I’m excited to present four new authors for this feature! There is lots of variety in what they write and in how they write it. Have fun peeking in at their answers.
Kathleen Kalb is our first author for this issue. Here’s a bit about her:
BIO: Kathleen Marple Kalb likes to describe herself as an Author/Anchor/Mom…not in that order. She’s the author of the Ella Shane historical mystery series for Kensington Books, including A FATAL OVERTURE (3/29/2022), and A FATAL FIRST NIGHT, named to Aunt Agatha’s Best Of: History Mystery 2021 list. She grew up in front of a microphone and a keyboard, working as an overnight DJ as a teenager in her hometown of Brookville, Pennsylvania…and writing her first (thankfully unpublished) historical novel at sixteen. After a news career with stops in Pittsburgh, Vermont and Connecticut, she’s now a weekend morning anchor at 1010 WINS Radio in New York City. As Nikki Knight, she’s also the author of the contemporary Vermont Radio Mystery, LIVE, LOCAL AND DEAD, coming 2/8/2022 from Crooked Lane. Her Vermont story, “Bad Apples” was an Honorable Mention in the 2021 Black Orchid Novella Award Contest. She, her husband, and their son live in Connecticut, in a house owned by their cat.
You have a new idea for a mystery that you want to develop into a book. What are your first steps in developing the idea to transform it into a novel-length piece? What’s the first thing you do after jotting down the initial idea?
Write the opening scene. If the idea feels right for my existing characters, or if the new characters are people I want to spend time with, I’ll sketch out the big finish, too.
What additional things do you do to shape that idea so it becomes the mystery you thought it could be?
It’s all about building the case. I’m a journalist and I’ve covered a number of trials, so I approach setting up a mystery plot like a prosecutor: revealing each piece of evidence at the right time. That’s the underlying structure of the story, but it often gives me ideas for the fun stuff, too.
Do you use Character Charts, plot outlines, pictures, notebooks, bulletin boards, etc.?
I write a synopsis early on, and later a more detailed outline, but I don’t use a lot of outside materials. My characters live in my mind, and I like to think I know them really well from spending time with them, thinking about what they do and their motivations.
Which methods have you tried and which have worked best for you?
The synopsis and outline are key. I know many people hate doing a synopsis, but I find it an incredibly useful tool for getting an early sense of the story. And the outline, a bit later in the process, is the roadmap for the entire book.
Depending on the method you use, how successful has it been in fleshing out the idea? Or, do you begin with one method and find yourself gravitating to another?
I call myself a “semi-pantser,” even though it sounds like a character out of my tween son’s favorite book! But it’s a fair description. I start by just sitting down and writing an opening, closing and often a few other key scenes…then figure out how it all comes together. Structure and evidence are critical in a mystery, of course, but if I don’t get a good feeling for the characters and story in that early brainstorming, I don’t know if I have anything worth the effort.
Do you find that the original idea changes as you work with it?
Absolutely! It may be something very serious or technical: it’s impossible to kill the victim the way I wanted to…or the solution doesn’t fit together properly. But it’s just as likely to be something “softer” – maybe it doesn’t feel right to have a character doing or saying something that originally made sense. You can’t be so in love with your work that you can’t make changes.
Does the idea ever become something entirely different than when you started?
It sure does. Jaye Jordan, the main character in my Vermont Radio Mystery, was initially in a completely different story. One day, though, I realized that she was the perfect lead for a reboot of my very first mystery idea…and it just flowed from there.
Does the method you use allow flexibility in development? How?
Of course. A good writer has to be willing to start over, or cut out chapters that aren’t working, or maybe add an entirely new character to bring more depth to the story. I keep “cuts” files for all of my projects, where I drop pieces – anything from a few paragraphs to entire chapters – that aren’t a good fit right now. I’ve found great ideas for future projects in those files.
Choose a novel of yours and walk us through its development from idea to finished work. Please tell us about the methods used and how the idea changed, if it did.
Back in 2015, when my son started kindergarten, I wrote a fun little mystery about a young, stalled, and single New York news anchor who inherits a radio station in Vermont. It was good enough to get some interest from agents, but it didn’t sell. I put it on the back burner and moved on to the Ella Shane historical mystery series, which got me an agent and a deal.
During the year-and-a-half from signing to publication (Don’t you LOVE the long timelines of traditional pub?) I noodled around with ideas, and came up with Jaye, a beleaguered single mom trying to find her balance after her husband survives cancer but their marriage doesn’t. She was initially a media coach in Connecticut, but as much as I loved her, I couldn’t get past the first few scenes.
