From a Crime to a Book: An Inside Look at a Mystery Author's Process

Every author’s process is different, and we’re always interested in hearing about how an author manages to move from an idea to a fully fledged book. We recently sat down with Spun Yarn author Steve Wechselblatt to talk about the strange journey his mystery novel has taken from genesis to execution.

The Spun Yarn: How long have you been writing?

Steve: I started writing fiction about eight years ago. My first book ended up in a drawer after three years when I finally admitted to myself that my idea was wildly impractical and/or far beyond my ability as a fledging novelist. During this frustrating time, I started working on very short fictions that later became the basis for Diamonds and Moths (2017).

The Spun Yarn: How did you come across the idea for the mystery novel you’re working on now?

Steve: In 2014 I began to look around for an idea for a novel that I could actually complete. I decided I wanted to work on a mystery because I always believed that mysteries are the place where reason (epitomized in the detective) confronts the irrational (humankind’s destructive emotions). Beyond that, I believe life itself is a mystery.

The Spun Yarn: Did the idea just come to you, or were you actively looking for something to sink your teeth into?

Steve: I wanted to start with something I thought was uniquely interesting. I began rummaging around the section on weird events that used to be part of the Huffington Post before it changed its format. I found the story of a young girl found nude in a water tank located on the roof of a Skid Row Hotel in L.A. Her body was discovered only when guests started complaining about the water’s peculiar smell. No one could figure out how she got up there or even why. I researched articles about the case. A tape of the girl in the elevator just before her death intrigued me and many other viewers. It sparked all kinds of theories. She looked scared, disoriented. Was she being chased? Was she on drugs? I obtained a copy of the  autopsy report, which did not find any illegal substances. The old hotel had been the haunt of serial killers, which added to the frisson to the case. When the police decided it was an unfortunate accident, many people suspected foul play or even some kind of supernatural event triggered by the once-notorious Night Stalker, one of the mass murderers who stayed at the hotel.

This was just what I was looking for: a case where conventional detective work and the irrational (here, the supernatural) confronted each other in a stark way. The fact that the mystery had a built-in audience of interested observers didn’t hurt.  I decided that exploring the story would require two distinct and equally credible narrators. I wanted them to start with totally different assumptions about reality, so I made one a detective and the other a psychic. I did want them to have something in common, so I made them both outsiders. 

The Spun Yarn: So how did you begin to work on your idea? Are you a panster or a plotter?

Steve: I am a born pantser. It’s hard for me to plot. Having a somewhat established story helped me. That said, I still found plotting hard. It is difficult for me to think in terms of cause and effect because I ultimately think life is so irrational. I also found it challenging to weave between two narrators with different events and viewpoints until the story brings them together. It was only with the third draft that the plot finally began to seem somewhat plausible. I say somewhat because it will have to evolve further.  At this point, the plot changes are less important than making the characters respond believably to the strange circumstances  I’ve put them in. 

The Spun Yarn: What kind of research did you do?

Steve: The idea itself came from the internet. Once I started writing, after researching the original crime, the victim, and the hotel history for a few weeks,  I wrote and did follow-up research more or less at the same time. When I ran into trouble with the writing, I’d go back to the internet. My research was all online. I even found a photo of a house in Silver Lake I thought my psychic might have chosen to live in. Of course, I would have loved to travel to L.A. to see the actual places I’ve described, but I couldn’t since I’m a full-time caregiver.  I had to do the best I could with articles and pictures of Skid Row and other places in LA. Many of the places I described are from websites about LA. Various posts about people reacting to the crime were terrifically helpful.

The Spun Yarn: So how long have you been working on the book, and how much longer do you think it will take?

Steve: The first draft took about a year. I’ve been revising since then. I really don’t know how to revise, otherwise I might have been able to do this more efficiently. Even now, as you know, I’m not done. There’s more work to do to make this what I think it should be. (Compulsively readable, of course). I have been working on this book for about 5 years (while doing short stories also).

Every idea evolves in the writing. I am still finding things I want to bring out – metaphors I want to highlight, not to mention different aspects of each character’s personality.  The Spun Yarn Manuscript Report highlighted that I need to work more on the voice of one of my protagonists, a dramatic scene that readers didn’t feel was sufficiently motivated, and a stronger ending. That’s what I’m doing that now!

The Spun Yarn: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us, Steve. We were fascinated by your idea, and your readers were too. Looking forward to seeing your book out in the world!

