A Writer's Dilemma and the Muse

I suppose all writers go through periods when they can't think of anything to write. I know from experience that it happens without any warning at all. It happens when I sit down to start a new novel and think, "What can I write about that will sell".

Don't get me wrong here. All writers, well, good writers, the writers that get published and paid, are artists who paint pictures with words, but along with weaving words into sentences and paragraphs that generate pictures in the reader's mind, all writers are concerned with writing something that will be published and sell. It's how we make our livings.

Well, that day that I sat down at my computer and asked myself that question, nothing came to mind. When I mean nothing, I mean exactly that -- nothing, not even an inkling of an idea.

I wasn't too worried because it had happened before. It happened right after I wrote my first novel that was actually accepted by a publisher and made it all the way to the shelves of mainstream bookstores. I sat down to hopefully repeat my success but couldn't think of a thing to write.

That time I'd chalked it up to the fact that I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in the city and it was never really quiet. My upstairs neighbor liked heavy metal music and played it from morning until midnight. About all I could hear was the bass track, but that constant "dum, dum, dum" made it really hard to concentrate.

I solved that with some noise canceling headphones plugged into my stereo system. I could write and listen to Brahms and Mozart and not hear anything else.

After that first novel, a murder mystery about a woman who kills her husband by poisoning him with ant poison after he starts physically abusing her, I sat down to write the next and drew a blank as far as a plot. I couldn't think of anything, so I watched a little television hoping to come up with an idea. Thankfully, my upstairs neighbor was gone so there was no bass track interfering with my television watching. Instead, I was listening to the police, fire, and ambulance sirens outside. That's when I decided I had to move somewhere quiet.

I had enough money from the first novel to do that, so I started looking at places in the country. After a month, I found what I was looking for. It was a three bedroom, two-story farmhouse on two acres. The house wasn't in great shape, but the price was right and I figured I could fix the house.

Well, I did fix the house and in the process got an idea for a novel about a landscaping contractor who specialized in tree removal. He'd come and take down your tree or clean up any fallen branches and take them to his place of business and feed them through his big wood chipper. He let the pile of wood chips compost for a while and then sold the composted wood chips to other landscape contractors.

He also performed another service to certain people in the city who had dead bodies that needed disposing of in a manner that would eliminate the possibility of said body turning up at a later date. The wood chipper ground those bodies into mulch that he mixed with the wood chips. He probably would have never been caught had one of those other landscapers not found what looked like a human molar in his load of wood chip mulch.

That novel sold pretty well so I congratulated myself on finding the answer by buying the house. That's when the owner of the adjacent twenty acres decided he could make more money by selling it instead of by farming it. He sold the twenty acres to a developer who started building houses on three-quarter acre lots, the closest of which was only about a hundred feet from my house.

The couple who bought that house were young but seemed to be friendly. It wasn't until the Fourth of July that I decided they weren't very good neighbors. That night, they had a party with about twenty people in their back yard. It wasn't too bad while it was still daylight. There was a low buzz of conversation that I really couldn't hear except for this one woman's shrieking laugh, but it was tolerable. At about nine though, they started their own private fireworks show and the damned booms and bangs kept on until almost midnight.

Well, at least that gave me the start of a new novel that started with the house being bought by a weird looking couple. Right after that, there were several murders in the nearby city, murders that were unique in that the victims were all missing all their fingers. The police were having trouble solving those crimes because while they had DNA from all of them only one victim's DNA was in the NDIS database. She'd been arrested for prostitution, so the police figured the other victims were as well and that they had a serial killer operating in the city.

That's where everything stopped because they had no leads to follow. It wasn't until the neighbor remembered the couple next door doing something in their garden at about one in the morning the day after the last murder that the case broke.