Then I remembered the Vermont mystery…and a scene I’d always wanted to use, but never figured out how to: What if the main character shoots a snowman and a body falls out?
“I shot the snowman, but I did not kill the guy inside.”
With that line – and the very deliberate musical echo – Jaye, now a DJ turned small radio station owner, announced herself, and took my old idea in an entirely new direction. The opening scene practically wrote itself, complete with the cuts to Jaye’s re-meeting with her old crush, the governor, as the snowman slowly disintegrates. Governor Will Ten Broeck was the most interesting survivor of the three guys of the original Janet Evanovich-style romance plot, which wasn’t right for grownup Jaye.
But I knew that blowing snow and second-chance romance weren’t nearly enough to make a good mystery. Not even with a flatulent moose in the background. (Yes, really!) I sat down and thought about how a talk show host would end up dead in a snowman…and whether there was a way to use the Will-and-Jaye romance as a plot driver. Some of the pieces just fell together, and some took a while.
The synopsis gave me a clear direction: we start with the snowman and Will and Jaye’s meet-cute – follow Jaye as she fights angry talk-show fans and tries to clear her name – wonder why Will seems to be having so many “accidents” – and end up at a sugarhouse for the big, maple-syrup-soaked denouement.
As the story grew, other elements became key parts of the plot: the threats and harassment Jaye gets from the dead talk-show host’s fans (real danger or red herring?) – Jaye’s struggles to keep the station on the air – and most importantly, the network of relationships between the characters, and how they drive developments.
I’m a character-driven writer; Jaye is the only person who could put all of the pieces of this mystery together, and only because of everything she’s been through as a DJ, mother, and ex-wife of a cancer survivor. But I like to share the wealth; several other characters supply major clues, too, again from their unique viewpoints and experience.
The really fun part with this one is that I thought I was done…and at the end of the initial draft, I realized there was a much better way to handle the “Will-in-danger” plot that brought a really big twist at the end. No spoilers, but let’s just say that the last attempt on his life leads to a revelation that could ruin his relationship with Jaye. I had to go back and make everything fit – but it was well worth it.
Worth it, too, a bit later when my editor asked a question that led to a very good – and absolutely radio-specific – reason for putting that body in the snowman. It’s not just there because it’s a fun opening. It’s there because the killer had a plan.
I’ve always been fond of carefully building a plot and distracting readers a little with romance or humor so that they’re surprised and pleased when it all comes together…but this one is especially intricate. Everything is there for a reason, and every event matters.
Despite all of that structure, though, it’s also a fun ride. I love humor, whether it’s the slapstick of that flatulent moose and the cranky station cat – or Jaye’ wry voice, always good for a snarky aside. More, it’s a love story – not the Jaye-and-Will thing, but Jaye’s love for her work, family and friends, and the town’s love for its local radio station. I wanted to make sure all of that came through.
The final version of LIVE, LOCAL, AND DEAD wasn’t intended as a way to show everything I’ve learned about craft – and life – in the last several years…but it is. And I’m still using those lessons today.
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Next up is Roger Johns. He hails from around where I live now, so I’ve met him at various gatherings BC (Before Covid). I’m glad to see someone else using spreadsheets to keep track of things.
BIO: ROGER JOHNS is a former corporate lawyer, retired college professor, and the author of the Wallace Hartman Mysteries, Dark River Rising and River of Secrets, from St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books. He is the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year (Detective·Mystery Category), a two-time Finalist for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award, and runner-up for the 2019 Frank Yerby Fiction Award. His short fiction has been published by Saturday Evening Post, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the Mystery Weekly Magazine, Dark City Crime & Mystery Magazine, Yellow Mama, and Viral Literature: Alone Together in Georgia. Roger’s articles and interviews about mystery writing and career management for new authors have appeared in Career Authors, Criminal Element, the Southern Literary Review, Writer Unboxed, and Southern Writers Magazine. He belongs to the Atlanta Writers Club, International Thriller Writers, and Mystery Writers of America. Along with several other crime fiction writers, he co-authors the MurderBooks blog at www.murder-books.com. Please visit him at: www.rogerjohnsbooks.com.
You have a new idea for a mystery that you want to develop into a book. What are your first steps in developing the idea to transform it into a novel-length piece? What’s the first thing you do after jotting down the initial idea?
