Writers Who Kill: Can An Old Dog Learn New Tricks? By Kim Herdman Shapiro

Friday, June 23, 2023

Can An Old Dog Learn New Tricks? By Kim Herdman Shapiro

Perhaps I should start this off with a quick correction. I should clarify that I am not an old dog. I am a mature canine. That sounds much better. A mature canine who has spent several decades away from the world of writing.

After working as a journalist for many years—some of which are chronicled in my book, Gelato with The Pope, I found myself in the aughts, newly married and the caretaker of two small children. Life as a new mom is like jumping in the deep end: a lot of frantic splashing around as you attempt to keep yours—and everyone else's—heads above water. Writing was wiped off the horizon. Survival was the only thing on my mind.

But time passes. With children, there is that terrible moment when you look up and realize there will be no more early morning cuddles in bed. Mom has become, if not redundant, then certainly not as essential as she once was. For me, this moment occurred during the pandemic. In the ensuing silence, the faint siren call of writing whispered softly in my ear.

Writing? Really? After all this time? I was rusty. Very rusty. And the world of journalism had changed dramatically from the one I had known. Did I dare attempt something new? Now, as I was staring the possibility of AARP membership right in the face?

Reading mysteries has been one of the literary constants in my life. From my childhood days of the Bobbsey Twins and the Happy Hollisters through to Agatha, Josephine Tey, Dorothy L. Sayers, and more modern-day favorites like Louise Penny. Surely, I had read enough mysteries to be able to write one myself!

But how, exactly, did one do it? I sifted through the various plotting formats - from the Hero's Journey to the Seven Point Plot Structure and the Three Act Method—before settling on Save the Cat! I like the way those 15 beats mark out the major turning points of the plot as well as structure the rising and falling tension throughout the book. I picked up a 4x4 piece of offcut plywood from Home Depot, bought a whole bunch of brightly colored sticky notes and a black marker, and started to build my outlining board. Painfully slowly, the sticky notes began to fill up with more and more text until I finally had the bones of a 40-chapter mystery staring back at me.

Next was Scrivener and Scapple. Scrivener gave me a way to transpose the scrawled sticky notes into chunks of fiction. And Scapple gave me a place to work out the complicated trail of red herrings and clues I scattered throughout the book.

So I had it. My 79,000 words of a traditional mystery. I found an editor and began revisions. Then it was time to start submitting to agents. Right off the bat, an agent requested the entire manuscript. I was thrilled, already picking out my outfit for the Edgar Awards banquet. I never heard from her again. Rinse and repeat this several times, each time my heart pricking at the request, followed by the slow and steady realization that I was not what they wanted. I blinked and two years had gone by. My mystery manuscript was still homeless.

This is the point where being a mature canine has its benefits. Twenty years previously, I would have probably railed against these agents and their inability to see the masterpiece in front of them. But mature canines have been around the block. Life has jostled us, sometimes roughly, over umpteen hurdles. We know, all too well, how easily things can get f@#ked up. Might these agents be right? That my manuscript was still not ready?

Two years in and with the help of a writer friend, I switched the whole novel from third person to Deep POV first person. And then rewrote it using the verité style of prose that had made me successful as a columnist. Things suddenly clicked. I was doing what I was good at, but tweaked and in another format. Rather than learn a new trick, I had reworked an old one. The email I had been waiting for finally landed in my inbox. My mystery series, The Wynter Island Mysteries, and the first book in the series, The Raven's Cry, had found a home with Level Best Books.

So, can an old dog learn new tricks? Perhaps the question should be: do we need to? After all, we mature canines have accumulated a fair number of tricks over the years. Perhaps we don't need new ones as much as we need the inspiration to use our old ones in new ways. Les Brown, Ohio politician and motivational speaker, said, "You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream"[1]. I would never have believed I could start a new career as a mystery author at my age. And yet here I am, apparently chock full of tricks I had no idea I could still use.

Kim worked as a journalist in Canada for many years, with experience in both print and broadcast journalism. Her book, Gelato with the Pope, highlights her time as a syndicated travel columnist in the Nineties.

In addition to her syndicated column, she has written feature articles for various publications, edited a monthly children's publication in British Columbia, and had her poetry published in Do Whales Jump at Night? A Canadian Anthology of Children's Poetry. She won a Microsoft Network award for Footloose, one of the first digital e-zines on the internet.

The Raven's Cry is the first book in her new mystery series, The Wynter Island Mysteries. It is based in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia and follows a journalist seeking a new beginning after undergoing trauma in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, her troubles follow her when the body of her ex washes up on an island beach. Book II, The Loon's Song, is due to be released in Spring 2024 from Level Best Books.