What's in a clue?

First, we must concede that I’m probably not as good a writer as I think I am.

Yet.

Second, everybody had to learn how to write once. Recently, an author wrote she had completely rewritten her story 13 times over 9 years before it was published. Ugh.

Did the writer’s skill improve during that time? Yes.

Did the writer feel the story was better at the end? Yes.

Was this the only way for the writer’s skill to improve? No. There are less painful ways to go through the job of tightening up a story. To say nothing of accelerating the learning curve.

Because of my computer woes, I now have tools which the average writer doesn’t. Yet. The tools I have increase my ability to track elements in my current story far beyond what’s available elsewhere, either in plain vanilla word processing software or the current marketplace in software for writers. You may be convinced there's no need for writers' software, or you may already feel it's a great idea and are panting for some intelligent venture capitalist to figure it out too! See what you think:

Here’s the objective: turn your story on its head and inspect it from a new perspective. In completing this task, I discovered an interesting way to streamline and tighten the story. Sounds simple, eh?

Well, it is. This part of the software design (see About Us) is a data table called CluesEtcⁱ, and turns out to be much more useful than I could have imagined. It’s a good tool to add to your quiver.

The tool: Go through your manuscript and extract single sentence statements of fact (CluesEtc) from your manuscript. For example, in the beginning of the story Joe is a big, bad, evil blacksmith and at the end Joe is a kindly, slightly gruff blacksmith. The statement which belongs in CluesEtc might be "Joe the blacksmith is a very large, intimidating man" which says nothing to a casual observer, but a great deal to the author who knows that this statement is fundamental to the plot.

What value am I getting out of this exercise? Here’s what I found:

• clues with inadequate buildup / reinforcement
• clues the detective never discovered
• inconsistent clues
• superfluous clues
• clues that were never resolved (don’t you hate that!)
• major characters who were too colourless
• minor characters who were too colourful
• inconsistent and/or superfluous character traits

How lucky I am to have saved myself years of grief because I am now able to revise this data before the story is done. And it didn't take too many years to learn about the issue, either. ;)

The first part of this exercise is to go through your manuscript and identify all the CluesEtc statements, and make some choices about each CluesEtc statement. See Tracking down CluesEtc for a more detailed discussion.

The second part of this exercise is the drudgery part, and the reason why professional computer software ought to be available for fiction writers. Connect the CluesEtc Statement to every part of your story where it appears. Keep revising the CluesEtc Statement until a single sentence works throughout the entire story. See Tracking down CluesEtc for a more details.

This is the first time that I’ve thought to examine my CluesEtc, and what an interesting exercise it turned out to be. My manuscript is about 80K words and it took about 20 hours to go through the story and document the important facts which occur. Some of that time was used rewriting the sentence so the single fact was true beginning to end. An author knows that this paragraph and this and this are all about the same thing, but it’s often tough to reduce the clue to one single sentence. But it’s mandatory, because of what one learns in the process. Samples of the kind of CluesEtc statements I ended up with are shown on the detailed description page of tracking CluesEtcs.

Not only was it difficult to reduce the entire plot line development to single statements, but a new software concept is always difficult to implement because the user (me, in this case) doesn’t know how the tool is supposed to be used. It doesn’t matter that I’m also one of the software designers, putting a new technique into use is always tough on the brain. So don’t be surprised if it takes you a few tries to make this work, if you’ve never done it before. If you have set up a system or procedure to manage clues etc, then I’d really like to hear from you.

I challenge you to go through this exercise and identify your CluesEtc. If this exercise doesn't give you solid grounds to improve your story, I'll owe you something fanciful which I'll deliver to you at the next crime fiction convention we both inhabit. :)

Now, here’s the curious part: I certainly didn’t invent this notion—plenty of people before me have found a way to pick the clues out of the story and examine them, and they didn’t have computer software to help them. So, what have other people done? Ideas? How do you examine your manuscript for clues, etc.?

Let me know by comments here, use the Contact form, or send an email to Theresa AT bstw DOT com (caps not important). Please note that "AT" = "@" and "DOT" = "." (both without quotes). Sorry about these obscurities, they're intended to cut down on spam created by automated bots which reap email addresses from websites.

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