From the basic idea, I develop a skeletal sequence of must-happen plot events, then decide who will carry the story, and who will help or hinder that enterprise. I work up very brief character sketches, trusting that the characters will reveal additional, necessary things about themselves as the demands of the story unfold. Then, I craft an intense opening scene, something that forces the reader into the story world in a way (I hope) they’re not likely to forget, something that communicates the mood of the book and the sense of menace that will hang over it. When my first book was in pre-publication edits, my editor told me that when the book came up in conversation, she and her colleagues never referred to it by the title, they referred to it by something the reader sees in the first paragraph. Because this was my first book, and because I had learned, from writing conferences, that agents and editors are swamped with manuscript submissions, I understood that a dramatic opening would be important to get their attention. I have continued this practice in subsequent works, long and short.
What additional things do you do to shape that idea so it becomes the mystery you thought it could be?
I obscure motives, downplay the significance of important information or characters, I Easter-egg information, I dismember fact patterns and scatter the pieces in a way that’s calculated to keep the reader from adding them up before the protagonist does. I use the setting and subplots and secondary characters to align the readers’ understanding of the story with the protagonist’s understanding, and then insert elements that cause the protagonist’s understanding to change so that she’ll be the first to see the facts in a new way and be able to add them up to the correct solution. This is the most fun, and most challenging, because the perspective-changing elements that work best, and are the most satisfying, are those that exploit some experience or psychological foible unique to the protagonist. This causes the protagonist’s understanding to change (hopefully) before the readers’ does. Later, once the reader becomes privy to the protagonist’s change of perspective, the reader’s Aha! moment is not only believable, it’s inevitable. A lot of trial and error, backing and filling, is required to get this right.
Do you use Character Charts, plot outlines, pictures, notebooks, bulletin boards, etc.?
My basic plots are short—ten or twelve must-happen events—and are often, literally, written on the back of an envelope. As the story develops, I keep track of everything using a scene list with minimal information, attempting to capture an entire scene on a single line, so I can see long sequences in the story in one eyeful. The ability to see large swaths of the story in a single glance shows me where plot holes or blocking problems or time inconsistencies are lurking, and it allows me to see two additional important aspects of the story: (1) Is there generally rising action throughout, and (2) are changes in pacing occurring, and at the correct times. I keep scene descriptions short, abbreviating character names, and using an A did B format to describe the main action/reason for the scene, and I use as provocative a verb as possible to describe that action. If I can’t capture a scene this way—in the form of the main character in that scene taking a critical action—then I question whether the scene is necessary or whether I understand its purpose or its underlying mechanism. Here’s a cut and paste of part of a scene list from my first book:
| PAGE | TIME | ACTION |
| DAY 1 [SUNDAY] | ||
| 001-003 | 545-559pm | WH investigates RO homicide crime, discovers backpack filled with cocaine |
| 004-009 | 600-610pm | WH interrogates SS, the BR city engineer who discovered crime scene |
| 009-011 | 700pm | DB exits hiding place in crime scene, flees with cocaine filched from RO |
| Offscreen | 800-805pm | DB searches MG’s house, ignites burn triggers |
| 012-015 | 815-825pm | MB sees house burning, flees lab and Bayou Sara in hidden getaway vehicle |
| DAY 2 [MONDAY] | ||
| 016-022 | 730-800am | WH interrogates SS’s wife, learns SS motive for RO homicide [SS = Suspect 01] |
| 022-026 | Afternoon | MC crossmatches WH and DEA interest in RO, describes significance thereof |
| DAY 3 [TUESDAY] | ||
| 027-031 | Morning | JB forces WH to partner with MH (fellow officer returning from drug suspension) |
| 031-033 | Afternoon | WH fights with MH over direction/control of RO investigation |
| 033-038 | 530-540pm | MC partners DEA with reluctant/wary WH on RO homicide [FE = Suspect 02] |
In some scenes, I keep track of time using clock time, and in others I refer to a general part of the day. I use clock time in situations where a number of things may be happening simultaneously in separate locations, because later in the manuscript, when those earlier, off screen, simultaneous events are related in flashback, the clock times allows me to keep tightly interwoven events in proper order and not have one event step on another. I know there are software programs that keep track of scenes and timing, but I’ve never used them. I find that the learning that happens while constructing these tables by hand forces me to think very precisely about exactly who’s doing what, to whom, and when, allowing me to keep larger, more detailed blocks of the narrative floating in front of my mind’s eye.
Which methods have you tried and which have worked best for you?
