Every novel has its demons. These were mine.
1. Writing a city I've never set foot in.
Contempt is a Baltimore novel. Every block, every jurisdictional line, every courthouse corridor. And I've never been. Not once. Eighteen months of research did the work. Maps, blueprints, court records, old newspapers, Google Street View pulled down to pedestrian level, hours of The Wire watched with the geography in mind, hours of local journalism read like a second job. The fight wasn't getting the facts right. It was getting the feel right. The humidity off the harbor, the way a cop stands on Gay Street versus the way he stands in Fells Point, the sound of the light rail at 2am in the station by the courthouse. You can research a city. You have to listen to a city. That was harder.
2. Letting the protagonist be smaller than the book wanted him to be.
The early drafts made Shawn Davidson a hero. Sharper, faster, more righteous than the book could hold. Every rewrite shaved him down. Made him more unsure, more complicit, more willing to work inside a machine he couldn't fully see. The fight was resisting the thriller reflex. The urge to let the lawyer win the room. Civic noir doesn't let anyone win the room. The room is bigger than everyone in it.
3. Legal accuracy without legal exposition.
The law in Contempt had to be right. Maryland circuit court procedure, defense motion practice, judicial appointment processes, courthouse security protocols circa 2006. All of it had to survive a reader who works in the building. But the moment the novel starts explaining the law, it dies. Legal thrillers that stop to teach are legal thrillers that lose the reader. The fix was hiding the research inside behavior. A lawyer doesn't explain what a motion in limine is. He files one, and the judge's face tells you how it landed. That took hundreds of sentences to get right.
4. The multi-POV problem.
Three lead voices. Several supporting ones. Every chapter break a risk. The fight was making each POV earn its lane. Different cadence, different grammar, different rhythm. Without letting the book fragment. I rewrote entire chapters because the voice had drifted into a neighboring character's cadence. The book fails if the reader can't feel whose head they're in by the second paragraph. That's an invisible fight and a long one.
5. The fight against perfection.
This one never ends. A manuscript will never be done in the sense that nothing could improve. There's always one more pass, one more line that could land harder, one more scene that could be tighter. The fight is knowing when the book is finished enough. When more editing starts to sand off the texture instead of clarifying it. I'd rather publish a novel with the fingerprints visible than a novel polished into glass. Contempt is done because a reader needs to hold it. A book in a drawer isn't a book. That was the fight I had to win last.
Five fights. One book. June 21.
LeRenyae
Contempt is a civic noir novel set in Baltimore. Follow the work at lerenyaewatkins.com.