Julia Spencer-Fleming: Should you write what you know? That may be the most loaded question among writers, after "to self-publish or not?" On the one hand, of course not - we portray murderers, after all, and I'm pretty certain most of us haven't ever done someone in. Stephen King isn't a vampire or a telekinetic high-schooler, but he certainly hit the ball out of the park with Salem's Lot and Carrie.
On the other hand, there are places and characters and stories that can only be told by an author who knows. And there is a certain magic that comes when an author returns to their home, or their profession, and it causes their fiction to rise above the ordinary. That's just the case for Joyce Woollcott, who was far from both her present home in Ontario and her birthplace when she felt that magic calling her. The result? Her debut, A NICE PLACE TO DIE, the start of a new Irish procedural series. She's here today to tell us how it happened - and how you can go home again.
How I came to write what I know, sort of …
My husband and I were enjoying a Mediterranean cruise. As the ship sailed out of Valencia late one evening, with the lights in the harbour twinkling behind us, I realized that a lot of the fun we’d had was due in large part to the company we’d kept: my cousins and their wives from Northern Ireland. Not a raucous bunch, but they were funny and we had laughed our way through the holiday.
I had just recently decided to retire. I wanted to travel and paint and I wanted to write. I had completed a series of paintings of birds and flowers and they had been well received. I had also finished a manuscript, a mystery about a kidnapped child. I set it in Mexico City, Veracruz, and New York.
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| Some of Joyce's paintings |
I had enjoyed writing that story about a New York City Detective on stress leave going to Mexico to help solve a kidnapping. I’ve been to New York a few times but never to Mexico City or Veracruz. I’d done a lot of research for it, looked up settings online, but never lived there. Now here I was with group of friends and family, one of whom had been a policeman, and he had lots of stories to tell. That old write what you know line came to mind. Why not, I thought, write about the country where I was born?
It had been many years since I lived in Northern Ireland, and when I started on my first DS Ryan McBride book, I decided to set it in 2016. I didn’t have to incorporate Covid, but it did mean I couldn’t travel home even if I wanted to. Once again, research would have to be online. Writing the story, working on plot in the DS McBride manuscript, was fundamentally the same as my first book. But I still had to look up much of the detail. New streets, buildings, places I had never been to.
Setting and dialogue, however, came easily. I remembered the particular way people spoke. Yes, there’s death and various other crimes in A Nice Place to Die, but there’s humour, too, because that’s what people are like back home. Funny. One of the most important discoveries to me was my vivid memory of landscape and countryside. The descriptions came easily because I’d been there, I could feel it. Walking in damp fields with birds wheeling above, and rain showers coming out of nowhere on sunny days.
I don’t for a moment believe you should only write what you know. Yes, it helps, but I write about a detective who is male and I’m neither. I think it’s more important to write what you love to read. As I get older I seem to have drifted toward specific kinds of mysteries. I enjoy police procedurals and the careful, painstaking unravelling of the crime. I tend to gravitate towards UK-based stories. I love the setting to be overcast and gloomy. And don’t we all enjoy brooding, angst-ridden protagonists?
Do you have favorite locations or seasons? City or countryside? The dark and rainy Edinburgh of Inspector Rebus or the gritty Dublin of Tana French? Dark Nordic thrillers or lighter reads like the Kinsey Millhone series from Sue Grafton, set in the warm and sunny fictionalized town of Santa Teresa, California? Do you have a special kind of mystery you love to read?
It was A NICE PLACE TO DIE...
The body of a young woman is found by a river outside Belfast and
Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride makes a heart-wrenching discovery at the scene,
a discovery he chooses to hide even though it could cost him the investigation
– and his career.
The victim was a loner but well-liked. Why would someone want to harm her? And is her murder connected to a rapist who’s stalking the local pubs? As Ryan untangles a web of deception and lies, his suspects die one by one, leading him to a dangerous family secret and a murderer who will stop at nothing to keep it.
And still he harbors his secret ...
J. Woollcott is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and BCAD, University of Ulster. Her first mystery, Abducted, was long-listed in the Canadian Arthur Ellis Awards in 2019. Her second book, A Nice Place to Die, won the RWA Unpublished Mystery/Suspense Daphne du Maurier Award in 2019 in New York. A Nice Place to Die was also long-listed in the Arthur Ellis Awards for 2020 and short-listed in the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence in 2021. She is working on part two of the Ryan McBride Belfast Murder Series, Blood Relations, due out in August 2023.
She is a member of Crime Writers of Canada, Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and the Suncoast Writer’s Guild. You can find out more on her website, and follow her on Twitter as @JoyceWoollcott.