Steve Wechselblatt

is the author of Diamonds and Moths, and is published in Circa, a Journal of Historical Fiction, Chicago Literati, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Journal, among other places.

3 Times You Ignore Reader Feedback at Your Peril

Before we curate an author's Spun Yarn Manuscript Report, we ask how far along they think they are in the editing process on a scale of 1 - 10. The average score over a hundred manuscripts? 7.3.

We also track every manuscript's scores from readers, who are comparing the manuscript they've just to other well-known books in the genre. The average overall score? 6 / 10.

There's a gap here. It's grayish, smudgy around the edges, and rrrrrreally annoying to authors.

After getting your beta reader feedback, how do you decide how much more work you really need to do? Do you really need to make the changes your readers suggest, or is the whole thing a matter of opinion? If writing and reading are subjective arts, why change the manuscript at all, especially when you've put more thought into this book than any other person on the planet?

Sometimes readers may be pointing to a valid issue, but may not have the right solution for it. Other times, readers are going to be spot on. Here are a few rules of thumb based on all the manuscript reports we've done.

1. When two or more readers independently agree on an issue, pay attention.

Hopefully, your beta readers haven't talked to one another and don't know each other at all. For example, here's a report in which two readers had the same comment at the exact same point in the manuscript:

Reader 1: "I'm struggling with the biological and scientific details that seem off the main topic.

Reader 2: "The content becomes very medically oriented in Chapter 6, and at times it's too dense to read."

As a writer, this kind of specific consensus is gold, and the change is also fairly straightforward. Go back to Chapter 6, and cut out some of the dense scientific details. Read it for tone, and make sure it's consistent with the rest of the book. These easy wins are why it's so important to have more than one beta reader read you book.

What if readers agree, but it's on a major issue that's going to require a lot of work?

For instance, what if you were writing a dystopian book about baseball, but your readers say it's actually a love story, and therefore your ending is all wrong?

This is the kind of feedback that takes some time to digest. Resist the urge to scoff. If your chest starts feeling tight just reading the feedback, it means you need to leave it on a shelf for a few days before you have the emotional energy to consider it. And then, when you're ready, you've got to consider it.

Go back to your story fundamentals and ask yourself: is this really a love story after all? Is there an arc you missed, or a reason why the arc you started out with became less compelling or relevant as the story went along?

The point here is that readers have pinpointed an issue that demands attention. They don't necessarily know the best way to address it. That's your job. But if you want a great book, you've got to pay attention when your readers agree.

2. If it's a straightforward minor change that doesn't matter too much to you, what do you have to lose?

In one of our recent manuscripts, one reader pointed out that the names of two main characters both started with a D and were sometimes hard to keep track of. Though as writers we tend to get attached to every word in our carefully wrought works of art, it can be helpful to think of editing as picking your battles. If a change is small, ask yourself what the manuscript stands to lose or gain by making the change.

3. Readers disagree on the problem, but all of them have some kind of problem with the same part of a manuscript.

At The Spun Yarn, we break a manuscript into four sections for feedback. This is another way of separating the opening, the building action, the climax, and the denouement. This is true of memoirs, and even to some extent of nonfiction manuscripts. When you have at least three readers commenting on each section, you'll begin to see trends. Particularly, you'll see that some sections have more reader comments than others.

For example, two readers think the ending was rushed, and one reader loved the action but didn't find the characters' actions consistent with their prior behavior. This is a cue that it might be in your best interest to take another look at your ending to see which issues you can address and which you'll need to leave as is. In your next revision, focus solely on what it’s delivering to readers, and how.

Even if you don't agree with readers or if they don't agree with one another, you have strong confirmation that you need to sit down with that section of the manuscript and give it a lot of thought and attention. Pretend you're a reader rather than an author, and try to diagnose the issue with fresh eyes. Just because readers don't always agree doesn't mean they aren't identifying an important trouble spot.

7 Holiday Gifts Writers Actually Need

As the holiday season rolls around, you may be realizing that there are only so many notebooks, pens, and sarcastic mugs you can give the writer in your life before you have to think of something new. We feel you, and as writers ourselves, we’ve curated a smarter list of holiday gifts for writers. Check out these seven holiday gifts for writers that will impress your writer friend or relative because they’re actually things writers need and use. Don’t get us wrong, tee shirts and mugs are cool too . . . but we think you can do better.

