Changing Seasons, Evolving Perspectives by Martha Reed

June is one of my favorite months. In Western Pennsylvania where I currently live, the April and May rainy season has moved on. The hillsides and meadows are lush with fresh greenery and wildflowers. Even the air smells green. I have a hard time keeping to my daily writing word count schedule because all I want to do is to get outside.

Full Disclosure: This is Western Pennsylvania. I didn’t have this issue in February.

June is also the month for graduations and weddings. I couldn’t be prouder of the new crop of youngsters as they settle in and start building their adult lives. Even though I was there when they came along, and I know we adults didn’t know what we were doing, it’s refreshing to see that we seem to have done alright.

It’s a circle of life moment for me in more ways than one. On the writing side, I signed up to mentor a newbie author through the Sisters in Crimes SinC Connect program. This six-month program matches the common interests of mentors and mentees who meet usually once a month via Zoom. This will be the third year I’ve participated, and I can honestly say that I think I learn more from my mentees than they learn from me.

Each mentee has brought a different writerly issue to the table for consideration. My first mentee was stuck in a Chapter One death spiral loop. She kept repeatedly rewriting the first chapter of her manuscript trying to perfect it. My tough love advice was a lesson I had learned (more than once): Jog on, because chances are you may cut the chapter out entirely down the road during the editing cycle. I’m happy to report this mentee finished her completed draft manuscript in time to pitch it to agents at SleuthFest.

My second mentee scared me a little because she hadn’t started writing yet. She came to the Zoom call with only the burning desire to “be a writer.” We spent our calls talking about identifying the requirements of her preferred genre, setting up sacred writing time and space, and the discipline of making daily writing a habit. By the end of the program she felt confident enough to sign up for and attend her very first writer’s conference.

This year’s mentee has been a real eye-opener because she’s Gen Z. I’ve written Gen Z characters before, but interacting one-on-one is a different animal. It’s more than slang usage and different grammar structure and vocabulary. Gen Z makes me feel like the last T-Rex, because they have a completely different mindset. They actively interject political activism, fluid sexual identity, profanity, and social issues into their genre writing in a way that shocks my Boomer/Gen Jones sensibility. I catch myself saying: Are we allowed to write like this?

Which in the end relights my fire because it makes me question and reexamine my personal writing constraints. Has my writing become moribund? Have I fallen victim to comfortable habit? And as I continue with my latest manuscript, what can I do to shake things up?