Fishing for ideas... looking local

 HALLIE EPHRON: Writers get asked all the time where we get our ideas. And, of course, the answer is everywhere.

Sometimes I go fishing in my local police log. It's published weekly in my local paper. Here’s an entry that caught my imagination (and made me love my local police).

911   Caller reports male party about 5’5″-5″6″ with blue or black baseball cap, tattoos, and baggy sweat pants was going from door to door claiming to be door dash but had no car on the street or food. Officer reports he is a confirmed door dash driver that was lost and helped him find his way.

Already I’m envisioning a mystery with a directionally challenged Door Dash driver who inadvertently stumbles into danger. Or maybe the protagonist is the person (a woman?) who called the police and who had good reason to be frightened. Or maybe the protagonist is the investigating officer? Or the people who are (still) waiting for the food delivery that never arrived?

More likely a short story than a novel... but still. And I want to know what food was ordered. We all have our priorities.

Have you found inspiration in your local news and then turn it over in your head, imagining a story with different players as the main character?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I love this! And I lived for decades essentially inside the police blotter, right?

I remember when a viewer called me with a story that had happened to her–short version, an adoption agency had set her niece to meet her birth mother–but turned out it was not the right mother! And she said to me–"Can you believe it, Hank? They sent that woman the wrong girl!”

And that, of course, became my book THE WRONG GIRL.

Which wasn’t her story at all, but yikes, what a good beginning.

But the police blotter is always especially funny. Full of “what were they thinking?” would-be burglars who break into people’s homes and drink their beer and then fall asleep on the couch. And get caught.

And I think the Door Dash driver is a drug dealer. I mean, huh, who would know if it was french fries with a side of meth? Actually, this is a good idea. For a book, at least.

RHYS BOWEN: He wasn’t exactly dashing if he had no car and no food!

Clare and I use the NTT archives for every day we write about and have come up with many juicy stories, our favorite being the man who was being sued for luring away a man’s wife. He twirled his luxuriant mustaches and said “Can I help it if I’m so much more attractive than Mr X?” That would never make it to the Times today!

LUCY BURDETTE: This reminds me of old times! When I was writing the Advice Column mysteries, I followed the police blotter of the Shoreline Times religiously–so entertaining! I saved the very best of the listings and included them as a preface to each book.

Here are the ones that I inserted into the first book, Deadly Advice:

• A Turtles Point resident reported that she had the sense that someone had been in her home six weeks ago, and she cannot locate her jewelry.
•  A prowler was reported on the side of the building under a ramp. Police investigated and found a cat under the deck.
•  A dog left his property on Dunk Rock Road and was very aggressive. There were no specifics as to the goals of the animal.
•  A Canberra Court resident reported that someone wrote on her window, "I'm always watching."
•  Neighbor trouble was reported on Great Hill Road.

Don’t you love “no specifics as to the goals of the animal”??

Now I definitely read the Key West papers for ideas, but they aren’t as lyrical as these old ones used to be.

JENN McKINLAY: I love this, Hallie! When I was writing the hat shop series set in London, I followed the Twitter account of the Kensington police department. Hilarious stuff as only the Brits can write it.

My favorite was a series of tweets that warned that a man was seen with a ladder and had been reported for trying to climb into open windows on second floors on a posh street. On the third attempt, he fell into the bushes and was apprehended but the police were advising residents to keep their windows closed for the time being.

I mulled that one over for a few days.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Boo. We don't seem to have a local police blotter. But, like Jenn, I follow every Metropolitan Police account on Twitter. (Sorry, not calling it X. So stupid.) And the London Fire Brigade, and the Ambulance Service.

So far I haven't come across anything that is a brilliant inspiration for a story, but there is always hope! 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: My mother used to send me newspaper clippings of crime in the Syracuse area, of which, unfortunately, there was a lot. But the one that really stands out was the multi-day saga of the bear who beheaded a man (yes, really) and was the subject of a county-wide man bearhunt. I got a whole manila envelope full of this undeniably interesting story, with a note from mom: "There are plenty of bears in the Adirondacks!"