1. Writing guides. We writers are always looking to hone our craft, and we often draw inspiration from the greats. If you'd like to give your favorite writer a writing guide, see if you can sneak a peek at their bookshelf to see which they already own. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is hands down the most touted guide to writing and life. Even if your writer isn’t a horror fan, Stephen King’s On Writing is another well-respected guide with sage advice that applies to every genre. To determine which guide is best for your particular writer, you can also check out a few blog posts to find the best fit.

• Give your writer the gift of feedback with a Spun Yarn Manuscript Critique. Chances are, the writer you love both craves and fears feedback about the project that has consumed her soul for the last few [months/years/decades.] When she's ready for feedback, she'll spend another eon biting her nails about how to get it. A Spun Yarn manuscript critique combines feedback from three trained readers who specialize in your writer's genre, and gives her a customized 30 page critique with editorial advice about exactly what to do in a next revision. The great thing about giving the gift of feedback is that the writer can choose to use it when she's ready, taking the stress out of soliciting feedback. Can’t afford the full manuscript critique package? Try out the mini critique for $35.

• Entry to a writing contest. If you're shopping for a fiction writer, short fiction contests are a perfect opportunity for him to sharpen his skills and have a lot of fun. Here are a few popular and well-respected writing contests that charge an entry fee the writing community generally agrees is worth it in exchange for the exposure and large prizes:

  1. NYC Midnight runs a contest every season, rotating contests for short stories, flash fiction, and screenplays. They offer several large cash prizes and a chance for writers to participate in multiple rounds of competition supported by a large and supportive writing community.

  2. Writer's Digest is another admired resource for writers that offers annual competitions in practically every genre and format.

  3. Glimmer Train is the holy grail of short fiction awards. A writer who places in one of these rotating competitions has a huge leg up—Glimmer Train stories appear in America's Best Fiction anthologies every year. Every literary fiction writer should give this competition a shot at least once.

• Submittable Subscription. You are truly in the know if you give the writer in your life a subscription to the world's largest online database of literary markets. For a reasonable yearly fee, Submittable allows writers to find the specific markets that fit for any piece we’re working on, and lets us track and check on the progress of our submissions. Submittable includes listings for short story, nonfiction, poetry, and full length manuscript publishers, and there's not a writer out there who won't find it useful.

• Scrivener. Every writer battles to organize all the moving pieces in a long term project. One of the most popular writing software/app products available, Scrivener makes the management of a large project possible by allowing writers to organize all the notes, drafts, and metadata in one place with a user-friendly interface. As a writing gift, writers agree that Scrivener is one of the best.

• A gift card for free books! Writers love to read, and sometimes the books we want can't be found in the local library. For a writer, a gift certificate to a bookstore is like candy to a fourth-grader, complete with greedy eye-gleaming and salivation as we unwrap your card and immediately begin planning which books to buy first.

• Want to give a more personal writer gift? Give your favorite writer the gift of time: offer a few hours of free babysitting, house-cleaning, or anything that will incentivize us to get out of the house and focus on our work. We tend to put other obligations (you know, jobs that pay actual money) ahead of our writing. Any way you can help us make time to write will be an incredible gift.

In choosing your writer holiday gift, it helps to know what kind of a writer your loved one is: fiction, memoir, short story, novel, all of the above? Many writer gifts will be tailored to the fiction writer, but all writers benefit from the gift of feedback, writing guides, and more books. We hope we’ve given you some ideas about how to score some major points with your writer, or at the very least, to avoid buying yet another notebook.

Flash Feedback: 5 Ways to Evaluate Your Novel's Pacing

Here's a question: how much have your beta readers told you about your book's pacing? As they read, did they make myriad small comments about wording, ask questions about believability, etc? 

As a beta reader myself, I've had to reign myself back from commenting on every page of a manuscript I'm reading. Why? Because what the author needs from a beta reader is a holistic impression of the work, AS WELL AS the reader's take on its moving parts: the characters, the plot, writing, etc. 

At The Spun Yarn, we've learned that Flash Feedback check-ins are a brilliant way to show an author how readers feel about each section of your book, and about the overall pacing. When you deliberately keep your beta readers from commenting on every line, but force them to check in at every quarter mark of the book, it instantly becomes clear which parts of your book are riveting readers, and which are lagging. 

Moreover, we've discovered something completely new. ALL of the high-scoring manuscripts (and we've done 40 now) share these two traits in common:

1. Readers are intrigued by the first quarter, wondering but not knowing what's going to happen next

2. Readers love the third quarter of the book most.

 

The third quarter of your book is where your pieces should falling into place. The novel's momentum is at its peak. If you're waiting until the last 25% of your book to begin wrapping everything up, you've waited too long. Your last quarter is going to feel rushed. 

