Cynthia Harrison
Novelist
Tag: plotting
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Ways to be Wicked
The current writing project is gathering steam. It will be my third mystery and I hope to have an easier time with it than the last two. They say third time’s the charm, right? To that end, I have been doing a lot of plotting and planning. I’m finding Writing & Selling Your Mystery Novel…
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Hidden Things
I’m at the most difficult part of writing my next novel: imaging a deadly crime and how someone (almost) gets away with murder. There’s much work to be done off the book, work unknown to all but the writer, at this stage of the game. Maybe that’s why I’m consumed today with the idea of…
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Compelling Minor Characters
Lily White, the protagonist of my WIP, lives in Detroit and works as a P.I. She used to have a very different life, in Blue Lake, my fictional tourist town on Lake Huron in northern Michigan. Lily started as a minor character in my first Blue Lake novel, Blue Heaven. Even in that book, she…
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The Rocky Road to True Love
Got through 30 pages of revision yesterday. Five hours of steady work. And then last night, I realized they were all wrong. Really wrong. Like, unfixable. In need of swift deletion. The saving grace was that I also knew exactly how to fix the scene sequence. I didn’t have the words yet, but I knew the…
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The Plot Behind the Plot
Read the first five chapters of Frey’s how-to this morning and realize I have work to do. Work that will not be adding to the 150 or so pages I’ve accumulated in the WIP. Yes, the stuff I need to do will inform my story, but most of it won’t be a part of the…