Louis Shalako
I’m just in the process of winding up my eighteenth
novel and the sixth in the Inspector Gilles
Maintenon Mystery Series. (Smashwords.)
It’s called How
to Rob a Bank. (Excerpt.)
The first draft came in at about 54,000 words. A week
or so later, and the final book is approximately 63,000 words. Editing is
definitely a process. I’ve just completed my fifth deep edit, a really stiff
read through the book that took a good twelve or fourteen man-hours. The
average person would read the book in anything from two and a half to four
hours.
At some level, it is entertaining. There are times
when you think, ‘man, I can’t believe I
wrote this thing…’
There’s definitely some level of satisfaction there.
So. You have a good story—now you want to take that
story and use it to knock the reader’s socks off.
Editing is work,
that’s for sure. It is work that must be done.
At some point it becomes excruciating. It’s really
tedious, painstaking work.
It’s startling to discover, in the first really good
end-to-end read of your book that one character, described as having a wife and
two kids in an early chapter, has mysteriously turned into a single man with an
active night-life near the end of the story.
There are two solutions. The first is to accept the change later in the book.
Your single man would have a wife and two kids again, and you would have to add
material. You would be adding material here and there all through the book. You
would have to go back through everything and justify it logically, because
every little thing in the book relates to every other thing in the book.
It has to make sense.
As easier change was to go to the early chapter,
remove the reference to the wife and kids, and then everything about that
character made sense again. It still requires careful reading, (you want to
look for further references to wives and kids), but having discovered this
error, now we’re hyper-alert to more.
And find them we did. In another scene, I had a
character who began life as Mathilde, and then switched over to being Phoebe,
and then back again to Mathilde. It was a simple choice, as I already had
another character named Mathilde in the book. (At least I think I did!) It can
get confusing.
To avoid confusion, Mathilde in that chapter became
Phoebe.
In another scene, a police officer is interrogating a
witness or a suspect. We start off with Grosjean in the chair, with Levain
coming and going. For whatever reason, during the writing process, we must have
gotten up and walked away, shut down or whatever. When we started up again, we
just grabbed Andre Levain by the scruff of the neck and then all of a sudden we
had him asking the questions.
That required careful reading, as even I don’t know
what the hell I’m trying to say sometimes.
The scene wasn’t completely visualized as to actions
and characters and their movements.
Sometimes it really does take five or six
rewrites before the scene makes total sense, and yet it is important during the
writing process to forge ahead to the end of the manuscript.
The nice thing about a mystery novel is the denouement. This is
the scene where the detective lays the case and its solution out to some
attentive audience. Very often in the old-school novels, all the suspects would
be sipping tea in the drawing room of some big old mansion.
It is only after reading your own book ten or fifteen
times that you can really nail all of it down.
Writing a mystery novel is a lot like conducting an
investigation. You want to have all of your facts in place before snapping the
cuffs on your suspect or suspects.
Every little place where I fudged as a writer, every
place in the book where I’m writing pure fiction, of a sort based on
information that can’t be easily verified, it all comes back to haunt you. But
this is an opportunity. Court procedures in France in 1929 are one grey area
for me.
I’m not a lawyer and to do the research online would be difficult as
the best sources are in French. There is the problem of key-word searches when
you want to ask a very specific question. Very few readers will ever question
it, and even fewer have the knowledge to contradict the text!
The book’s not really written for scholars, lawyers or
police investigators, it’s not written for bankers. All of those folks have a
million times more knowledge than I can claim.
It’s written for people who like a good murder
mystery, and of course I want to do the best job I can.
Every objection
that I can raise to my solution can also be dealt with. It does require going
back, through vast sequences, and finding the perfect spot to put another
little detail into the story.
You have to get to the end of your manuscript before
you can really begin shooting it down.
It’s all part of the editing process, the writing
process, and ultimately the publishing process.
No one wants to produce a book
that’s full of typos, misused words the author clearly didn’t understand,
errors of logic and an ending that underwhelms the reader.
Even on the fifth run through the book, I was still
fixing clunky sentences. I still found missing words and the odd extraneous
word in a sentence. As far as logic, it seems pretty good, pretty detailed, and
hopefully convincing enough for the average reader.
How
to Rob a Bank will be available through many fine
online bookstores very soon, with paperbacks to follow.
***
This may be a bit controversial.
In my opinion, a beta reader, one that had read the
book once might have picked off any
number of these errors. They might even pick off all of them. But they didn’t
write the book, they don’t know who the characters are supposed to be. That’s
not the real problem.
The trouble is that time element. I don’t want to wait
three weeks to hear back from people. I would be on to the next project. It
would dominate my mind—and this story
would be almost forgotten at that point.
I really don’t want to go through that sort of process
multiple times. Let’s assume beta readers caught every mistake. My solutions
would have been pretty much the same. The book would be substantially the same. Either way, it would still take x-number of hours of my time, and probably a lot more doing it that way.
That’s not to say there are not concerns, because
there always are. With each book, we learn new things and that all goes towards
the next book we write.
There comes a time when it’s done and it’s time to let
it go—but I will read the book again once or twice just to make sure, ladies
and gentlemen.
You can trust me on that one.
END
Here’s my blurb:
Inspector
Gilles Maintenon has finally run up against an original mind—someone who’s very
good at wasting their time. The dead body of a young bank employee is
discovered in a vault that shows every sign of being robbed. The premier Paris
branch of Crédit Lyonnais has ten or twenty million francs on a busy
day. Then there’s the safety-deposit boxes. A proper investigation takes time.
The police are nothing if not predictable in their procedures. But that other
mind has already gone down that road. They’ve had plenty of time to think about
it. Their killer, using simple human psychology, has come up with a brilliant
plan. Gilles would dearly love to meet the mind that conceived of that plan. He
intends to do just that.
Mystery
fans are sure to enjoy How to Rob a Bank,
the sixth volume in Louis Shalako’s Inspector
Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series. (Amazon.)
Thank you for reading.
***
