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Julie Howard

Stories of domestic suspense

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You are here: Home / Featured / Indulge yourself, but not in your writing

Indulge yourself, but not in your writing

By Julie Howard

Ever been to Costco? Have you gone when you’re hungry and feeling just the slightest bit needy? Big mistake.

That’s when the kilo-sized bag of potato chips land in your cart, right next to a couple new tops, a blender, the double six-pack of muffins and above the 90-piece food storage containers with snap-on lids. If your husband’s along for the ride – and he is, because he loves Costco and the free samples – that only means there are four hands stacking items in the cart instead of two. Exit Costco; subtraction bank account.

Now, getting a little bit out of control at a warehouse store might not break the bank. But indulging yourself too much as a writer can ruin a book. Writers can be overly clever, overly descriptive and overly cute. Readers may not think you’re cute; they may just get annoyed.

One writer of a very popular mystery series had me totally hooked. I loved his dashing main character and sharp wit. This helped me overlook the thin plots and tired story lines. But about a dozen books in, he committed a fatal error. The plots all but vanished and the cloying cleverness overtook the story. I haven’t read another one of his books.

I made this mistake in an early draft of book two of my Wild Crime series and my beta readers let me have it. Thank goodness they are honest, and I fixed the problems before sending the manuscript to my publisher. In the editing process, I revised even more.

I read recently that you need to be careful how many quirky characters you put in your novel; the advice was no more than one or two. My fictional town of Hay City, Idaho is a quirky place filled with people with murky motivations. This is part of what makes cozy mysteries fun to read. My main character’s best friend, Honey, understands a little too well the wish to kill a husband. (And perhaps, in her case, even other people’s husbands too.) But there’s a fine line between a book that’s fun to read and one that’s downright silly.

Beta readers and critique groups are two opportunities to weed out the silliness or other indulgences. Writing a police procedural? Be careful not to wear your reader out with way too many details on a cop’s job. Writing a romance? Watch out for too many “flowing locks” and “heaving breasts.” Limit the adverbs and run-on descriptive adjectives. Indulge yourself on the first draft, if you must. But then edit, edit, edit.

Splurge on that crazy-big sundae, take a Mediterranean cruise, wear something with too many sequins – but when it comes to your novel, behave like a cheapskate.

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Julie Howard is the author of the Wild Crime books, a series of domestic suspense novels. A former journalist, she also writes short stories and leads a writing group in Idaho. Read More…

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