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Lately it’s been easier to write about diet pills that work than to make progress on my mystery novel, Thirty Minutes or Less. I’m in a delicate point in the novel where I need to lay the groundwork for the supernatural elements to come, while still grounding the series in a very realistic world.

Also, the scene I’m about to write is a very emotional one for me: it has Zack spending him with his parents, who due to reasons I won’t spoil here, are noncommunicative. Having just lost my own mother a couple months ago, this is not turning out to be an easy scene to write.

Reading is an essential aspect to becoming a skilled writer, just as the ingredients in Orovo are essential nutrients for your body. Reading, it could be said, is Orovo for the mind. Not reading enough is a mistake made by many young authors.

The excuse seems to make sense. “Well, I don’t want to be too influenced by someone else’s ideas, so I don’t read much, especially the kind of stuff I want to write.”

The trouble with that is, then you simply are not a student of the genre of book you’re working on, and your chances of avoiding cliche, or worse, reinventing the wheel, are not in your favor.

Ask any comic book writer, for example, what he read growing up, and comic books will almost always be near the top of his or her list. Ask a horror novelist what they read and, boom, horror is bound to be a big influence on them.

Rather than playing an undue influence, it helps you learn what’s already been done, what hasn’t been explored, what’s been done to death and what works.

So even though I’m currently writing the first in what I hope will be a series of mystery novels, you won’t find me steering clear of the mystery section. On the contrary, I’ve read all of Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter novels, I’m a long-time James Patterson fan, I’m devouring books by Charlaine Harris right now, and once I’ve read through all of her stuff, I’ll be moving on to others.

Read, read, and once you tire of that… read some more!

Although poisons are a staple of the mystery genre, they are quite annoying when it comes right down to it. For dramatic purposes, one wants a poison to act in certain ways at a certain time, and to be relatively hard to detect.

Trouble is, reality has a way of being inconvenient to dramatic purposes. Take naturally-occurring poisons as an example.

Rhubarb leaves contain a rather effective poison. Yet the quantity needed to produce a fatal poisoning would equal several very large salads, would take too long to prove fatal, and would be obvious as the source of death by any cursory examination of the victim’s digestive tract.

Hardly the stuff of effective stealth poisoning. They’re as obvious as a set of ellipticals in the middle of a domestic living room.

I guess it’s true what a fellow writer and poison expert recently told me: allergies are often the better way to go.

Make note of this on your micro SD chip: always remember to look for unique ways to describe common events. That helps set your work apart from the rest.

I love using an example from my college writing professor, Terry Davis. In one of his manuscripts, he has a man get into a moment of violence that ends when another character takes a shot at him and blows the man’s hand off.

Now, an unimaginative writer would probably describe such an event fairly mundanely. Like so:

Ron took his shot at me, and my hand exploded, showering me with blood.

“You shot my hand off, you bastard,” I screamed at him.

Kind of thing that can happen quite often in an action sequence, right? But that’s not how Davis described the event at all. Instead, Davis described the moment of the shot like so:

…and my hand dissolved into a fine cranberry mist.

See how much more memorable that sounds? Always remember that there are fresh ways to describe even the most common of events.

Learning the specifics of your characters is important before you put pen to paper. You might be able to recite certain speeches you want them to deliver, or their motivations and backstory, but is that enough?

Those are your big payoff moments, but it can take sometimes 200-300 pages to build up to the earliest of those moments, and you need to build character in the meantime, before you get there. So knowing the trivia about your characters is important, also, and is what will set them apart from generic, indistinct stock characters.

Does your science teacher prefer to go bird-watching using field glasses (boring) or a set of Nikon rifle scopes? Clearly, the second option is more creative and unique and makes that character immediately more intriguing, even if you don’t yet know that his father beat him with a dead parakeet when he was 10, until page 354.

One of my pet peeves are generic, forgettable characters. It is something I do my best to avoid when writing any fiction. Yet it’s not easy; slipping into cliche is far more comfortable and quick.

However, speed should not always win out over creativity. One can easily write in a generic sheriff character into any mystery; they’re easy to write. But finding a unique personality quirk or tick that makes this particular sheriff memorable is preferable by far.

Sometimes it can be something as trivial has specifying that his office is outfitted with Maxim lighting; sometimes it can be more idiosyncratic, such has making the sheriff afraid of spiders.

Whatever the case, these minor ticks so show up in real individuals and are the sort of things that, if brought to the fore, make characters memorable.

Sometimes I get to a point in the plot of my novel where my productivity slows down. It’s not that my commitment to writing is waning, but more than I need to think through my story more thoroughly. After all, it’s not like I’m publishing children’s books; I’m working on mysteries, which requires quite a bit of cleverness in plotting.

