Where Do You Begin?

LUCY BURDETTE: This week I have to finish the copyedits for A DISH TO DIE FOR (coming next August), and also try to make progress on a few pages in food critic mystery #13 before the holiday season takes over completely. I was thinking about the different ways a book gets started. In DISH, the opening definitely sprang from visiting a little beach on Geiger Key, about 11 miles north of Key West. It was the perfect private and wild place to find a body. The only problems came with understanding who the guy was and why he was left there (and why Hayley’s involved, of course.)

Book thirteen (as thin as it is right now) began with characters. I knew I wanted to bring the two Scottish sisters from A SCONE OF CONTENTION to Key West–I can’t wait to see the shenanigans they and Miss Gloria get up to. UNSAFE HAVEN started with exploring a situation–a teenager thrusts her newborn into the arms of a stranger. Why? 

So DISH began with place, #13 begins with people, and UNSAFE began with a situation. Reds, I’d love to hear what kinds of sparks launch your minds into a new book?

HALLIE EPHRON: My first suspense standalone, NEVER TELL A LIE, began with a yard sale. Which is also, in a way, the inspiration for CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. And they’re both set in a fictional version of my home town, both about wives who wonder whether they can trust their husbands (not something I ever had to worry about). Making it so personal cuts down a lot on the research phase of the project.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Such a good question, Lucy. Mine all seem to have different sparks, some stem from a setting, some from an idea, some from a character, situation, or relationship I want to explore. WATER LIKE A STONE, for example (since we were talking about Christmas books yesterday, ) began with a little clipping I read in a Texas newspaper about a couple who were renovating a house and found an infant's body in a wall. I also wanted to write about Christmas, about Duncan's family in Cheshire, and about the English waterways and the canals that run through that particular part of the country. I stuck all these things together and voila, a book!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:I wish I had a pattern or a reliable source, because I’d be going there right now. Prime Time began with a funny thing that happened to me, and WHOOSH, I knew it was a book instantly–what if there were secret messages in computer spam? I had no idea of anything else, but whoa, that’s a good story if I ever heard one. For TRUST ME, I had been thinking about In Cold Blood, and how Capote had written it as “true crime”-- how does anyone know what’s true? It’s all what someone TELLS  them about what happens, and each person’s “true” is different from someone else’s.   I thought: there are three sides to every story: yours, mine and the truth. And all true crime writers are simply saying: “Here’s “truth.” Trust me.” And then I started to write.

My newest book, STILL UNTITLED, came from a random thought about Bernie Madoff’s wife–did she know, or didn’t she? It’s completely not about that. But that’s how it started. So the “idea spark” is just the spark, not necessarily the book.

 

RHYS BOWEN: my starting points are all quite different, except that for my series I have to build on the lives of the characters   I have to remind the reader where we are up to. For Molly it’s often real history. For Lady Georgie it’s a fun environment I’d like to visit.

For the stand-alones, usually something I’ve read about a place I’ve visited. Or…. I was in Venice. I attended the Biennale ( the big international art festival ) and I saw it was held in 1940 and 1942. And I thought it was during the war. Who attended?  Immediately I thought of my aunt who visited Venice every year. As a teenager I wondered whether she had a secret lover there— and viola! Story was born.

JENN MCKINLAY: I have no idea. I'm an outliner so I spend a lot of time reading the news, studying murder cases, and thinking about how I can twist them to suit my nefarious purposes. That's the spark, I suppose. But the actual opening scenes to my books are usually a surprise. I sit down to write and hand over the introductory pages to my characters, hoping they'll know how to start the show. They haven't let me down yet. 

 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I'm often sparked by news stories - not necessarily a single real-life crime, but more zeitgeist stuff. For instance, the main plot in I SHALL NOT WANT, involving migrant workers, popped into my head after reading several stories about immigrants working in Northern New England - not the place one usually thinks. 

 

My w-i-p, AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY involves white supremacist militias, and either I'm darn lucky, or or they've been in the news for way too long a period, because I started thinking about this book, like, seven years ago.  