What other conclusions for your next revision can we draw from Flash Feedback check-ins?

Readers give you a lot of slack for development in the first quarter.

You must introduce a compelling conflict, but your first quarter doesn't need to be action-packed. In fact, readers expect setting, description, and world-building. We've seen manuscripts go the other way and include too much action in the first quarter. Readers have said "Wait, where and when are we? What's happening?" Your world may be clear to you, but you have to build a staircase that leads readers down slowly, gives them time to pressurize and immerse themselves in your world.

Have you considered dividing your manuscript into four quarters, and plotting out the action or plot points in each quarter?

We ask because another common problem is a weak middle. That's right, it's not good for your core strength or for your novel. The perfect novel builds throughout, with the maximum tension occurring in the third quarter. If you don't have enough action in the middle, is your plot complex enough? Did you space pivotal moments evenly, or did you pack too much into the first or last quarters?

A good middle answers some questions introduced in the first quarter, and introduces new questions as well. For example, in the middle of a good horror story, a reader may be thinking: "Ahhh, so they found this creepy house, and that's where the scary part is going to start, great! But what exactly are those two men planning to do to our three lost young friends. Are the men evil or are they fronts for a greater evil deeper within the house?" 

You get the picture.

Finally, endings are about tying pretty bows.

The kinds of bows you tie and how prettily you tie them depends on the genre. In literary fiction, it's not always good to answer every question, but you must leave the reader with a sense of finality, with a great, overall impression. In a mystery, you are booking the criminals, meting out their life sentences, and house-shopping with the newly safe heroine on a poplar lined boulevard, imagining her nervous young daughter settling into school. Endings are about satisfying the reader, hopefully in at least a few ways they didn't predict.

If you haven't looked for beta readers who can stop commenting long enough to step back and give you a big picture look at the four quarters of your book, try us--we've practiced, and we're good at it. We give you THREE different readers to check in at each quarter mark, so you can immediately say Yep, the middle is dragging for all of them or Wow, Reader 1 is not my reader but readers 2 and 3 totally get it.

We have readers who get it. 

Happy writing!

How To Decode Beta Reader Comments on Pacing

At The Spun Yarn, we do Feedback better than anyone else. You choose your reader demographics. We assign three readers to provide full novel feedback, including check-ins throughout the novel, overall comments, and qualitative scores compared to our growing manuscript database. Then we find consensus, analyze, and give you actionable suggestions for what to do in your next revision.

In our How to Decode series, we share our learnings from more than one hundred full beta reads from our diverse group of readers. How do beta reader comments map to potential problems in your manuscript, and what can you do to address them? 

Ok, so you finished a draft of your WIP (go you). You swallowed your imposter syndrome long enough to ask some people to read it, (phew!), and at least one of them finished it (you're rocking everyone's pants off). 

So...now what? Your reader(s) said some good things about your WIP, and maybe some not-so-amazing things too. You have a feeling that some of their comments are right, but you aren't sure if you agree with others. What do you tackle in your next revision?

More readers = consensus = gold 

Quick note: the more readers the better. The good thing about multiple readers is consensus: where they agree and disagree. Consensus is liquid gold for writers.

Personally, when it comes to big story issues, I trust an honest reader's gut reaction that something is wrong, and then decide whether it's important to fix it, or whether fixing it would break something else. When two or more readers independently agree that something is wrong, I bow to the throne of consensus and I FIX IT.

If you don't have multiple readers (get some, and uh, we do consensus analysis really well), you can still map specific comments to areas you may want to look at in a revision. 

Comments That Are Really About Pacing 

Pacing, the speed at which your story unfolds, gathers momentum, complicates itself, and resolves. Different genres have different paces, literary fiction moving more slowly than thrillers, for instance. What's important is that your pacing should be deliberate and consistent. 

A glacial pace could lose readers and sound your WIP's death knell, even in literary fiction. A frenetic pace will confuse readers and may eventually lose them, even in a thriller. You may keep readers a bit longer with a frenetic pace than with a glacial pace, but a confusing, hurried pace is worse because when you do finally lose your readers, they will be frustrated and ANGRY with you. Hell hath no fury like a disappointed reader, especially when it comes to Amazon reviews. 

Let's take a look at the kinds of quotes we see in Spun Yarn beta comments that relate to pacing. 

"At three-quarters of the way through, I was riveted." 