During the years I spent trying to write my first book I tried every method I could think of, including those suggested in a shelf-ful of how-to books. The end-to-beginning method I describe in my answer to Question 7, below, is the one that works best/most reliably for me, for both long-form and short-form fiction.
Depending on the method you use, how successful has it been in fleshing out the idea? Or, do you begin with one method and find yourself gravitating to another?
I would consider my method successful. It has carried me through two novels, and counting, and several short stories, and counting. So far, it hasn’t let me down, although maintaining the discipline to stick with is sometimes challenging because once I’m in the grip of an idea I just want to sprint ahead, unburdened by the constraints of method or the lessons of experience. Most of the time, this turns out to be me running headlong into trouble, forcing me to go back to the discipline of the method.
Do you find that the original idea changes as you work with it?
I have abandoned ideas that I’ve come to realize are either uninteresting, unworkable, or too far beyond my skill or experience, but once I commit to an idea that can clear those three hurdles, I tend to stick with it. That said, the vehicle I ultimately use to carry that idea forward (the combination of characters, setting, voice, plot, and subplots) is in flux until I’m finished. And I know I’m finished when I quit changing things.
Does the idea ever become something entirely different than when you started?
With respect to the basic idea for the book/short story, I tend to kill ideas (see answer to Question 5, above) rather than change them. However, once I’m underway on a project, I often find that something I’ve already written leads me to discover something else that’s useful that would not have found its way to the page had the material I’d already written not been in place for me to see and think about. And this can cause me to change things. It’s as if the world I’ve created understands itself well enough to point out inconsistencies I’ve inflicted or additional things implicit in the world that I can use, things I hadn’t seen or understood until I had committed other material to the page
Does the method you use allow flexibility in development? How?
Yes. In fact, the method demands flexibility, by requiring me to constantly assess whether my choices of character, setting, plot revelation, scene sequence, and so forth are good…or are they the best I can uncover. I’ve come to understand that when my writing slows down, it’s usually not because my basic premise is not good, but because I’ve settled for implementing the idea in a way that doesn’t, in a sense, tell itself. When that happens, I know to go back over earlier choices and ask what could be different, and how/why that change will propel the story.
Choose a novel of yours and walk us through its development from idea to finished work. Please tell us about the methods used and how the idea changed, if it did.
Dark River Rising is my first novel. It’s a thriller that exploits the idea of a new technological discovery that has the power to threaten the established cocaine industry. The idea of the new technology came to me, out of the blue, as I was on my way to teach a class on international business transactions. It got me to wondering why the cocaine cartels didn’t operate the way I was thinking, since doing so would make their business far simpler, much more profitable, and nearly impossible to suppress. The idea was so intriguing, I did some research and discovered that what I envisioned couldn’t be done. Many had tried, but all had failed. That didn’t mean the technology was impossible, only that it was, as yet, undiscovered. So, of course, the inevitable ‘What if’ question began rattling around in my head. I was certain it was a good idea for a thriller, but the idea rattled for a looooong time, until I encountered the first of what would turn out to be five big realizations.
Big Realization No. 1: A good idea for a book is not the same as a good plot for a book. This seemingly obvious notion forced me to find the specific sequence of events, characters, and actions that would best make use of my idea. I tried every way I could think of to do this, including just about every way suggested in every how-to book I could find: outlines, note cards, scene lists, you name it I tried it…and it all went nowhere, except that it did lead to…
Big Realization No. 2: Start with what you know. The only thing I knew for certain was the ending. The driving force in a thriller is the protagonist trying to stop some terrible catastrophe from happening, and I knew what that catastrophe would be, and how I wanted to stop it from happening. So, I started there and worked backward, asking myself, every step of the way, ‘If z happens, what y must come before, to cause it?’, then “If y happens, what x must come before, to cause it?”, until I arrived at a beginning. This process yielded a skeleton plot of ten or so fundamental events and the order in which they had to occur. With this in hand, I began at the beginning, putting the story in the hands of my chosen cast of characters, and with great hope in my heart, I set about writing the story…which ground to a dead stop around page seventy. Still energized from discovering my basic plot, I tweaked a few things about my main character and his job and the situation, and began anew, writing feverishly…until the story ground to a dead stop around page seventy. This happened three or four times, each time leaving me baffled, each time leaving me a little less energized and a little more doubtful, until…
Big Realization No. 3 came sailing in from the ether, in the form a tiny voice in the back of my head telling me: “This man you’ve cast as the protagonist is wrong for the part. You need a woman at the wheel.” Thus, a great idea for the main character is not the same as the correct idea for the main character. As good as I thought my original lead character was, apparently it wasn’t his story to tell. So, believing I was up to the task, I changed my protagonist from male to female, and the pages flew…all the way to the end, at which point I gave the manuscript to my wife and she pronounced the story excellent…except that my main character didn’t come across as authentically female. This brought me to…
Big Realization No. 4: If you’re writing a character beyond your experience, seek help. I asked my wife, but she politely declined, believing there are certain things spouses should not try to teach each other (e.g. how to drive a car, how to drive a golf ball, and, apparently, how to craft an authentic fictional character). So, I spent nearly two years with a women’s writing group. Without their firm, steady, talented, generous, patient counsel, my main character, Wallace Hartman, would never have seen the light of day.