Which is right, of course, but not so useful for a murder mystery, unless the bear has been trained as an assassin by the real, behind the scenes bad guy. 

I dunno, maybe Paul Doiron can use that news item.

HALLIE: How's crime in your neighborhood? Because we're always in the market for a good idea.

What We're Writing Week - Julia Tapdances

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: We all know many writers are self described as pantsers - composing without outlines to guide them. I prefer the term writing organically, because that's how it feels to me: one character or event leads to another and so on and so forth until four years later soon you have a novel.

 

But whether one writes "like driving at night in the fog," as E.L. Doctrow said, or meticulously plans and plots every twist and tune in advance, every writer wrestles with the same weird and magical process: taking an idea and turning it into a story. 

 

Maybe the idea is the world's best logline: Jurassic Park, except with sharks (MEG, by Steve Alton.)

 

Maybe the idea is an amazing character: a confused teenager with Asperger's Syndrome (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.)

 

Maybe the idea is a totally out-of-the-world premise: What if people and literary characters could move in and out of books in a Great Britain still fighting the Crimean War in the 21st century? (The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde.)

 

 

 

Great ideas are all around us.  Heck, I've produced a dozen brilliant business ideas in the past decades that only fail because 1) I have no idea how to implement them and 2) I tend to forget them immediately after telling one of my kids about, say, a service that rents dogs to stressed people.

 

 

 

The jump between having an idea and having a story involves speculation, pushing and prodding the facts, research, stretching the idea like Silly Putty with a picture pressed into it, weighing what's interesting and will open up new avenues for exploration, and what, instead, is a dead end. For some writers, this messy process takes longer than actually producing the words that make up the manuscript.

 

So now I have to confess that I'm not, at the moment, talking about what I'm doing with AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY. What I'm talking about is Make Your Own Murder, an event I'm taking part in - right now, if you're reading this after 1pm EDT! - at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Southern Maine campus in Portland. It's the baying crowd eager-to-learn attendees versus three mystery authors: me, Kate Flora, and Richard Cass. We'll be taking suggestions from the crowd for plot ideas, setting, and characters, and from that, we're supposed to spin out a story synopsis  - within two hours. 

 

Since we set our plows in different fields - I write traditional, Kate is doing the Joe Burgess police procedurals, and Dick is well-known for his noirish private eye series about jazzman Elder Darrow - it's going to be very interesting to see how we work when harnessed together. I'll let you all know how it went in the comments later this afternoon (how much later depends on whether we go out for drinks afterwards...)

 

Do you have experience spinning a single idea (or two) into story gold, dear readers? And have you ever seen/ participated in an "authors making $#%! up on the fly" event?

JULIA: I'm finally home at 5pm, and I'm utterly wiped out! Dick and Kate and I had so much fun, and the almost-overflowing crowd did as well, with lots and lots of great suggestions coming from the audience, back-and-forth about how and why authors make certain decisions about character, setting, motivation and plot lines, and (very flattering to the three of us) lots of book sales through Maine fave Kelly's Books To Go. 

We settled on, I think, several characters based on names and occupations the audience had written down. We drew names first, then settings, because we all agreed where the story was taking place was the next more important thing to who was in it. We decided on the Moosehead Lake region (featuring a foggy swamp) populated by an elegant antiques dealer, a judge, a new-age spiritual guru (and con man,) a wastewater plant supervisor, a clinical social worker, a Finnish-American pathologist and a Mi'kmac trout farmer/Maine guide. 

Over the course of two hours (less, really, with all the asides) we showed the audience how the sausage was made. We killed off the sewage treatment guy first, and then changed the social worker from the detective to the second victim. We decided the antiques dealer was in it with the "shaman," providing fake Indian relics to sell, and later decided she was married to the judge, and having an affair with her partner in crime.