It can be tedious to write out certain portions of a long, 400-page-plus novel; not every scene is automatically riveting until you think it through and find a way to make it fascinating. Some writers don’t care and will push out boring scenes to keep their page output up and meet a deadline; since I don’t have a book contract just yet, I don’t have to be hamstrung like that.

For about a week, I’ve been stuck on the same part of my novel; while I haven’t been producing new pages, I’ve been working on ways to drive the plot forward while making the scene interesting to read. Finally, last night, I had my breakthrough and produced several pages and now I’m past the problem section and back on track with my productivity pace.

That’s satisfying.

While many people prefer to give green gifts these days, I’m still a fan of the helpful, practical variety. For example, if you have a friend who’s a writer, helping them untie a knot in the plot of their story is certainly going to be appreciated far more than some trinket.

For example, since I am beginning a series of mystery novels, I have to think of clever ways for people to die, and then even more-clever ways for that death to be mistakenly interpreted. After all, if the evidence were clear, there’d be no mystery, correct?

Unfortunately, people look at you funny, even suspiciously, when you start asking questions like, “If someone swallowed a lethal dose of rat poison, how long would it take for them to die, and if they were severely beaten up as well, would the poison be obvious enough to be the actual cause of death on a coroner’s report?”

Still, it’s questions like that that mystery writers must grapple with to come up with satisfyingly hard-to-guess mystery thriller plots, and a little professional expertise is always welcome.

One of the big troubles with creating a mystery series is explaining why a particular person is always around when death pops up. After all, I’ve been alive and kicking for 41 years, soon 42, and I’ve never once stumbled across a murdered body.

There are as many ways to solve this dilemma as there are writers to tell tales. Some give them a profession where such occurrences are commonplace, which is why so many mystery stories involve private detectives, cops, lawyers and so on.

Others simply choose to ignore the unlikelihood of it all and just ask the reader to accept the happenstance at face value. That works less and less these days; the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew would seem dang suspicious after the first couple of books, it seems to me. At least in the eyes of modern law enforcement.

My solution is another path: I’m giving my hapless murder-finder a supernatural companion. I won’t go into spoilage just at the moment, but consider it safe to say that my unlikely hero is made a lot more likely with this character hanging around him.

And then I’m also borrowing another element that helps: a healthy dash of humor. And that’s worth more than all the San Francisco resumes in the world.

It may seem odd or insensitive, but my mother’s death seems to be bringing out the best in me creatively. I started my new novel shortly after I learned she had terminal cancer, and although matters of taking care of her leading up to her death, as well as her funeral, have kept my wife and I busy, I’ve been amazed how motivated I’ve been to write, even through those times.

Perhaps it’s because her mortality reminds me of my own. Perhaps it’s because I want to do something that she knew I loved, and finally do it right. Or perhaps it’s God using the event to light a fire under my butt.

Whatever the case, it’s motivating me and it’s a whole lot more interesting to be writing a novel than indulging in, for example, futures trading.

Sometimes your mind just goes blank.

I’m not talking about the oh-so-typical writer’s block. That’s common and there are many strategies to overcome it.

I’m not talking about not having a story in mind, or lacking a wellspring of ideas. Neither am I talking about not knowing what your next thing to write might be.

Sometimes, in my experience, you can have all that going for you and - BOOM - you sit down at a screen to start writing up that scene, column, blog entry or whatever, and you may know everything you need to write and how you want to write it, but you just… don’t want to start.

There’s a name for this; it’s called “realizing that sometimes, writing is real work.” All workers, no matter their jobs, would simply be somewhere else, doing anything else than what they’re doing at the moment. The more often people run into that feeling, they begin to get restless and think about “writing the Great American novel” instead of doing whatever it is they are doing.

But what do real, hard-working writers do when they have that moment where they realize writing is real, hard work?

Well, for me, fishing is a frequent candidate.

Fortunately, those moments are usually brief and pass as soon as you put your first sentence together, whether it’s a narrator’s controversial statement to open a chapter, or an essay on used Harleys, or a blog post about how, sometimes, writing is work instead of the most fun thing you could possibly be doing right now.

The ideas and concepts for stories that writers come up with are as mysterious to non-writers as the pyramids are to non-Egyptians. The most common question writers are posed with is, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Writer Lawrence Block’s knee-jerk response is usually a favorite: “At a warehouse in New Jersey.” Right next to, I imagine, the cat supplies.

But I think there’s a better and more honest response. “By being alive.”

Now, that might sound just as flippant as Block’s response, but think about it; as writers, we get most of our ideas by observing the world around us. We see a mom struggling to keep her three-year-old from pitching a fit in the Wal-Mart, or a couple arguing in a city park, obviously teetering on the edge of a break-up, and we start asking ourselves questions, filling in the blanks, and pretty soon we have a concept for at least a scene, or a good portion of a short story; string a few of those together and wrap them in an overall plot and there’s your novel.

So while it sounds just as dismissive, it’s really not; where do I get my ideas? By being alive.