At some point in the process, I came to appreciate that, from initial conception to finished manuscript, every element of the story, except the setting, was changing—EVERYTHING. And that led me to…
Big Realization No. 5: Don’t stick with something just because you like it or you’re afraid to let go of all the effort you’ve put into it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Let. It. Go. This was a difficult lesson, and something I still struggle with. And the significance of it wasn’t really visible to me until I had time to look back on the experience of writing that first book. Now, when I find myself struggling to let go of something I know I should, I cut and paste it into what I call a museum file, where I can visit and admire it any time I want to, secure in the knowledge that it won’t be road-blocking my work-in-progress.
Thank you for the opportunity to share my method and the story about how my first novel came to be.
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The third author is Reed Farrel Coleman, a name I’ve been familiar with for many years, maybe because of all those awards you’ll see in the next paragraph.
BIO: Called a hard-boiled poet by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan and the noir poet laureate in the Huffington Post, Reed Farrel Coleman is the New York Times bestselling author of thirty-one novels including six in the Jesse Stone series for the estate of Robert B. Parker. He is a four-time recipient of the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel of the Year and a four-time Edgar Award nominee in three different categories, as well as a two-time Thriller Award nominee. He has also received the Scribe, Audie, Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards. He is a former Executive Vice President of Mystery Writers of America, a former adjunct instructor at Hofstra University, and a founding member of MWA University. His new novel Sleepless City for Blackstone Publishing will arrive in 2022. He lives with his wife on Long Island.
You have a new idea for a mystery that you want to develop into a book. What are your first steps in developing the idea to transform it into a novel-length piece? What’s the first thing you do after jotting down the initial idea?
I don’t so much develop an idea as I consider whether the idea I have will sustain 80,000 words plus. And simply having an idea is the easy part. An example: Several years ago in NYC, a pregnant woman stumbled into a restaurant in which two off-duty EMTs were dining. The story was somewhat misreported that the EMTs refused to treat the woman. Tragically, she died as did her fetus. Okay, so I had an idea for the novel loosely based on this incident, but didn’t think it could sustain a full length book. However, a month later, one of the EMTs involved in the incident was murdered. Bingo! That’s a book. And thus, Book #7 in my Moe Prager series Hurt Machine was born.
What additional things do you do to shape that idea so it becomes the mystery you thought it could be?
Once I believe I have a sustainable idea, I don’t do calculations per se. I never outline. To me, an outline is writing the book’s fun parts. Why would I then want to write the book again if all the fun has already been explored. But what I do is imagine the story playing out and wonder where I might fit in the tropes and conceits necessary for the genre. For instance, with Hurt Machine, I knew I had a solid idea and knew I could make it work as a PI novel, but could I give it enough juice, enough action and pacing to make it entertaining to the reader? That’s always the question I ask as I write. Can I keep the reader interested?
Do you use Character Charts, plot outlines, pictures, notebooks, bulletin boards, etc.? Which methods have you tried and which have worked best for you?
Never. Never. Never. Did I mention, never? One of my tricks for keeping readers interested and entertained is being the audience. My theory has always been, once I have the idea, just sit down and write. One thing I learned early on in my career was that my mind was working on the plot even when I wasn’t aware of it. So that one part of my mind is writing for the part of me that’s the audience. If I’m entertained and surprised by what comes next, I believe the readers will be as well. I also have a very organized mind so that I can keep track of what happened to who and when. Even if I can’t keep track of absolute specifics, I have the kind of mind that knows the book in sections and if I have to go back I can always find what I’m looking for. Then, of course, I reread the novel when I’m done and can smooth out any inconsistencies I find. As my career developed, I’ve also found a good copy editor will pounce on the incosnistencies I might’ve missed. Although, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest a new writer do it my way, I do find that my method of approach is both freeing and risky. It’s working without a net and I like it. Over the course of my career, I’ve also encountered many new writers who get so hung up on Character charts, plot outlines, pictures, etc. that they use their creative energies in the wrong places. I think it was Harlan Coben who once said that only writing is writing. Thinking, research, prep, et al is all useful, but it’s not doing the work. I use all my creative energy to do the work.