The pathologist went from being a possible killer to the protagonist, as she tried to discover the parent who abandoned her when she was an infant. Surprise, it was the judge! The big action sequence at the end was when she saved the judge from the real killer...

his wife, the antiques dealer, who was trying to off him for his money. The only thing we didn't get to was what I would definitely put in: a burgeoning romance between the pathologist and the aquaculturist/ Maine guide. 

This doesn't begin to cover the various motives - everyone wanted someone dead! - or the discussion over frying pan versus antique rifle as the murder weapon. Honestly, it wasn't a bad start to a book - I'd tackle it if I wrote as fast as Jenn or Rhys!

It definitely got my creative juices flowing, and I can highly suggest going to any similar event if one turns up near you. (The OLLI director was so impressed, she wants to make it a regular offering every semester.) I wish you all could have been there with us!

I Have An Idea! by Vicki Delany

Jenn McKinlay: As a huge fan of the Sherlock Homes Bookshop mysteries, I am just thrilled to welcome Jungle Reds friend and fellow author Vicki Delany. And today, she is letting us glimpse behind the curtain. 

Vicki Delany: “Where do you get your ideas?”

As writers we’re often asked that.  I’d love to get my ideas from the Idea Factory, or maybe Ideas-R-Us. But so far I haven’t found such a convenient place.

What is an idea anyway when it comes to a novel? What does that even mean?

The idea is the spark from which all else flows. Coming up with an idea is pretty easy.  I can give you the ‘idea’ behind one of my books in one sentence. That’s idea is the spark, the germ of the story.

The task now is to turn that one sentence, even one word, into 80,000 words. And that is not so easy.

What has me pondering the origin of an idea at the moment, is my current work-in-progress. I’m writing the fifth in the Tea by the Sea cozy mystery series.  I was in Italy in October with my good friend, the Canadian writer Barbara Fradkin. We were, as one is in Italy, overwhelmed with great art. We’d been to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and were walking through the streets heading for either more art or more food when I told Barbara I was having some trouble coming up with an idea for the next Tea by the Sea book.  One of the paintings we’d most admired at the Uffizi was Judith Slaying Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – 1656).  

(Incidentally, the story behind the famous painting is a mystery writers’ idea in itself.) Barbara laughed and said, “How about a beheading? The main character finds a headless body in a bed at the B&B.”

As I write cozy novels, that wouldn’t quite suit.  Barbara thought some more and said, “a headless doll then. A gift, given anonymously at a bridal shower.”

Bingo! I had my idea. A headless doll is rather creepy, but not out and out gory or repulsive.

What the idea does, in this case the decapitated Raggedy Ann doll given as a shower gift, is provide the inciting incident. The point from which all else that happens in the novel flows.  It also sets the scene for character revelations: obviously not all is well between the bride and her friends and family.

How not well?  Someone is murdered later on. Is the shower gift pertinent to the murder? It might not be, but it sets the scene, starts the action, and gives our amateur sleuth character a reason to ask questions.

And, most importantly, it gives me, the author, a jumping off point.

In the Sherlock Holmes bookshop series, the idea is even less than a sentence. It’s a word. In the latest book, The Game is a Footnote, the word is “haunted house”. Okay two words. In next years book, as yet untiled, the word is “séance.” In last year’s novel, A Three Book Problem it’s “country house weekend.”

The idea is the germ from which all else flows.

Another thing most writers can relate to is the experience of someone offering to tell them their great idea, and then suggesting the writer use that idea and they can split the profits from the subsequent bestselling book. Uh, sorry.  If someone provides one word or one sentence, and I provide the other 79,999 words I’m not sharing anything.

Because it’s not the idea, it’s all that flows from the idea.  And that’s the hard part.  Lay down the clues, build the plot, create the characters, put them in an attractive (or otherwise) setting, have a believable sub-climax when the protagonist is threatened or all seems lost. Build it all to a climax and the grand reveal.  Then wrap it all up. 

