Writing Lesson Number One: To Thine Own Self Be True

“I don’t feel any feeling.”

That was *Betty’s mantra every time I read scenes from my work in progress to my writers’ group.

People often ask me now if I’m in a writers’ group, or if I got feedback from friends or relatives while writing Sweet Man Is Gone.  No, I say with a shudder.  No writers’ groups and no in-progress feedback.  Never again.

This is what happened.

Betty wore me down with her complaints about the lack of feeling in my project.

No feeling, I would brood unhappily as I drove home.  If there’s no feeling, no one will care what happens to my heroine.  No editor will want my book.  In my darkest moments, I was convinced I’d never be published because I myself had a horrible flaw–no feeling.  It’s true that I don’t often show emotion in public, but it had never occurred to me before Betty that maybe I was truly incomplete when it came to emotional development.

I resolved to remedy the problem—at least as it manifested itself in my writing.  I went through the manuscript and tried to imagine what a feeling person would feel in the situations my heroine encountered.

So my heroine started to cry.  She cried a lot.  I challenged my descriptive abilities to come up with different ways to talk about crying: gulping sobs alternated with trickles of tears, or moist-eyed howls of misery.

Betty warmed to my project.  My heroine became even more emotional.

Around that time I made a new friend at a summer guitar workshop, *Carrie.  Carrie had recently retired from a job in publishing and had decided to devote herself to music.  We started practicing together and inevitably I mentioned that I was writing a mystery.

“Oh, I’d love to read it,” she said.

I gave her the first several chapters and looked forward eagerly to what I was sure would be lavish praise—for one thing, the mystery was about music.

But her reaction wasn’t what I expected.  “I wouldn’t want to read a book like this,” she said after she’d had my chapters for a week.

“No?”  I felt my throat clutch the way it does when I’m nervous.

“No one would.  Your sleuth isn’t a good heroine at all.”

“She’s not?  What’s the problem?” I said, trying to control my distress and make my voice sound merely conversational, rather than devastated.

“I couldn’t stand her.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Well,” Carrie said, shuffling my pages back into their folder.  “She’s much too emotional.  She cries all the time.”

*Names have been changed.

Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor who now writes mysteries and plays blues guitar.  She is the author of Sweet Man Is Gone, featuring sexy blues-singer sleuth Maxx Maxwell, and published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage.  Visit her at www.PeggyEhrhart.com .  This first appeared in Another Writer’s Life–August 10, 2008.