One trick I use that would work for any writer using any process is to reread yesterday’s work before beginning today’s writing. I also reread the first 50 pages of my book over and over again until I can almost recite it. The first 50 pages are the solid base upon which I build the book.
Depending on the method you use, how successful has it been in fleshing out the idea? Or, do you begin with one method and find yourself gravitating to another?
Well, I’m 30 years and 31 published novels into my career. Add to that dozens of short stories, so I think it’s worked pretty well for me. Whenever I’ve delved into other processes, however briefly, the results haven’t ever matched the way I usually work.
Do you find that the original idea changes as you work with it? Does the idea ever become something entirely different than when you started?
Sometimes. Especially working, as I do, without an outline or a long range story arc. For instance, in my 6th Moe Prager novel, Innocent Monster, I was sure the antagonist was going to be Character A, but as I wrote the novel, Character B seemed like a much better idea for the antagonist. In fact, my instinct to use B made the story so much richer emotionally and dramatically, that I thought I was nuts for ever considering A. Also, in my stand alone novel Gun Church, the actual structure of the novel demanded that I adjust the original ideas.
Does the method you use allow flexibility in development? How?
I think my method allows for maximum flexibility as there’s only the idea and the writing. Nothing else gets in the way. However, as I state above, flexibility comes at a cost and with high risk. Without an outline or story arc, without the other practices employed by colleagues, I have written novels in which I’ve gotten lost. Although I have 31 published novels, I’ve written 3 novels that were never published, two early in my career and one in the middle part of my career. But the risk is one I have always been willing to take. Writing a novel is, in itself, a huge risk. When I taught writing at Hofstra, I would sometimes ask students who wanted a career as a novelist to stand. To those who stood, I would say, “You do realize that you may spend a year or two of your life alone in a room writing something that may never see the light of day?” The ones who remained standing, I admired.
Choose a novel of yours and walk us through its development from idea to finished work. Please tell us about the methods used and how the idea changed, if it did.
Well, I’ve already kind of done that with Hurt Machine. But let’s try Where It Hurts, the first novel in my Gus Murphy series. In my earlier series novels, I had written protagonists who had a jaundiced view of the world from page 1 of book 1. With Gus, I wanted to write a cop/PI character who had a different POV. He thought he understood how the world worked. He had everything he could want: a happy marriage, two great kids, a paid mortgage, and a pension. So the book was an idea of character first before plot. That’s usually how I work in a series, especially with the inaugural book. The driving force of the novel was to take someone who was content and thought he understood the world and show him how wrong he was. So, the next step was to blow up Gus’s contentment with tragedy. And this was the crucial decision: How to do that? What I decided to do turned out to be one of the best writing decisions I ever made. Instead of having his wife or daughter assaulted and murdered or killed in a auto accident—My goodness, how many times have those conceits been used—I had Gus’s son John die unexpectedly on the basketball court from an undiagnosed heart condition. The point being, Gus had no one to hold accountable. He had no one who could explain why to him. The universe he had assumed worked in an orderly fashion and made sense, suddenly made no sense and seemed utterly random.
So, when a ex-con whom Gus had arrested many times for petty crimes comes to him to ask his help in solving the murder of his own son, Gus goes bezerk. He’s even jealous of the ex-con, because with murder, there are people responsible to answer for the crime. Who can Gus blame for John’s death? Then, when the ex-con is murdered in turn, Gus grabs onto the cases for dear life. Why? Because he may not be able to get answers about John, but there are answers to be had about the ex-con and his son. Gus is desperate for answers even if they’re not his.
Also, an element that is too often ignored, is setting. In the Gus books, this was crucial because the books wouldn’t have worked if they could have been set just anywhere. Gus is a retired Suffolk County (Long Island) uniform cop. So where does Gus live? Where does he work? I realized that a man so defeated by tragedy would have to work to occupy his mind, but it would have to be a meaningless, faceless kind of job. One that let him put one foot before the other, but one that didn’t require dedication or deep thought. Hence Gus drives the courtesy van for a ratty hotel near MacArthur Airport. He lives at the hotel and on Saturday night works security at the hotels dance club. The ratty hotel makes for rich setting and the employees at the hotel, their guests make for an interesting cast of characters.
