Originality Begins with You by Paula Munier

 “What is originality? It is being oneself, and reporting accurately what we see and are.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

LUCY BURDETTE: A few weeks ago I took a Sisters in Crime workshop online from Paula Munier on the subject of plotting. (I'm always looking for help on that subject!) I enjoyed it so much that I persuaded Paula to share some of her 'secrets' with you!

PAULA MUNIER: Be yourself. Advice we hear from the day we’re born from everyone from our mothers and teachers to our ancient philosophers and present-day Ted Talk pundits. It’s good advice for artists, too—and now that getting paid for making art is more difficult than ever and AI and other forms of copyright infringement abound, being ourselves might be the only thing that can save us. 

Whether you paint or sculpt, craft or compose or choreograph, design or dance, or write, as I do, originality is now our best weapon in the war against human creativity. As someone once said (maybe Oscar Wilde, maybe Thomas Merton, maybe someone else altogether), “Be yourself; everyone else is taken.” I was reminded of this by the one and only Matt Weiner, writer and producer and creator of Mad Men. I recently took a class from him on ideas and the imagination through the Los Angeles Review of Books, and in that class, he encouraged us to note the things what we liked, and to write them down in a notebook. 

Of course, I’m doing it—I’m doing everything Matt told us to do—and was reassured by his advice because I do something similar every time I need to jump-start my imagination. When I don’t know what to write, I remember My Writing Rule of Three: 

1) Write what you know.

2) Write what you love.

3) Write what you’d love to know.

Taking that rule further, I use a bubble chart I created while writing Plot Perfect. It’s a list-making exercise, basically, a brainstorming strategy for artists regardless of medium. Here it is:

 

When you don’t know what to write or paint or sculpt or craft or compose or choreograph, do the bubble chart. The lists serve as a kind of X-ray of your likes and dislikes, your beliefs and your values, your past, present, and future selves. In short: What makes you, you.

From Bubble Chart Lists to the Bestseller Lists

I have the bubble chart to thank for my Mercy Carr mysteries. I’d always wanted to write mysteries, ever since reading the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes as a kid. I had several unfinished manuscripts in the proverbial drawer. Meanwhile, I’d published a lot of nonfiction, and acquired a lot of nonfiction and fiction projects as an acquisitions editor and as an agent. But my dream of writing a mystery series eluded me.

Then Phil Sexton asked me to write a book called The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings for Writer’s Digest Books. I needed a first chapter that I could use to illustrate certain fictional techniques and revision strategies. I couldn’t use anyone else’s first chapter for that purpose, so I wrote an opening chapter of a mystery—and I threw in everything I knew and loved and would love to know, working straight from my bubble chart’s lists. I grew up in a military family, so I made my heroine, Mercy Carr, a former MP who’d served in Afghanistan. I love dogs, so I gave her a canine companion named Elvis. I love the woods of northern New England, so I set the story in Vermont’s Green Mountains. I love stories about foundlings—from the Bible’s Moses to Anita Shreve’s Light on Snow to Julia Spencer-Fleming’s In the Bleak Midwinter—so I opened the story with Mercy and Elvis finding a baby abandoned in the forest. I even threw in a little Shakespeare because the bard is, well, The Bard.

Long story short: My agent read The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings, and said: “That’s a good opening chapter. You should write that mystery and I’ll sell it.” Armed with my bubble chart lists, I finished A Borrowing of Bones, the first book in my Mercy Carr series—and it made the USA TODAY Bestseller List. The first chapter of that novel is the first chapter that appeared in the writing book, with very few changes. The seventh book, The Snow Lies Deep, comes out in December. I’m working on Book #8 as we speak.

It’s All About You

As human beings, we can’t help but admire and appreciate originality, especially in our artists. Look upon a Matisse, and we admire and appreciate his unique mastery of color. Listen to Bob Dylan, and we admire and appreciate his personal yet profound lyrics. Read Alice Hoffman, and we admire and appreciate her particular illumination of the mystical and magical and mysterious aspects of life. These individual qualities inform these artists’ work and make their work special. 

The good news is: We are all originals. We owe it to ourselves and our art and the world at large to make the most of that originality. So, go ahead: Be yourself.

LUCY: Thanks Paula! And now it's your turn Reds, what would be on your bubble chart?

PAULA MUNIER is the Senior Agent and Director of Storytelling for Talcott Notch Literary and the  USA TODAY bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mysteries. A Borrowing of Bones, the first in the series, was nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and named the Dogwise Book of the Year. Blind Search also won a Dogwise Award. The Hiding Place and The Wedding Plot both appeared on several “Best Of” lists. Home at Night was named Library Journal’s Mystery Pick of the Month. The Night Woods, the sixth book in the series, debuted in October 2024, earning a starred Library Journal review among other acclaim. THE SNOW LIES DEEP debuts in December. Along with her love of nature, Paula credits the hero dogs of Mission K9 Rescue, her own rescue dogs, and a deep affection for New England as her series’ major influences. She’s also written three popular books on writing: Plot Perfect, The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings, and Writing with Quiet Hands, as well as Happier Every Day and the memoir Fixing Freddie: The True Story of a Boy, a Mom, and a Very, Very Bad Beagle. She lives in New England with her family and four rescue dogs and Ursula The Cat, a rescue torbie tabby who does not think much of the dogs. For more, check out www.paulamunier.com. 