He called the police who ran the couple through NCIC and discovered they both had records. The man had been accused of murder but hadn't been convicted because they couldn't find a body. The wife had a record too. She'd been tried and convicted of assault on another woman who happened to be a prostitute. The assault was she'd tried to cut off the prostitute's little finger with a pair of pruning shears. According to her confession, her father had been a client of that same prostitute and that caused her mother to divorce him. She'd sworn to make the prostitute pay in some way and thought if she cut off the prostitute's pinky finger she wouldn't get any more customers.

That ultimately led to the police digging up the garden. When they did, they found a bunch of fingers buried in between the tomato plants and green beans. Only one set of fingers had any fingerprints left, but they were able to match the DNA of each set of fingers to the murder victims. At the end of the novel, the couple is convicted of serial murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

That book sold reasonably well too, so I started to write my fourth novel, another murder mystery. That's when I realized I had no ideas.

I sat at my computer for an hour every day for a month with the same results -- no ideas, no plot, no nothing except frustration. It was at the end of that month I saw the realtor's sign in the front yard of the house next door. Two weeks after that, a moving van pulled up at the house and two guys carried boxes for half a day from the house to the van. A week later, another moving van parked in the drive and two guys carried boxes from the van to the house while a woman of maybe late forties, early fifties watched.

I figured the woman was my new neighbor so I kept watching for an opportunity to meet her and her husband. That opportunity came one Saturday when I was mowing my grass. I was almost done when the woman came out, went to the little storage building at the back of the lot and pulled out a push mower.

She got it started and started mowing the back yard, but she wasn't making much headway because she had a lot to mow. I waited until she was close to the lot line and then rode my mower over to where she was.

She smiled and waved at me when I stopped, and then let go of the handle on her mower so the engine would stop. I shut off my mower then too, and got off and walked over to introduce myself.

"Hi there, Ma'am. I'm Todd Kelly and it looks like you're my new neighbor. Welcome to the country."

When I held out my hand, she smiled and shook it.

"Yes, I wanted to get out of the city and as soon as I had the chance I did. I think I'm going to like it out here. It seems quiet so far. I can hardly wait to start a flower garden. I'm Marion, by the way, Marion James."

I nodded.

"Same reason I moved out here. I need quiet so I can work."

"Oh", she said. "What type of work do you do?"

I always liked it when people asked me that. I grinned.

"I'm a writer. I have three novels published so far. What does your husband do for a living?"

She chuckled.

"Well, I'm not sure. He used to be a high school principal, but after the divorce he got fired."

"You're divorced?"

She grinned.

"Yeah, finally. Took a while, but it turned out pretty good for me, not so good for Bob. I got the house, the newest car, half the savings and checking accounts and half of his 401K and his teacher's retirement. He had to pay all the legal expenses too, so that wiped out most of his half of the 401K. That's how I could move out here. I sold the house in the city and had enough to buy this place free and clear."

I was a little confused.

"He got fired just because you divorced him? That seems like an odd reason to get fired."

Marion laughed then.

"He didn't get fired because I divorced him. He got fired because of the reason I divorced him. He was screwing one of the senior girls at his high school and got her pregnant. Man, was her father ever pissed. The girl was eighteen so he couldn't have Bob charged with statutory rape, so he sued Bob, the school, and the entire school board. The school board ended up firing Bob and settling out of court for what I heard was a quarter million.

"Bob didn't have any money left after the divorce so the father dropped the suit against him, but he did get a judgment that Bob will have pay child support until the kid is eighteen.

"The daughter says she loves Bob and she's keeping the baby so he'll marry her, but I don't think it's going to work that way. As soon as Bob got the divorce papers, he left town and didn't tell anybody where he was going. I feel sorry for the girl, well, a little. Bob's forty-nine. You'd think by the time she's eighteen a girl would have more sense than to let some guy old enough to be her father screw her, but Bob has this way of convincing women that he's pretty special. I should know. That's why I married him.

"How about you? You have a wife I can have coffee with in the afternoons?"

I shook my head.

"No, no wife. I used to think about having a wife, but once I start writing, I can't seem to stop. I lost two girlfriends that way. We'd agree to go somewhere, and I'd figure out where my plot had to go and lose all track of time. After the second girl called me at one in the morning to ask what happened to me, well, it wasn't worth all the fighting about why was my writing more important to me than her. Since then, I haven't really been looking."