As to characters, as I was writing, I hit upon the idea of Slava, the bell man. Big and ugly with a poor grasp of English, Slava befriends Gus. But Slava has secrets. Both men work at night because the dark helps them hide their secrets from the world and themselves. Slava also provides an interesting subtext. Then there’s Gus’s ex, his daughter, and the bad guys, including many of Gus’s ex-colleagues, who propel the story forward.
What also interested me was that I felt most non-New Yorkers only know Long Island as either Gatsby or the Hamptons. I live on Long Island and wanted to reveal it to the world in a way I feel it’s never accurately been portrayed. So this idea let me texture the novel with commentary on the place I’ve lived for over thirty years. But I hope that commentary never obscures the action in the novel nor the entertainment value.
I should add that Where It Hurts won the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel of the Year, and was nominated for both the Edgar and Thriller Awards for Best Novel. It is perhaps my most successful attempt at bringing a simple idea to fruition.
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Please meet our fourth author, Millicent Eidson, and see how she does it.
BIO: Millicent Eidson is the author of the alphabetical Maya Maguire microbial mystery series. The MayaVerse at https://drmayamaguire.com includes prequels, “El Chinche” in Danse Macabre and “What’s Within” in Fiction on the Web, and a side story, “Pérdida” in El Portal Literary Journal. Author awards include Best Play in Synkroniciti and Honorable Mention from the Arizona Mystery Writers. She can be found on Twitter, @EidsonMillicent, and Instagram, @drmayamaguire.
What are your first steps in developing the idea to transform it into a novel-length piece? What’s the first thing you do after jotting down the initial idea?
My alphabetical microbial mysteries are science-based, so the first thing I do is research thoroughly the peer-reviewed literature on the disease organism. Fortunately as a veterinary medical epidemiologist for my career, it’s easy for me to find the scientific information and interpret it. This is the primary planning part of the novel.
For the first novel “Anthracis,” I created appropriate veterinarian and physician characters to investigate an anthrax outbreak and secondary characters to provide them a rich life of relationships. To transform these disease threats and the characters into a full-length novel, I just sit down at my computer with the characters and let them tell me the story. I’m a definite “pantser,” meaning the interactions and plot events reveal themselves as the characters interact.
What additional things do you do to shape that idea so it becomes the mystery you thought it could be?
These diseases from animals, zoonoses, are so fascinating that there are too many ways of transmission, settings, and animal associations to include them all. The organism causing the outbreaks is known from the beginning because it’s the name of the book. So the mystery elements for the reader don’t come from figuring out the organism, although my medical detective heroine Maya Maguire may not know what it is right away. The mystery comes from all the confusing ways it’s spread, how infection will cause illness and death, and whether Maya can discover the threats in time with other public health partners to reduce the risk.
I also include mystery elements beyond the microbial structure of the novel. Each book has compelling women’s fiction and romance challenges for Maya, which unravel over the book’s journey. Every book will end with a satisfying “happy for now”-HFN conclusion, while foreshadowing the mystery of the book to come.
Do you use Character Charts, plot outlines, pictures, notebooks, bulletin boards, etc.? Which methods have you tried and which have worked best for you?
I have computer files for storing and organizing my scientific reference articles. I also rely heavily on excel files. One is a character list with each character in a row and information about that character organized under multiple columns. Each novel and short story is a new page in the character excel spreadsheet so I can add in the new characters while easily referring back to the old ones. That spreadsheet is essential for the planned 26 novels and several prequel or contemporary short stories, to make sure I’m consistent on all aspects of the characters as they proceed through time.
My second important spreadsheet is a timeline for each story. Every row is a different day or group of days, and the columns summarize what happens for key characters during that period. My first novel “Anthracis” is particularly complex in plot because it alternates contemporary chapters with Maya investigating the first anthrax cases in Arizona and an older diary of a young boy, until eventually the timelines catch up as the characters impact each other. That was immensely challenging to line up diary entries with events of other characters.
Depending on the method you use, how successful has it been in fleshing out the idea? Or, do you begin with one method and find yourself gravitating to another?
