Practicing the Gentle Arts

 

The invitation to a decanting and decluttering you see below is my approximation of the one Janet Marsh recently received. Janet is one of the four protagonists in my ensemble amateur sleuth Highland Bookshop Mystery series.

Janet’s invitation is nicer than the one I made. Hers is written in a spidery hand on cream-colored paper and it has an embossed border. The invitation arrived in a matching envelope. Janet strokes that envelope. It’s lovely. As she says, “There’s a story behind an invitation like this. And if you put the envelope, the invitation, and the rich paper all together you have possibilities.” 

 

 

 

The pleasure of you company is requested for an evening of

 

Decanting and Decluttering

 

14 January, 7 p.m.

 

Fairy Flax Hall

Inversgail

 

I feel like Janet when I find the seeds of an idea and start planning a new book. Oh, the possibilities! I revel in them, run down rabbit holes filled with them. Sometimes, as my mind wallows in possibilities, I even feel as though I’ve been to a decanting like the one Janet’s been invited to. Here are some of the possibilities I worked with while planning Janet’s latest adventure:

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margaret Magnusson (A book recommended to me by a library colleague. The general idea is that you give away stuff you don’t need before you die so that your family has less to deal with after that, we hope, sad fact.)

Arsenic

Argyle socks

Scrapbooks

Sherry

Ganseys (Traditional hand-knitted pullover sweaters worn by fisherman around the UK and beyond.)

Traditional knitting patterns

Food trucks

Foodborne illnesses

Empathy

Rivalry

Rule breakers

Knitting competitions

Volunteers

Benefactors

Completists

Coded messages in WWII knitting

William McGonigal (Widely considered to be the worst poet in the English language.)  

Bog bodies

Operation Mincemeat (Fascinating story from WWII. Look it up.)

Baked potatoes

Roly-poly pudding

Grangerized books (Also called extra-illustrated books – books augmented by gluing in pictures, articles, pages, etc. cut from other books. Please don't cut up books.)

Robert Louis Stevenson paper dolls

Arnish Moor Man, Isle of Lewis

Nutmeg scones

Humbug (Slang for fraud or nonsense.)

Humbugs (Hard candies usually flavored with peppermint.)

Fairy flax (A delicate, pretty flower found in Scotland. Also called purging flax. Purging isn’t usually delicate or pretty.)

 

That’s a lot of stuff. It’s more stuff than any story needs, so I engaged in a round of decluttering. I separated out the ideas that would carry the story too far afield and I packed them away for other stories to have.

Then I wrote the book.

Then I revised the book. For me, the real writing is in the rewriting, and with rewriting comes another round of decluttering. This is the point where writers must commit murder by killing their darlings. Chop the words and phrases you use too often. Whack dialog that doesn’t move the story forward. Paragraphs that are nothing but self-indulgent description? Strangle them. It’s hard. But it makes the writing and the writer stronger. So do it, then decant something, sit back, and let your mind turn to all the possibilities yet to come.

The story behind Janet’s invitation to the decanting and decluttering is the story that unfolds in Argyles and Arsenic, book five of my Highland Bookshop Mystery series. The book comes out March 1^st and is available for pre-order now.

Don’t you love the possibilities that await when you open a new book? What else do you love for the tantalizing possibilities they offer?

Molly MacRae writes the award-winning, national bestselling Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries and the Highland Bookshop Mysteries. Visit Molly on Facebook and Pinterest and connect with her on Twitter  or Instagram.