Reds, as readers or writers, what pulls you into a story?

What We're Writing: Hallie in the final lap

HALLIE EPHRON: I’m writing the final fifty pages of a new suspense novel currently titled You’ll Never Know, Dear. At last all the pieces are coming together and the final shoes are dropping. I know who did it (I think), and I know how, and I know why. I just have to write it. 

It’s been a long haul. In the fall of 2013, a friend told me a story about her mother, an aging Southern belle who made porcelain portrait dolls. That became the inspiration for my book’s Miss Sorrel. 

It's the story of a little girl who, along with her favorite doll -- a porcelain portrait doll that her mother made for her -- went missing forty years ago. The book opens with the doll coming back.

  

Here’s a bit from the middle of the opening chapter. Miss Sorrel is the seventy-something-year-old mother and Lis is her forty-something daughter (the sister of the little girl who disappeared). In this opening, Lis and Miss Sorrel are having lunch out on the front porch of their home in South Carolina when a car pulled up in front.

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The car sat there for a few moments, its engine wheezing before it shut down. The woman who climbed out wore sunglasses. She had on tight jeans and a V-neck, flowered T-shirt. With a practiced gesture she tossed back the long dark hair that hung past her shoulders, leaned on the open car door, and gazed across at the house. At Lis and Miss Sorrel watching her from the porch.

 “She’s early, dammit,” Miss Sorrel said under her breath as she levered herself from the chair and waved. “Evelyn’s not even here.” Evelyn Dumont lived in the grand pink house on the corner lot next door. It had wide verandas in front on both floors. Evelyn and Miss Sorrel had been making and repairing dolls together since, well, since before Lis could remember. Both widowed, as they’d aged they’d grown more or less fused at the hip.

“Miss Richards? Hello there,” Miss Sorrel warbled as she gestured to Lis to get rid of the food and dishes. She adjusted the scarf around her neck. “Come right on up.”

The woman, who looked far too unfinished to be Miss anything, reached back into the car. She pulled paper shopping bag from car and a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, straightened, and bumped the door closed with her hip. She tugged down her top which had ridden up, exposing a roll of flesh bunched over her low-riding jeans.

Miss Sorrel’s typical clients were older women who arrived in church clothes, taking special care of their injured or simply aging dolls which were swaddled in blankets or packed in boxes with tissue paper. Not this one, not the way she was swinging that bag, oblivious to the coffee that was dribbling onto it from the cup.

The woman – the getup said eighteen but the face said closing on thirty – climbed the steps to the porch. Lis could tell the moment when her mother could actually see her because that’s when her expression soured from welcoming to eau to manure. And then, because of her excellent breeding, her mother turned up the corners of her mouth in a bright smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

Lis went inside and cleared the kitchen table and sponged it down. Then she lay down a yellow swaddle blanket and a fresh pair of purple latex gloves for her mother to wear when she examined the doll.

Miss Sorrel and Miss Richards came in, followed by Binty. The low-ceilinged kitchen felt claustrophobic as it filled with Miss Richards’s cloyingly sweet perfume smell -- gardenia squared. The girl set the bag on the table and shoved away Binty who was trying to bury its nose in her crotch. Was that a tattoo in the small of her back?  Lis only got a quick peek, but it looked like Harley Davidson eagle wings.

“Darling, would you get my log book?” Miss Sorrel said.

Lis walked through the passageway to her mother’s work room. She flipped the light switch and banks of fluorescent lights that hung low over a pair of worktables tinked to life.  On one table lay an aging hard plastic doll and a can of fixative, its chemical smell still hanging in the air. From a drawer she pulled out the aging theme book in which doll repairs were carefully logged. She also picked up the digital camera they kept in the drawer. Every doll that came into the house was photographed as well as catalogued.

When she brought the items back to the kitchen, Miss Sorrel had opened the bag the woman brought and was peering inside. Her face was so white that the spots of rouge on her cheeks stood out like a clown’s face paint.

           -- Hallie Ephron, from You'll Never Know, Dear