Barbara, like Thea Browne, her protagonist in her mystery series, was born and raised in the Midwest. In college, she studied French, spent some time in Paris, then returned to her hometown, Rockford, IL and became a newspaper reporter. Eventually, she moved to New York, and worked in magazines as an editor. After she met her husband, they drove a 30-foot truck to California, where they still live. She worked briefly as a script supervisor on movie sets, but her biggest claim to fame (so far) was co-writing animation scripts, such as Transformers, G.I. Joe and My Little Pony.
https://www.amazon.com/Barbara-Petty/e/B001KDP2W2
BMH: What is something you wish someone would have told you before you became an author
BP: I wish someone had told me to make friends with my characters (even the bad ones) because I spent an awful lot of time with them, all alone in my room. But now I know better.
BMH: Why did you become a writer?
BP: I became a writer when I realized the words I wrote had the power to make an impact on or influence or entertain those who read them.
BMH: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
BP: Long story. I knew that I wanted to be a writer after an experience I had during my senior year in college when I was in a study group in Paris. Toward the end of our time there, our instructor asked us to write about our interactions with the French. I wrote about an encounter I had on the metro with a young boy. My friends and I were on our way to the theater, so we were dressed to the nines. This boy of seven or eight was staring at me, and I thought he was looking at me in a critical way. It made me smile sardonically to myself, but he caught my smile—and returned it with one of genuine friendliness. I was stunned that I had mistaken his stare for one of disapproval, and, feeling somewhat guilty, I grinned back at him. We spent the rest of the journey smiling and laughing at each other—and it was my very favorite experience of all the amazing ones I had in the City of Light. The instructor read my story about it out loud to the rest of the group as an example of what she was hoping for with her assignment. I was stunned again, as I knew I was definitely NOT her favorite student, but she had singled me out because of something I had written that had impressed her. I was hooked. The seed was planted for me to become a writer.
BMH: Do you have a daily writing routine?
BP: I do have a (mostly) daily writing routine. I write in the afternoon until I run out of juice. I will occasionally hit a wall, and then I let myself take some time off. But this is almost never real “time-off,” because I am usually wrestling with the next scene in my head, trying different approaches, etc. When I find one I like, I go back to the keyboard.
BMH: Why crime fiction?
BP: Why crime fiction? Simple. Nancy Drew. I remember reading “The Secret of the Old Clock,” the first book in the series, and I was smitten with mysteries. Still am.
BMH: Have you written in other genres?
BP: I have not written much in other genres of fiction. But I started my working career in my hometown of Rockford, IL as a newspaper reporter, columnist, and features writer. After I moved to New York City I wrote publicity and magazine articles. When I moved to Los Angeles I did some animation writing, such as Transformers, G.I. Joe, and My Little Pony.
BMH: What is something you’ve never written about, but hope to some day?
BP: Something I’ve never written about, but hope to someday is a question I don’t really have an answer for at present. I’m too busy trying to come up with a plot for the next book in my Thea Browne series.
BMH: What two words best describes your writing style?
BP: What two words best describe my writing style? I would hope “evocative” but “realistic.”
BMH: What comes first for you, characters or plot?
BP: What comes first for me, characters or plot? Plot comes first at the beginning of each novel, but once I’ve figured that out, the characters become all-important. How they react to the situation the plot puts them in is what drives everything forward.
BMH: How do you create your characters?
BP: How do I create my characters? Most of the time I piece them together bit by bit, but sometimes they spring full-blown onto the page. For instance, the character of Joe Biggs, the son of Thea’s best friend, Annie Biggs, came from a young teenage boy I once saw on an airplane flight. I only observed him for a few minutes, but I got his name, his appearance and what his relationship with his mother was like from those few moments I witnessed as he settled into a seat across the aisle from me.
BMH: Outliner, seat-of-your-pants writer, or a mix of both?
BP: I started out as an outliner, but am more of a pantser now. Although I do have a rough outline in mind as I write.
BMH: How much editing do you do as you write your first draft?
BP: I do quite a bit of editing as I write my first draft. Editing is just built into me, as I did so much of it on the newspaper and magazine articles I started out on in my writing career.
BMH: What authors influenced you the most?
BP: The authors who influenced me the most were Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky and Marcia Muller. They were trailblazers in the modern detective series featuring a female heroine. They definitely inspired me.
BMH: How do you handle research?
BP: I do my research mostly online, but there are occasions when it helps to call on an expert. For instance, in, “Where’s the Body?” I asked a friend of mine who’s a physician to help me with the description of a life-threatening knife wound that is inflicted on one of the characters. This same friend also had a cabin in the North Woods of Wisconsin and sent me photographs that aided a lot in my descriptions of the setting.
BMH: How do you handle marketing?
BP: I am a novice when it comes to marketing. But it’s a skill I know I need to develop, and I am beginning to do so. I have only recently started a Barbara Petty Author Page on Facebook, and will do some advertising from that page. The first novel in my Thea Browne series “What Has Mother Done?” was featured on BookBub at the end of November, and it rose to be #1 in Amazon’s Top 100 Free Kindle Books. Coming up, I will be on a panel at this year’s Left Coast Crime Conference in Vancouver, B.C. And soon I hope there will be more to come!
BMH: You can go back in time, meet and chat with anyone, who would it be? What would you talk about?
BP: If I could go back in time and chat with anyone, it would be Jane Austen. I would love to talk to her about the development of two of the most memorable characters in all of fiction: Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Even if it was for just an hour, it would be wonderful to bask in her brilliance.
BMH: You are going to be alone on a desert island, what three things will you take with you?
BP: If I were going to be on a desert island I would take bags of popcorn, Fiji Water, and Sue Grafton’s Alphabet Series.
BMH: How big a part did your upbringing have on your writing?
BP: My upbringing is having an effect on my Thea Browne Mystery Series because the setting that I am using, the small city of Rockridge, IL is actually based on my hometown of Rockford, IL. And it’s mostly based on my memories of growing up there and living there for a short time as an adult before I left for the big cities of New York and Los Angeles.
BMH: How about some hard-earned advice.
BP: Some hard-earned advice would be that I actually started out writing what could be described as thrillers, and had some success doing that but was never quite comfortable with it. In my heart of hearts, I always wanted to write mysteries because that was what I always loved to read. And then one day Thea Browne and her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother being accused of murder began to worm its way into my consciousness, and I got excited about writing again. And then my friend, Sheila Lowe, who writes the Claudia Rose forensic handwriting series, introduced me to her publishers, Shannon and John Raab of Suspense Publishing, and the Thea Browne Mystery Series was born.
