiction, Times New Roman, 11 point for the text and 13 point for the chapter titles. The fiction settings are what my publisher requires.
I save the font play for my art work, and there I go really crazy.
4) Do you have a writing schedule?
Right now 10:00 AM to noon, five days out of seven. I’m trying to work back to a slightly longer writing session, say 9:00 AM or even earlier to noon, but lately a lot of the non-fiction stuff, and managing the business has encroached on the writing time. But mornings are definitely my best fiction times.
5) Best tip for rewriting?
Don’t get hung up on consistency as you do subsequent drafts. If you’ve just decided one of your characters needs to be African-American, and she wasn’t in the previous draft, don’t try to change it in this draft. Go back to the chapter where she first appeared and write a margin note so you can correct it in the next draft.
Print what you want to rewrite; read it out loud. The stumbles, the convoluted sentences, the “this is brilliant,” or “this sucks” stand out so much more when I see the words on paper and hear them.
6) Best piece of grammar or style advice?
What I call the closeness principle. Words that relate to one another should be as close to one another as possible. Somehow, following that rule seems to solve all sorts of sticky grammar problems.
Actual sentence from a news story: Doctors in Brazil say they have removed a 15-centimeter fishing spear from the brain of a man who was shot by a friend while diving off the coast of Rio de Janeiro.
I don’t know about you, but I’m confused about who was doing what, where, and to whom. Try
Doctors in Brazil say they have removed a 15-centimeter fishing spear from a man’s brain. The man and his friend were diving off the coast of Rio de Janeiro when the accident happened. The friend’s spear gun misfired.
End first sentence with the man; begin next sentence with the man.
End second sentence with the accident; begin next sentence with details of the accident.
Just in case you hate not knowing endings: His doctor says the patient is doing well, and is not likely to suffer any major, lasting damage.
7) Writing rituals?
Have breakfast and make a large pot of hot tea. Check the weather, our blog site—that’s Poe’s Deadly Daughters [http://poesdeadlydaughters.blogspot.com/]—a couple of inspirational sites, a site about what’s happening with independent bookstores, and my e-mail.
Put on my writing hat. It’s a purple felt fedora with a yellow band that says, “Police Line: Do Not Cross.”
Turn on music. One of the first things I do when I start a book is assemble a 9-to-12-hour play list of background music. With iTunes I can changed the play list order every day. Sometimes I play it by performer alphabetical order, or by title alphabetical order, or by length of piece, or maybe by how many times I’ve played the pieces before. Each different order suggests new relationships. The trade-off is that by the end of a book I’m so tired of that music that I can’t listen to it for a while.
I always try to have an unfinished chapter on the go. If I finished a chapter yesterday, before I stop writing for the day, I open a template for the next chapter and write a couple of sentences about what this new chapter will contain.
Sometimes I have no idea what the chapter will contain, so I free form it, jotting down random thoughts, such as, “Last chapter was in a stuffy office; be nice if this chapter is outside. Is it time to bring the grandmother back for a scene? Several previous references to weather expected to get worse. What if torrential rain starts in this chapter while grandmother is in a big park? Where would she run for shelter? Who could she meet in the shelter?”
That way, I never have to start the next day with a blank screen.
8) Cure for writer's block?
Stop reading and writing for at least one full day, sometimes two. That means—if I can get away with it—no writing or reading at all, not even a grocery list. I look at picture books and do art or sew. I listen to music that’s not on my current-book sound track. Sometimes the word part of the brain gets tired; it wants a day off.
If I’m still stuck after forty-eight hours, I backtrack one to two chapters. Very often I’ll find that I started down the wrong path and I written myself into a dead-end.
If I’m still stuck, I write the most outlandish chapter that will come to mind. It might involve alien invasions, or the characters robbing a bank, or sex between two characters who would never, ever have a sexual encounter. Then I file that chapter somewhere safe and get back to the business at hand.
9) How do your capture ideas?
I was fortunate to have a writing instructor who said that writers must learn to remember ideas because great notions often come when it isn’t convenient to write them down. He led us through a series of exercises designed to remember not only ideas themselves, but the feelings accompanying the idea, which is often the most important element. Don’t ask me to describe those exercises, this class was 29 years ago, but the legacy is that I seem to be able to remember ideas until I can get to a place to save them.
I do carry a small notebook and camera in my purse, which helps me capture an unexpected moment.
At home, I use a writing organizing program called PowerStructure, which is 85% helpful and 15% mind-numbingly frustrating, but I am always trying kluges to bend the program to my will, more or less. I’ve written seven books using PowerStructure so it now like a crotchety relative, whom I love, but who also, occasionally, drives me crazy. I also keep a timeline in table format, so that I can sort events by date or by character as the need arises.
10) What do you wish you were better at?
Being able to do what works in marketing. Even with the Internet and all of the electronic gizmos available, the bedrock of book sales is still face-to-face, word-of-mouth recommendations from one book lover to another. A truly successful marketer needs to be on the road all the time, and that’s neither practical, nor affordable.
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