I have over fifty published books now, and I’ll admit, an idea for something vaguely original is getting harder to come by.  One of the things I’m most struggling with is a way of having the protagonist catch or trick the killer.  You can only have your character eavesdrop on conversations so many times and leap out from behind the curtains to say, “J’Accuse” with pointed finger.  She can only wrestle so much with a deranged killer at the edge of a cliff in a storm at night.

But I’ll get it, eventually, because I started with ‘an idea’.

I’d love to know how the Reds (who have so many fabulous ideas!) generate their own ideas for such amazing and original plots. And readers, any ideas you’d like to share with us?

Gemma Doyle and Jayne Wilson are back on the case when a body is discovered in a haunted museum in bestselling author Vicki Delany's eighth Sherlock Holmes Bookshop mystery.

Scarlet House, now a historical re-enactment museum, is the oldest building in West London, Massachusetts. When things start moving around on their own, board members suggest that Gemma Doyle, owner of the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium, might be able to get to the bottom of it.  Gemma doesn’t believe in ghosts, but she agrees to ‘eliminate the impossible’. But when Gemma and Jayne stumble across a dead body on the property, they’re forced to consider an all too physical threat.  
 
Gemma and Jayne suspect foul play as they start to uncover more secrets about the museum. With the museum being a revolving door for potential killers, they have plenty of options for who might be the actual culprit.
 
Despite Gemma's determination not to get further involved, it would appear that once again, and much to the displeasure of Detective Ryan Ashburton, the game is afoot.
 
Will Gemma and Jayne be able to solve the mystery behind the haunted museum, or will they be the next to haunt it?

 

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than fifty: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy.  She is currently writing the Tea by the Sea mysteries, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series, the Year-Round Christmas mysteries, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates).

 

Vicki is a past chair of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival.  Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. Vicki is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario. 

Where do you Get Your Ideas from?

OTTAWA, Ill. — About 50 people are searching an area in rural LaSalle County for a woman who vanished after a car crash that killed her husband.

Forty-year-old Tanya Shannon of Ransom was believed to be riding with her husband when their car crashed shortly after they left a holiday party. A deputy found the wreck early Sunday.

Authorities say 41-year-old Dale Shannon was dead behind the wheel, and footprints in the snow led away from the car.

Sheriff Tom Templeton tells WSPL Radio that it's possible searchers could find Tanya Shannon's body under the snow Tuesday, but Templeton says nothing is being ruled out at this point.

RHYS: It's True Crime Tuesday again, and a couple of newsworthy crimes from last week stuck with me.
Whenever we writers speak in front of a crowd I can guarantee that one thing we will always be asked is where we get our ideas from. How do you keep coming up with new ideas, people will say to me. What the answer of course is that writers learn to fine tune their senses, to keep their eyes and ears open, and it only takes the slightest germ of suggestion to start that thought process, which turns into a plot.
A favourite phrase of the creative writer is "what if?"
So take the above incident I read in the news last week. The vehicle was found crashed on a deserted road and the man at the driver's seat killed in a horrible accident. However, his wife who had been with him was not in the passenger seat. And there were footsteps leading away from the car. No trace of her found after a long search.

For a mystery writer, this is a great "What if?" moment. The mind starts racing to all kinds of scenarios. Had the wife been seriously injured and staggered off into the woods to get help only to collapse into a snow drift? Or or had the wife planned this accident, made sure her husband crashed and killed himself, and left him in the woods to die? Or ... had a third person caused the crash, killed the husband and kidnapped the wife? So this is a starting point for all kinds of good stories. The police will no doubt be investigating the state of their marriage, the state of the minds of both individuals to decide whether something was wrong or not.

And I don't know if you noticed the other good twist. The couple came from Ransom!

