A couple of weeks ago, I finished the first draft of a Phillip Gold short story under the working title "Violet". As is my wont, I circulated this draft among my writing colleagues and asked for feedback. Well, I'll be darned if I didn't get feedback — in large portions.

So what do I do now? It's easy when the feedback is consistent from all or most of the readers. You just adopt their suggestions. But what about where one says, "do A", another says, "under no circumstances do A", and a third says, "do A but with the following twist"? Or what do you do when the readers offer consistent suggestions on a particular point but you feel that the suggestions would change the story from being your own to someone else's, that the suggestions conflict with your own personal writing style.

I find the latter two situations very hard but I have developed some strategies. In the first case, I generally try to consider all of the options, think about them in terms of their contribution to the story, their consistency with the tone I've established and whether or not they seem appropriate to me from a character standpoint (would my character do or say this?). I usually go with the option that feels "right" to me and often that means I leave it more or less as I originally wrote it.

In the second case, on the other hand, I have to get into a much more philosophical examination. It usually revolves around my goals in writing the story in the first place. I like and respect my readers and know they are making comments with what they consider to be the best interests of the work in mind. I also know that, in general, they make comments with a view to helping me get my work published. So I have to decide: do I choose what feels most comfortable to me or what creates the best chance for the story to be published?

I'd like to think that the two were always in line with each other. But they're not.

And I have to accept that I want to be published. So sometimes I have to sacrifice.

It's a tough life.

Tags: Phillip Gold, Mystery

I'm experimenting. I'm working on a Phillip Gold short story and I'm writing it in the third-person format — you know, "Gold stood there, looking at his toes" — rather than in first person: "I stood there, looking at my toes". This is the first time I've tried such a thing. It seems foreign to me, odd and different. So yesterday, when I found a half hour to work on the story, I had to fight the inclination to rewrite what I have into the more familiar first-person approach.

What worries me most is that I'm not sure that my inclination to change it is coming from a good place — this is what's best for the story — and not from a bad place: this is what's most comfortable for me.

And I'm also worried that I'm going to continue to use this ridiculous em-dash, em-dash, colon construction throughout this piece. That would be truly tragic.

The third-person approach gives me options, variety, the ability to move out of the main character's mind and into the world. I can even, if I'm really clever, create a personality for my third-person narrative voice and have him/her commenting (either subtly or not so subtly) on the action and the characters. I can describe scenes at which Gold is not present, thus, perhaps, bringing the antagonist to life more effectively or building higher levels of tension. And, let's face it, even Raymond Chandler started running out of ideas on how his first-person narrator (Philip Marlowe) could describe being knocked unconscious: "I heard a bang and a curtain fell."

The first-person approach, on the other hand, lends immediacy to the action. If done well, it can heighten the suspense and bring the reader closer to the protagonist. It also tends to simplify things from a structural standpoint: the reader experiences what the main character experiences. Sometimes it means the reader is solving the mystery alongside (on the shoulder of, in the pocket of) our hero.

So I'm not sure what to do. In reviewing what I've written, I have found that I've included a fairly long scene of dialogue between Gold and his client in order to fill in the background information. I think it's fairly well written but I am also conscious of the fact that, in first person, I could simply have Gold tell us everything in the space of a single paragraph.

And that's another problem. I'm not a big fan of third-person exposition, where the narrator provides the background information to the reader. You've read it: "Gold had heard it all before. She'd grown up on a farm and gotten to know a lot about crops and livestock. When she was sixteen, she left home to open her own grain shop in the city."

I even considered writing it both ways and then letting my writing friends decide. I don't know. I'll have to give it some more thought.

But that's the beauty of writing. You have the time to think things through. Okay, okay, that's the beauty, and the tragedy, of being an unpublished writer. No one's waiting on your manuscript.

Tags: Phillip Gold, Mystery

I'm currently working on two short stories and two novels featuring my hero, Phillip Gold. It's an interesting process. I created Mr. Gold about a decade ago while attending writing classes at a Canadian University. He's an homage to the great hard-boiled detectives of the past, like Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer, but with the legal twist. Early in his career, Gold is finding the law thing isn't going so well but that he seems to have a knack for investigations. He solves a couple of cases and things start to snowball to the point where people seek him out as a PI rather than as a lawyer (see Sharon Kyle in The Gold Figure). Gold resists the shift but ends up having to accept the inevitable.

My plan is that, at some point, Gold will investigate and then represent in court, finally taking the first steps towards establishing his skills as a lawyer too. We'll see how that goes.

I made a major push last year to find an agent to represent me and Mr. Gold but to no avail. Although I got little feedback, I realised that the two first novels (Fleck and Glisters) don't start with enough punch. I need a flashier opening (since that's the only part most agents you approach will see) and then a more consistent tone. I'm getting contradictory feedback, however: many readers really like the sarcastic, witty, metaphor-filled style while others would like to see it go away entirely. We'll see, I guess.

In the meantime, I've decided to try to write a couple Gold short stories to see if I could get them published in a mystery magazine of some kind. It's always easier to sell your work once you've sold your work. Writing short stories is very different, however, from writing novels. The plots have to be more simple, the characters less fully developed and you have to keep the pace going throughout — no time for a reflective pause. Well, at least not much time. So it's a battle.

But I'm getting very helpful feedback from my old writing buddies, Ross and John, and my partner is amazingly good at spotting "inconsistencies" of both a minor and a major nature (like when a character sits down on a couch and gets up from a chair or when a character is shot in the side of the head and fall forward). I'll keep working. The first story is complete but in the revision stage while the second one is still being written.

Revision is something I really need to focus on. I tend toward verbosity and I often don't have the patience to set something aside, wait for a month or so, then go back and revise and edit it. That's what you have to do to end up with really polished writing. It's something I have to learn to do.

So now I've spent the last ten minutes reviewing and revising this blog. Can't start practicing too soon!

Tags: Phillip Gold, Writing, Mystery