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Red means needs rethinking
The Birth-Year Timeline
Jennifer Egan keeps a timeline of birth years for the detective novel she is writing, set in San Francisco in 1952 and following Manhattan Beach. The earliest birth is 1890, because how far living memory reaches among the characters depends on their parents too.
A Kinder Color Code
Her character list is color-coded with one rule: no abusive language toward herself. In earlier drafts she wrote terrible or boring beside problems, and it brought her down. Now red means needs rethinking instead of not working, blue means there has to be another way to use that person, and gray means the character is probably going to go.
The category headings follow the same tone. Factual questions are red while unanswered and shift as she makes progress. Drafts are numbered, and by draft six there should be far less marking up.
Why does harsh self-talk hurt a writer's work?
Research on self-compassion points to a mechanism: harsh self-criticism after a failure raises threat, and threat narrows attention to the failure itself. In a 2012 study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen found that people prompted to treat a failure kindly became more motivated to improve than people prompted to protect their self-esteem. The kind-framing group also spent more time studying material from the test they had just failed. The study is a frequently cited result in the self-compassion literature.
Why is San Francisco so tied to detective fiction?
Dashiell Hammett worked as an operative for the Pinkerton detective agency, including in San Francisco, before turning to fiction. He set The Maltese Falcon there, and the novel appeared in 1930 after running in the magazine Black Mask. Its detective, Sam Spade, walks real streets of the city. The 1941 film version, starring Humphrey Bogart, is often cited as a landmark of film noir.
Why does red feel like a warning?
In a 2007 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Andrew Elliot and colleagues at the University of Rochester found that people who briefly saw the color red before a test performed worse than people who saw other colors. The researchers linked red to danger and failure, since it appears in stop signals and corrections. Teachers' red pens have made the color a standard mark of mistakes in schools. The study was among the best known in research on color and performance.
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