Now that I’m writing my third novel, I find that my method has remained largely the same. The passion for immediate typing of initial thoughts has reduced, so the number of hours writing the first draft per day has lessened. But this change is understandable as I’m juggling the first draft of the third novel at the same time as editing the second and marketing the first.
Do you find that the original idea changes as you work with it? Does the idea ever become something entirely different than when you started?
I rely heavily on the workshop process with other authors to get feedback on the novel chapters. My workshop groups are through the Burlington (Vermont) Writers Workshop (BWW) Burlington Writers Workshop – Providing writers with free learning opportunities that help them develop as artists and professional writers and the national and local chapters of Sisters in Crime (SinC) Sisters in Crime . They have been fantastic at letting me know what’s working and what’s not. Of course it can be a challenge when you get conflicting feedback!
For “Anthracis,” all workshop partners loved the ending. A couple of them added a “What if?” comment about the ending. After a number of months, I decided to experiment with their idea for a different ending, not expecting to like it. However, changing the ending opened up new possibilities for earlier sections and character development, so that’s the published ending. And of course that huge change influenced the second novel “Borrelia” which I’m formatting for publication probably in June 2021.
Does the method you use allow flexibility in development? How?
Almost every day, I’m editing one or more of my novels. I save to my computer a new version named by that date. So that allows me to go back at any point and look at earlier versions, in case I want to reassess any decisions I’ve made.
The workshop process mentioned above also is invaluable at suggesting different options. My fellow authors in the workshops come from differing perspectives. The SinC group is fellow mystery or suspense authors. For BWW, I participate in a novel workshop, a romance workshop, and an open genre workshop.
Choose a novel of yours and walk us through its development from idea to finished work. Please tell us about the methods used and how the idea changed, if it did.
The first step in developing “Anthracis” was to pick the disease! I created an excel spreadsheet with each letter of the alphabet and decided which zoonotic disease to use as the scaffolding for the appropriate letter. Anthrax has loomed large in American history with the 2001 anthrax letters, and the bacterium has complex ways of infection and clinical outcome. So that was a natural choice.
The next step was to pull together tons of scientific articles about anthrax. I’m retired as a veterinary epidemiologist with state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So the disease investigation methods are based on my own training and experience plus the research for updates. I teach a course about zoonoses and climate change at the University of Vermont to graduate students working on their Masters of Public Health (MPH) degrees, so the students in their own research occasionally unearth new references that are helpful to me.
After choosing the disease organism, I needed to develop my characters. For my primary medical detective, I wanted Maya to start out the series young, so readers can share her growth over about a 15-20 year period confronting these disease threats. I decided to make her Chinese American, adopted by an older Irish American couple. I made that critical character choice for several reasons. My husband and I adopted an infant girl from China in 1995 and I wanted to ‘write what I know,’ which is the process of forming a family in that way. Plus I wanted to share this MayaVerse journey with my daughter, who’s a close consultant and editor. We both want to see more diverse representation as leading characters of mysteries.
I enjoy Tess Gerritsen’s medical detective novels and was disappointed that as an Asian author, her main characters didn’t reflect her background. In an interview, she said that she was advised to write white characters to enlarge her potential audience. At this time in my life, it doesn’t matter to me if some readers avoid the MayaVerse because the main character is a person of color. Some agents rejected “Anthracis” because I’m not a person of color even though Maya Maguire honors my daughter and is written in close collaboration with her. That was a primary reason for deciding on indie publication. I wasn’t willing to compromise the integrity of my vision for Maya Maguire just to make her match my race. Her immigrant story, which my family shares, was too powerful to pass up.
The first draft of “Anthracis” was powerfully felt and practically wrote itself in one month, sometimes 22 hours a day. Unsure of its value, I took a full two years for workshop feedback and the publication process.
“Borrelia” was jumpstarted with NaNoWriMo in 2020 and completed within two weeks after that. I’m obsessive about taking writing classes and learning my craft, so “Borrelia” will have 1.5 years between the first draft and publication.
“Corona” was started during 2021 NaNoWriMo with a goal of one year until publication. I anticipate with each novel in the series, the time needed for feedback and editing will shorten.
Final Thoughts:
Emphasize persistence and quality in your writing journey. Enjoy all aspects of the process as a wonderful learning experience, even when they are very difficult. Support groups are important. In addition to those mentioned above, I rely heavily on Alliance of Independent Authors: Association For Self-Publishing Authors (allianceindependentauthors.org) and Member Spotlight: Millicent Eidson – The Authors Guild
