The heroine of one of my Works-in-Progress has been stuck in a hayloft, in the middle of the night, for years. The reasons she is stuck there are legion, as I have slowly realized over those same years.

A fiction book written today has to have a story arc. I’m betting that books always did, but not enough to skip my careful qualifiers. Depending upon the kind of fiction, the arc can follow a person’s growth, or an action. Action could be exploration or war or … something I haven’t thought of.

The arc of my particular story includes growth in my heroine. So here’s the deal. My heroine needed to change, but the kind of change she needed wasn’t obvious to me, even though the story I set up is providing that opportunity. So until my conscious mind caught up with my subconscious arrangements, I couldn’t move forward. She’s supposed to figure out what is going on while she’s in the hayloft. And I don’t mean figuring out who stole the sheep.

Anyway, while she’s been stuck, I’ve been doing other writing and reading. (See Dante.) There are two pieces of advice that I have seen consistently across all forms of advice for aspiring writers. One is to write and write and write. The other is to read and read and read. I discovered several years ago that finding books I liked at the local library was a struggle. I made long lists of books I thought would be interesting to read or that people recommended, and then couldn’t find more than one or two. The information desk was unhelpful about interlibrary loan so I moved on and tried Project Gutenberg (Australia, originally). At least I figured there would be quantity. 

I have read a boatload of books there over the last few years, of varying kinds. Australia has slightly different copyright laws so some of the books there are as late as 1955, while Project Gutenberg itself currently has books whose copyright ran out in 1923. Also, the Australian site has a ton of books about Australian exploration, a really lovely book of letters from an Englishwoman who moved there in the 1860’s (The Letters of Rachel Henning), Australian cemeteries, and Australian wheat farming.** And yes, that book was amazing. They don’t have Mary Evershed Orr’s book about the southern constellations, which is odd, but possibly it isn’t out of copyright in England.

Recently, I tried to make a list of some of what I’ve read over the past few years, along with brief notes to myself, to see if there were obvious lessons. Hmm. Well, I read some really awful romances, and they were not even close to as awful as you can find. Trust me on this. (Look inside on Amazon is your friend. It only takes a word or two to know I need to leave!) Romance, as a category, is all about emotion. ALL about emotion, with a ton of what I would call emo porn. Avoid it. And I wouldn’t call anything I want to write “romance” because as genre I wouldn’t qualify. I hope.

I read a lot of mysteries. I didn’t read the older ones that Dorothy Sayers references in Gaudy Night, though they are all on Project Gutenberg Australia. I did try S. S. Van Dyne. Not for me. I tried someone else from the 1950’s. His stories creaked. They turned on clever ways to disguise the murder weapon (poisoned lipstick?), along with a few Sexton Blake moments of the detective being lured into a burning building and nearly drowning. Whatevs… Here’s one anyone can try, from 1913, that is a little different. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2568/pg2568-images.html

I tried a few cowboy books. Here’s an important lesson for writers. If you call your book The Texas Matchmaker, you had better make a match. It’s really irritating if the only couple you actually manage to set up, get a divorce and run away with other people. I kept reading and reading, thinking that sooner or later the title would apply. Hah! The same applies to calling your book Charming Billy (though I got that one out of the library). If there aren’t any cherries I will be very annoyed and wonder what you were thinking, and then decide that I don’t care. You are just off my list of authors to read. So titles matter.

Then I read several more cowboy books, some of which I can’t find again. One author, Bertha Bower (aka Bertha Muzzy), supposedly wrote 60 or 70 westerns, and PGAu has about 30 of them. Oddly, in the first one about a ranch called the Flying U, there is a romance that plays all the way out to a wedding. But in the following seven or eight sequels, none of the rest of the cowboys get married. They have affairs of the heart but cannot, somehow, commit or the girl can’t, or something happens. The stories Bower tells about the ranch would have had to change if the cowboys had, er, grown up. So that looks like a sequel trap the author fell into.

I also read some Marjorie Bowen. I had never heard of her but she wrote about 150 books of many different kinds, and is known particularly for her horror stories. Those are NOT what I read. She wrote historical fiction about George Washington, well-enough constructed that I had to go check on one of the main characters. Entirely made up. She also wrote a depressing account of part of her early life and, yeah, I see why she would write horror, even if I don’t want to read it. Lesson here, anything I can think of probably happened to someone once, and lots of other things I won’t think of…

I read forty or fifty books by mid-list British women writers of the twentieth century. (Easily discovered because something called Dean Street Press was republishing some of them.) Dorothy Emily Stevenson and Molly Clavering were the best of those, and some of the most useful, in terms of thinking about the art of writing. Stevenson wrote enough so that some of her books are much better than others, and you can see why. In some the story arc works better. Listening Valley is an example of a story with a surprising arc but it is actually very tightly plotted.

Noel Streatfeild is another of these British writers who is useful for thinking about the art. She wrote a whole series of very frivolous books under the pseudonym, Susan Scarlett. But she is actually such a good writer elsewhere that her skill at character building shows through these otherwise superficial books. The Man in the Dark includes a very funny 17 year old girl, Shirley, who was brought up in the USA and is — different. I’ve actually read that book over and over, just because I love reading about Shirley.

Let’s not get started on E. Phillips Oppenheim… One of the fascinating things about either Project is that you can see that some people were REALLY prolific. They used a lot of pseudonyms and wrote a lot. Edgar Rice Burroughs is one as is Oppenheim. So was Arthur Conan Doyle. And yes, I’m much more familiar with the front end of the alphabet on PGAu.

I might have reached the point where reading is now a distraction from the work of getting Jessamyn out of the hayloft. I think I know how to do it… We’ll see.

** Here is the URL for the book about wheat. F. G. Guthrie wrote about William J. Farrer and his work in adapting wheat to the Australian climate. Previous to Farrer there really wasn’t a wheat industry in Australia, and post Farrer it was a breadbasket. https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1302161h.html