Marion smiled again.

"Well, I probably need to get my butt working on this yard again. I didn't realize how big three-quarters of an acre really is. I think this weekend I'll go buy a riding mower like you have."

I liked Marion. She didn't seem shy at all, and I was pretty sure she wasn't going to be doing anything that would distract me from writing. I also found her to be a pretty woman with that mature beauty women develop once they turn forty or so. There were a few silver strands in her dark brown hair and her mature figure looked good even in the oversize T-shirt and jeans she was wearing. For all those reasons, I said if she didn't mind I'd do her back yard.

"Marion, you'll never finish your back yard before dark with that push mower. I'm about done with mine. Why don't I just keep mowing and finish yours too? You can do your front yard while I do the back."

She said that would be great, but she didn't know what she could do to repay me. I just smiled and said she didn't need to do anything and that I was just being a good neighbor. She thanked me and then started pushing her mower to her front yard.

It only took half an hour to finish her back yard after the fifteen minutes it took me to finish mine. That's about how long it took Marion to finish her front yard. She was pushing her mower back around her house when I shut off my blades.

She looked at her back yard, smiled, and then said, "I'm definitely getting a rider this weekend. What kind would you suggest?"

Well, to tell the truth, I had no idea which rider was the best. I'd bought mine because it was on sale and it looked big enough I wouldn't spend all day mowing. I tried to sound like I knew what I was talking about though.

"Well, it depends on you, I suppose, how much you can afford and how easy it is to drive. I like my Husqvarna, but it's not the only one out there. If I were you, I'd stop by Home Depot, Lowe's, and Wal-Mart. Sit on one and see if you can reach the controls easily. That's probably the main thing. Most of the mowers out there will probably do a good job."

Marion shook her head.

"I'm not mechanical at all so I wouldn't know the difference. Bob always did all that kind of thing."

She smiled then.

"Hey, I know we just met, but would you come with me on Saturday and help me decide? I'll buy lunch. It's the least I can do after you mowed my yard for me."

I couldn't very well tell her I didn't want to, so that Saturday at eleven, I got in Marion's passenger seat and she drove us into town. Lunch was actually pretty good. We ate at Golden Corral. I ate way too much, but when I told Marion that, she just chuckled.

"Don't worry about it. You don't look like you're the type to get fat. Now, let's go find me a lawn mower."

We hit all three places. At each one, I explained to Marion how the controls worked, though they were actually all about the same. She tried pushing in the clutch and the pedal for forward and reverse and didn't seem to have any trouble with any of them. I showed her where to fill them up with gas and she said she thought she could manage that.

When we finished up at Wal-Mart, Marion looked at me and said, "I think I like the same one you have. It's orange and I think it's prettier than the others."

As we drove back to Lowe's to buy the Husqvarna, I was thinking that I'd just wasted half a day because Marion had made her decision based on the color of the mower and not anything I'd helped her with. It had been fun though, and I hadn't really wasted anything because I still didn't have any ideas for my next novel.

Marion paid for the mower with her credit card and asked when it would be delivered. The mower guy said she'd have it by Friday and when they delivered it, they set it up for her.

As we were driving home, Marion asked me about the novels I'd written.

"What do you write about?"

I said I'd written a murder mystery about a woman who poisoned her husband, one about a family of serial killers, and another one about a tree removal guy who chopped up people in his wood chipper.

She grinned then.

"I read romance novels, but what's the title of the one about the woman who killed her husband? I'd like to read it and maybe pick up some pointers about what to do if I marry another jerk again."

I said she didn't need to buy one because the publisher always gives the author several copies to give to friends.

"I'll give you one when we get home. It's only fair to warn you that the woman gets caught and goes to prison."

Marion sighed.