The other good story came from an English newspaper and involved a couple who went on holiday to South Africa. The wife was originally from there and wanted to take her husband back to her homeland. She insisted on visiting some not too safe areas. Even though her husband was against it. Their car was hijacked with the wife in it and she was later found killed. Now comes the twist -- when someone was arrested for this crime, he claimed that the husband had paid him to do it. So we have a fascinating scenario in which the husband appears to be reluctant to go to is South Africa with the wife, when all the time he is plotting her death. And my writer's mind starts to turn this around too. How about a wife who is trying to get rid of her husband? So she lures him to South Africa, stages an apparent kidnapping, leave some blood in the car and then sits back to watch him arrested and convicted of the crime of murder.


So you see if you're a crime writer, you need never be short of ideas. They are on the news every day. So tell me, when was the last time you got a plot twist from the news or read a great plot idea in the news?

On ideas: And then the phone rang, and then...

Things come to me in driblets. and when the driblets come I have to work hard to make them into something coherent.
...Aldous Huxley

HALLIE: Taking off on a question that Mike Draper posted on Mystery Writers of America's listserv (EMWA) last week: Suppose a chapter of your book has just ended with your hero being told that a friend is dead and the authorities are saying it's suicide. How would you open the next chapter?

Does the room spin? Does your character dissolve into a tearful puddle? Is your character angry that, once again, her drama queen friend has made herself the center of attention... I know, I know, it all depends on the relationship between the two characters.

Here's one possible next-chapter opening:"At least now I wouldn't have to shoot her myself."

Anyone else want to take a few potshots at this??

HANK: How about: "Stella was murdered. Absolutely. No way she'd kill herself before the last episode of Project Runway. Plus, I knew she just paid off her Visa bill. If she were going to kill herself, why bother to write a check?"

Okay, I know I'm the fun-light one. Let me think of something else. Darker. Back soon.

HALLIE: See, this exercise is actually a kind of Rorschach.

RO: My character, Paula Holliday is a wisecracker, and if it was not a friend I can definitely hear her saying something like "Suicide? If it was, it was the only thing she ever did herself. Her servants had servants." But a friend...ooh, that's a bit different. My plucky protagonist would probably refuse to believe the death was suicide, would find the bad guys and beat the crap out of them.

JAN: Protagonist X would immediately charge over to the police/doctor/mother of the deceased friend to find out what she drank/inhaled/injected and whether the champagne/crack/steroid came from a suspicious source.Later, after Protagonist X obtained some stimulating, yet frustratingly ambiguous clue that could lead her in any number of directions, she'd see something on the drive home that reminded her of her deceased friend. Protagonist X then has a vivid, meaningful memory. She doesn't quite collapse, but emotes deeply, yet in an intelligent way that allows her to maintain control of the car, so she doesn't tragically veer off the road, way too early in the novel, and end up as a fatality before chapter three.

HALLIE: Okay, I wanna read that book. Especially the *emotes deeply yet intelligently but not tragically* part.

HANK: Said I'd be back. Hallie, I think this is a fascinating exercise. On the face of it, it seems like an off-the-wall idea. But I now think it's actually very, as you say, revealing. I've been experimenting all weekend (between reheating stuffing and deciding how long is too long to keep sweet potatoes) with openings for the next chapter.

And some I write (in my head) don't seem like me. The dark, writhing-in-pain ones, or the bitter self-blaming ones. The ones I COULD write are questioning, certainly, like:
"I tried to list all the reasons Stella would kill herself. Just like Stella did. She made lists, for everything, while she was alive. Maybe, somewhere, she left one last careful roster of pros and cons."

I could also go the conspiracy route. "I dashed for the kitchen.For my recycling bin. I suppose I could have gone on line, but all I could remember was where the article had been on the newspaper page. I had to see how it looked. I knew I had read articles about two other suicides of thirty-something single women, just in the last week. That seemed like too many."

And looking at those ideas, I guess you can tell I'm a reporter.

HALLIE: I can see it now - BREAKING NEWS: The first serial suicide novel!

So, folks, please chime in with your response to this challenge: Suppose a chapter of your book has just ended with your hero being told that a friend is dead and the authorities are saying it's suicide. How would you open the next chapter??