We've noticed that our most liked manuscripts share this trait: readers are at their peak of enjoyment three quarters of the way through.

This makes sense when you think about it: in the first quarter, you're setting out your premises, building your world, and introducing your conflict and characters. In the second quarter, your characters are journeying, complicating the conflict, reaching their lows or gaining tantalizing leads to their highs, and by the third quarter, all of your work should be paying off as the plot and character development fall into place and gain momentum.

By the three quarter point, you may have answered or resolved some initial conflicts, but readers are tuned in and leaning forward to see your grand finale. This is pacing at its finest: a beginning and middle that meticulously set all the pins in place, a third quarter and finale that knock them all down in surprising ways. It's a sign of a great outline, or, if you're a panster, that your revision thus far have paid off, pulling all of your disparate threads into place. 

"The book was a little slow for me at this part..." 

Slow = boring. Readers are generally nice people. They don't want to hurt your feelings. Any good writer can hurt their own feelings by translating words like "slow" into "boring the pants off of me, turning my eyelids to cement, making me crave a root canal to distract from the monotony." Okay, we writers tend to go overboard with the self-deprecation.

If readers say that a particular section was slow or took them several tries to read, they're indicating potentially slow pacing. You haven't made them care enough about what they're reading, or, in some cases, you're covering too much old ground and frustrating readers who want to move to new plot events.

A well-paced book will unfold at a consistent pace, and will always give readers a compelling reason to keep going. Most often, the reason to keep going is conflict. Sometimes it's mystery. Your characters should always be struggling and changing. If readers get bored, consider ways to shorten the section in question, cut it altogether, or weave it into a section of the book that does have clear conflict.

Finally, clunky writing can slow the pacing. If you sent a book out to beta readers but none of them finished despite their pinky swears, take a hard look at your opening chapters. In addition to conflict, is your writing tight and engaging? Check yourself on passive language. I like this article on passive voice because it dispels the notion that passive voice is always bad, and gives examples of when and when not to use it. Check for overuse of adverbs (we don't believe that adverbs are evil but they can certainly be overused). Check for tedious reiterations of things you've already said in slightly different ways. Check for filter words and awkward phrasings. Read the opening aloud in front of a frenemy and you should be able to tell immediately if there's something wrong with the writing. 

"The X part felt a little too quick, and/or confused me."

When readers are confused or feel that events unfold too quickly, it could be a sign of inconsistent pacing. At the Spun Yarn, we often see this in the last quarter of the book. An author finds herself with too many loose ends to tie up, or isn't sure about how to end the story and it shows in an overly convenient ending or an ending that leaves too many questions unanswered. 

1. Make sure your subplots are resolved. Map them out and address each one, even if only in passing. The point is to instill the reader with confidence that you're not wildly abandoning subplots along the path behind you: that you have a plan, that you haven't forgotten anything.  
2. If every subplot's resolution occurs in the last quarter of the book, see if you can resolve a few of them earlier to make the pacing consistent. Minor subplots can be resolved a bit earlier, and spacing them out can quell the heartburn that comes from a placid third quarter followed by an explosive, chaotic finale. 
3. Cut some subplots altogether if they're not strongly contributing to the story enough. 

If you receive this feedback about 'too much at once' or 'it's confusing' at the beginning of your story, tease out whether readers are content to stick with you and trust that their questions will eventually be answered, or whether readers seem overwhelmed and panicked. If the latter, try taking more time to cover the critical elements first, and saving other characters / mysteries / subplots / settings for later. 

We notice in Spun Yarn comments that readers are often willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for the first quarter of the book, as long as they don't continue feel overwhelmed in the second quarter of the book. 

Let us know in the comments: was this helpful? Were you rolling your eyes at the lack of new information, or panicked at seeing terms you didn't recognize? If the latter, check out this brief primer on pacing from the always helpful Writer's Digest. 

 

You wrote a book. Is it any good?

After months (or years) of carpal tunnel, crippling self-doubt, and procrastination, you have FINALLY FINISHED YOUR MANUSCRIPT. Congratulations!!! You emailed your mom and told your dentist and other random people on the street. Hopefully, you also sent your manuscript to a few readers, and at least one of them actually finished the thing and gave you some feedback.

So...what's next? Are you sitting on a bestseller? Are you ready to approach agents? How can you tell? At the Spun Yarn, we've learned a lot about what separates the finished from the not-quite-there-yet, and we'd love to share those learnings in our free quiz.

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