"Yeah, I know I'd get caught, but prison couldn't be any worse than knowing your husband is sleeping with a girl young enough to be his daughter. You have no idea how that affects a woman. I mean, we all know we're going to get older and that we won't be as sexy as when we were twenty, but to have your husband do that is just a slap in the face."

Marion turned to look at me then.

"Sorry. That's probably a lot more than you wanted to hear, isn't it?"

Well, actually it wasn't, and that's what I said.

"No it isn't, because one of the hardest parts about being a writer is making your characters real. You have to give them the personality a real person would have and then make them act according to how that personality would likely cause them to act. It's like in my first novel. When you read it you'll see how the wife's personality caused her to do what she did."

When we got home, I gave Marion a copy of "Never Again". She said she'd read it and then tell me what she thought. I fell asleep that night hoping she'd like it.

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I saw Marion again on Monday afternoon. Where we live the mail is delivered to a mailbox out next to the county road. I walked out to get my mail at about four and saw her planting some flowers around her mailbox.

When she saw me, she waved, then put down her trowel and walked over.

"I'm about half way through your book and it's pretty good. I see what you mean about the wife's personality too. One thing though...you didn't put in enough sex. Do you ever read romance novels? They have lots of romance, guy meets girl and they fall in love and all that, but it's the hot, steamy sex scenes that draw women in. We like to imagine we're the girl that he's making love to. Any novel needs at least a couple hot sex scenes if women are going to want to read it."

I chuckled.

"No, I've never read a romance novel and I'm not sure how well I could write a sex scene. I have a somewhat limited experience in that sort of thing."

Marion smiled.

"Maybe you should do some research then. Well, I need to get the rest of my flowers in the ground and then go fix my dinner. You have a great night. Oh, and you think about putting a lot more sex into what you're working on now. I promise it'll sell better."

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My house has one bedroom on the first floor and three on the second. Two of those second story bedrooms are empty except for a little storage of things I don't need and probably should throw away or sell. The third is what I call my writer's den. It has a desk for my computer, a couch where I take an occasional nap, and a small library. It also has a window that faces Marion's back yard.

I spent all morning in my writer's den trying to come up with something to write about. About six false starts later, I went downstairs and fixed myself a sandwich for lunch. After I ate, I went back upstairs. When I still hadn't thought of anything worth writing, I stretched out on my couch to think.

I was thinking maybe Marion had been right. My three novels had sold well enough I didn't have to get a second job to survive, but none had even gotten close to being a best seller. My agent had even said kind of the same thing as Marion. He said he could sell my books, but not to expect any rave reviews by any critics. He didn't say why other than I was still an unknown. Maybe the way to get known was to put a little more sex into my writing.

When I made the decision I was going to become an author, I'd bought some best sellers in an attempt to see what made them sell so well. When I thought back about those novels, they did all have some sex in them, some more than others, but there was at least one scene in each where the main characters have sex. It wasn't necessarily with each other, but they still had sex with somebody.

I went back to my computer to try to start something again, and when I went past the window, I saw Marion talking with a man just outside her back door. A few minutes later, the guy left, and a couple minutes after that, a pickup with "Jordan's Pool Sales and Service" pulled around the house and into the back yard.

Marion's house didn't have a pool, so I assumed she'd bought one. It was then that the idea hit me that maybe I could write a murder mystery about a woman who buys a pool and has a guy set it up for her. He comes back once a week to make sure the water quality is up to snuff.

I'd write the guy as a man who is really a psychopath who hated his prostitute mother and transferred that hate to all women. I'd write the woman as a middle-aged, pretty brunette with big breasts and wide hips who liked wearing shorts and halter-tops. Secretly, she knew how she looked and liked turning men on while knowing she'd never do anything with any man other than her husband.

Seeing her flaunting herself like she was would make the pool guy remember his mother. On one of his visits to clean the pool, he'd force her into the house, force her to have sex, and then realize he'd have to kill her so she wouldn't go to the police. Once he had, he'd take her to his pool shop on the outskirts of town and bury her at the back of the property.