Paula Munier--Home at Night

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I am such a huge fan of this series that I've had this book release marked on my calendar! There's a new Mercy Carr novel from Paula Munier on your shelves today, and what's not to love with a gorgeous New England setting, dogs, romance, suspense, and a terrific mystery?  

And what a great cover! Here's Paula to share why this book has a special meaning for her.

The Best Houses, Real-Life and Literary

 

I love houses. I’ve lived in so many places in my life—too many to count, thanks to an Army brat childhood that took me from Georgia to Germany, Ohio to Oklahoma, North Carolina to New Orleans, among other places, and an adulthood spent chasing husbands and jobs from Nevada to New Jersey, Connecticut to California, Ohio to Florida, Louisiana to New England. I’ve hung my hat in French Officers Barracks, Swiss chalets, Las Vegas condos, shingled Cape Cod cottages, Santa Cruz beach houses, Boston triples, Ft. Lauderdale bungalows, college dorms, Married Student Housing (as bad as it sounds), basement apartments in Chicago, studios in New York City, brand-new ranch homes and 19^th century farmhouses in Illinois and Indiana corn fields and U.S. Army quarters everywhere.

As a child I dreamed of living in a house all my own. I loved the houses I read about in books: My favorite was the Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott grew up and where she set Little Women, which was my favorite book as a girl. (Of course, I wanted to be Jo. Didn’t we all want to be Jo?) I visited the house—now a museum—as a middle-aged woman and it did not disappoint.

And, of course, I adored Misselthwaite Manor, the large, forbidding English country house on the Yorkshire moors, where Mary Lennox is sent to live with her uncle when her parents die of cholera in The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. (Duncombe Park in North Yorkshire stood in for the estate in the 2020 film adaptation, starring Colin Firth and Julie Walters.)

The best part, naturally, was the garden. How I longed to have a garden like that one day….

There was Pippi Longstocking’s Villa Villekulla, where she lives with her horse and her monkey and drinks all the soda she wants from the tree in her yard that grows a popular Swedish soft drink—because what kid wouldn’t love that? And 221B Baker Street where Sherlock Holmes played his violin and injected himself with his 7 percent solution and solved the crimes of the century. I devoured all of Sherlock Holmes after a British friend gave me a collection of the stories when we visited her in England—the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the U.K.  (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made up that address, but in time the streets were renumbered and now there’s a Sherlock Holmes Museum at that address in London. Such is the power of fiction.) Even the boxcar where the four orphans take up residence in Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children, seemed like heaven to me.

It took me nearly a lifetime, but now I live in a 260-year-old Colonial on 19 acres of woods in what my Millennial child calls “Nowhere, New Hampshire.” It’s the perfect home for a writer, full of secrets and stories and maybe even a ghost or two.

Houses like mine are everywhere in northern New England. In HOME AT NIGHT, the fifth book in my Mercy Carr series, Mercy is house-hunting in Vermont, and the house that wins her heart is a Victorian limestone manor, a faded beauty built by a Civil War hero for his young wife in 1866. They say she died young under mysterious circumstances, and now haunts the house. That doesn’t bother Mercy, and even when she finds a dead body in the library, she’s determined to make the place her own—she’ll just have to solve the murder first. 

It was so much fun to write a story set at Halloween in a haunted house. I spent a lot of time researching houses, finding the just right one for the story—and changing my mind more than once. Being a writer allows me to live many lives in many houses….

What houses have you loved? Which houses have haunted you? What are your favorite houses in real-life and in literature? Let’s talk houses!

 

PAULA MUNIER is the USA TODAY bestselling author of the award-winning Mercy Carr mysteries. The fifth book in the series, HOME AT NIGHT (October 2023, Minotaur), was inspired by her volunteer work as a Natural Resources Steward. An agent by day, she’s also written three popular books on writing: Plot Perfect, The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings, and Writing with Quiet Hands, as well as Happier Every Day and the memoir Fixing Freddie. She lives in New England with her family, four dogs, and a cat who doesn’t think much of the dogs. For more, check out www.paulamunier.com.

                                                                    

Beware the blackbirds…

It’s Halloween in Vermont, winter is coming, and five humans, two dogs, and a cat are a crowd in Mercy Carr’s small cabin. She needs more room—and she knows just the place: Grackle Tree Farm, with thirty acres of woods and wetlands and a Victorian manor to die for. They say it’s haunted by the ghosts of grieving mothers, missing children, lost poets, and a murderer or two, but Mercy loves it anyway. Even when Elvis finds a dead body in the library.

There’s something about Grackle Tree Farm that people are willing to kill for—and Mercy needs to figure out what before they move in. A coded letter found on the victim points to a hidden treasure that may be worth a fortune—if it’s real. She and Captain Thrasher conduct a search of the old place—and end up at the wrong end of a Glock. A masked man shoots Thrasher, and she and Elvis must take him down before he murders them all. Under fire, she and Elvis manage to run the guy off, but not before they are wounded, leaving Thrasher fighting for his life in the hospital, Mercy on crutches, and Elvis on the mend.

Now it’s up to Mercy and Troy and the dogs to track down the masked murderer in a county overflowing with leaf peepers, Halloween revelers, and treasure hunters and bring him to justice before he strikes again and the treasure is lost forever, along with the good name of Grackle Tree Farm….

DEBS: Now, let's add Halloween and haunted house to my list of reasons to love this book... 

READERS, what houses have been special to you? What are your favorite literary houses?