Patti O'Shea's Blog

As the corporate showdown between Amazon and Macmillan continues, I wanted to remind everyone that you can still buy my books and preorder In the Darkest Night (March 30, 2010 release) at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books a Million, Powell’s, as well as many others. Until the situation is resolved, I’ll be adding this to my blog posts, but after today, I promise to put it at the end of the post so you can skip it if you’d like.

One of the interesting things about writing is looking back at what you did previously and seeing how much you’ve changed and grown. I remember after my first book, Ravyn’s Flight, was out and I was working on The Power of Two. I lamented to a much more tenured author how much better I was as a writer now and how I wished I could go back and rewrite my first book.

She asked me if I’d done the best job I could with the book. I told her yes. And of course I had. I’m an obsessive perfectionist which is part of why I’m a slower writer. This other author told me that as long as I’d done the best job I could, I had to accept that and move on. Wise advice.

Right now, I’m experiencing another moment like this.

I turn in all my books long, I’ve never come in for a single title work at less than 400 pages. Actually, I think 412 manuscript pages is the shortest. But I’ve had some of my early books come in at 463 manuscript pages. Lately, I haven’t been that long, pulling to a close around 420 page or so and I was wondering why my stories are shorter now than they were. As I listen to Through a Crimson Veil on tape, I’m figuring it out. Boy, I used a lot of words.

I love Crimson Veil and Mika and Conor, but as I listen, I keep thinking, I should have cut that sentence/paragraph(s) or wow, I used a lot of extra words there. And I realized that I write tighter now. Before, I had to go back and deliberately spend weeks cutting things down to get them tight, and as my book on iPod shows, I wasn’t always as hard line on the cutting as I could have been. Now, though, I write tight the first time around and I don’t need to trim out that much.

It’s an interesting thing to hit me. Once you reach a certain point as a writer, the growth is incremental and I stopped noticing how it’s evolved. But wow, has it been happening even while I wasn’t paying attention.

I’m sure there are still extra words in my work. I tend to be chatty in writing, although in person, I’m very quiet and tend to listen more than talk. I think some of my written chattiness manifests itself in my writing, but there are less unnecessary words now. Less unnecessary sentences. And I like this. I think my stories read faster and with a crispness that wasn’t quite there earlier. I still love my earlier work, don’t get me wrong about that. (And it’s not because I’m infatuated with myself as a writer, but rather because I just love my characters so much. Each and every one of them.)

Um, sorry, I digressed. But the point is that even when we don’t realize how much our writing is changing, it is evolving and sometimes it’s really worth looking backward to see it for ourselves. It’s humbling, but also an incredible rush.

Some of you are probably aware of the Macmillan/Amazon flap that started Friday. Even though I write for Tor, who is under the Macmillan umbrella, I don’t plan to blog about this tonight. There are many other people who’ve said things much better than I have, and frankly, I’m tired of thinking about this. I wasted far too much time this weekend reading about what was going on instead of writing.

Instead, let’s talk about something much more fun. Stories and setting.

I confess, as a reader I skim/skip description. If you tell me the characters are in a hotel room, I’ll create my own visual, thank you very much, and I hate it when the author’s vision intrudes on mine. Imagine my surprise when I found out not all people feel this way about reading. It required I start thinking a lot more about setting in my stories and that I spend word count on the details.

Some authors get their stories like a movie and just jot down what they see. Unfortunately, I don’t see much. I get my stories in words. I hear the characters talk to each other, I listen to their internal monologues, and I try to piece things together from there. But it’s tough to set the scene when you don’t see the scene. So I spend a lot of time on Google and Yahoo’s image search engines. Also, Flickr and Webshots are my friends.

This isn’t necessarily the easiest thing in the world, though. When people take pictures, they’re not thinking, wow, I know an author would really like this view so let me frame it for her. No, I find tons of shots that don’t do me any good or are too small. I get frustrated by all the people who protect their pictures on Flickr. I understand you don’t want people using your pics. Truly. But I’m not going to repost them. I only want to study them until I have the scene set in my mind.

The scene I’m writing right now has the hero arriving at Venice Beach. I’ve used VB as a setting more than once for a couple of reasons. The most important is that I’ve actually been there. The second being I loved that place! Talk about fun and so many different types of people there. Perfect for so many different stories. And you’d think finding pictures of Venice Beach would be easy. Not so much.

Today’s search, and I do redo the searches even though I have a lot of pictures from the earlier books I set there, yielded me a ton of posing muscle dudes. Which I wouldn’t object to if I wasn’t on a mission. I finally had to redo the search to eliminate the guys.

The problem continues, though. I hardly took any pictures when I went to Venice Beach and that was a while ago now. I can’t remember the layout of the place all that well any more, and TBH, I was more interested in shopping with my friends than I was thinking, wow, I’m going to set stories here some day so let me imprint this in my memory. What was I thinking?

When I see the pictures online, they don’t help me place where they are in relation to anything else and that’s what makes it tough for me. What I’d love to see is a pieced together set of pictures that took me along the entire length of the Venice Beach boardwalk. Surely someone, somewhere did something like that, right? Just for me? Sigh. Probably not.

I’ve learned important lessons, though. When traveling, take many, many, many pictures. Make notes. Expand notes when I get back to the hotel room. Caption pictures with additional details. Don’t count on my memory or random photographers to post their pictures online.

Setting/description will probably always continue to be something I struggle with simply because it’s not something that’s important to me as a reader. Plus, sometimes it’s just plain hard to describe things right without bringing the story to a screeching halt or wasting far too much word count when I already run over word count on every book. Ah, well, I’ll get this scene described yet. Or die trying.