Kate Flora: Sometimes I hit January 2^nd raring to go, with a brain full of a story that demands to be written. One year, it was two stories, and I had to make one wait while I wrote the other. This year? Nada. The urge to write a new story hasn’t arrive yet. So what does a write do when she void in the inspiration suit? Pull old stories out of the drawer and fiddle with them.

Actually, when I wasn’t busy in December with all those holiday things we do, I was trying to cut five thousand words out of a manuscript so an editor would agree to read it. The book was too long, but there weren’t chapters or even scenes that we easy to cut, so instead I found myself going word by word, cutting single words or occasional sentences to reach a word count under 100,000. It was brutal, and very slow going, and spilled over into January, so I didn’t have to face the idea void until the second week.

But now I am facing it, and honestly, rereading and editing old books is kind of fun. The first week I spent rereading a book called Memorial Acts. In truth, the working title for the book which is about how the mother and daughter in a military family let the loss of two husbands and fathers shape their lives, was called Blow Jobs for America. Not a title that’s easy to send to an agent, though these days it just might sell. The book isn’t a murder, although someone is murdered in the book. It would probably be called women’s fiction, or women’s fiction with elements of romance. It was fun to go back and reread it and decide whether I still liked the story. I do. It was only after I’d finished reading and doing a little light editing that I woke up one morning thinking: But in the first chapter, Amy is too unpleasant. I need to have her “save the cat.”

Maybe some people are unfamiliar with the term, “save the cat.” It comes from a book on screenwriting by Blake Snyder, subtitled: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.

The “Save the Cat” scene is the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something—like saving a cat—that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him. So in the book, Amy, who is tired and grungy after a long plane trip and a difficult business meeting, gets in a grubby cab and when the driver does something careless, she yells at him. And then, not liking herself for her attitude and behavior, apologies, the drive apologizes, and she learns that he’s distracted because he has to drive the cab to make money while his wife is in the hospital having their baby. Grumpy changes to compassionate, a connection is made, and Amy is revealed in a better light.

Amy actually saves a lot of cats in the course of the book.

Rereading the book also reminded me of this: I wanted the book to open with Amy discovering that she’s gotten the wrong the suitcase at the airport and the one she’s brought home holds some very odd items. Curious about what to put in that suitcase, I asked my FB friends for suggestions. What I ended up putting in that suitcase, instead of the cute flannel pjs with cats she expected to find, were a bloody clown suit large enough to fit a tall man, an old photograph, and a bundle of antique silver wrapped in a silk nightgown. That set the stage for the man who shows up with her suitcase, and what his story is.

Revisiting an old manuscript is rather like meeting friends I haven’t seen in a while. I’m reminded, as I read about Amy, and her mother, Angel, and Luke, the man with the peculiar items in his suitcase, what it was like to spend time with them. It was definitely a book where my characters took charge and told me how the story was going to go. That doesn’t always happen and when it does, it’s both scary and fascinating.

Books can begin in so many different ways. With a character. With an event. With a scene that makes me wonder why these people are in this situation. Sometimes with a character who raises the question: who is she and what’s her story? The whys are always a significant driver of story. Memorial Acts didn’t begin with Amy in her taxi. It began with a prologue about a cop holding a dying man in his arms on a rainy night in a filthy alley. That scene is still in the book but not until much later. But it was that scene—the feeling of the night, the power holding a dying man had over the cop who found him—and my immense curiosity about what the story was, that led to a novel.

I’ve moved on from Memorial Acts to a book that still needs a title, about a political campaign and a girl who discovers that one of the candidates for president is her father. One campaign wants her to disappear; the other to use her, so she’s on the run from both of them. This book started because I was thinking about the strengths that Title XI, and women being able to be tough and competitive, give to today’s female athletes. Then the rest of the story, in which she reads her mother’s diary and learns about her mother’s affair, and her mother’s life when her mother was her age, followed. Unfortunately, the book 116K and needs a serious pruning. We shall see how that goes.

Who knows. Maybe rereading these old books will spark something and a brand new book will emerge.

And yes, I need to reread Save the Cat and learn how to write a log line.