Plots from the Family Tree

LUCY BURDETTE: I went to a family wedding in Illinois over Labor Day and happily spent the weekend with my father‘s brother and his sons, my cousins. One of my cousins is the genealogist of the family, so we took this chance to query him about our history, and also to get details about old family stories from my Uncle Don. I knew the tragic story about my grandfather who co-managed a silk factory in Paterson, New Jersey with his sister and another relative. As I'd heard it told, he had wanted desperately to sell the factory, but the others refused to accept a very good offer on the business. And then came the development of synthetic fibers and the Depression, which reduced silk to a nonstarter. And so they were stuck with the factory worth exactly nothing. Obviously this had a big impact on him both financially and psychologically. My uncle said his father had never been willing to discuss this.

What I didn’t know is that we also had a relative who made Ferris wheels in Paterson, NJ. When the market for those dried up, his company turned to metal crypts, a product that never goes out of demand.

Now surely I can find a good plot in all that! What stories do you have in your family that might be good fodder for a novel?

HALLIE EPHRON: Metal crypts! And your protagonist inherits a basement full of them... only they're not all empty. (Cue scary music.)

My family favorite story is about my father's mother who died before I was born. She famously saved the family from economic disaster. In one of several unpublished manuscripts my dad left behind, he says, "In 1921 my father was in the woolen business, and when the depression of 1921 came, he went bankrupt. He told mother something she had guessed long before. She put her arm around him and said, "We'll be all right. For the last two years I've been in the real estate business. I've bought and sold five houses and I've got enough money to buy that rug store we saw in the Bronx." Now, if only I still owned five houses in the Bronx.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Both sides of my family talked so little about their family history that I'm beginning to wonder what skeletons were in the family cupboards! I know that my maternal grandmother, recently widowed, had to sell her wedding ring during the depression to put food on the table for her four kids. I also know that she taught school in California for a while, before she came back to Texas to live with my folks when I was born. Now I wonder what adventures she might have had there.

My dad started his own business in the Forties, selling raw popcorn to movie theater chains. He was The Popcorn Man, and quite the entrepreneur. I'm seeing a musical here!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: SO funny--my dad asked Gramma Minnie to tell him about life in Russia in the say, 19-teens. She lived in a little village somewhere in Russia, and she told him, "Oh it was lovely, and everyone was lovely." Gramma? Ya THINK?  Doubtful. So I'm wondering what she was hiding, right? My mother's mother, Gramma Rose,  was a strange fashionista. And I do mean..strange.  When she died, I was maybe 10? And we went to clean out her closets. her house was beautiful, immaculate. BUT in the closet: she had several dresses--in several sizes. Like, every size. Like--the blue one in a  2,4,6,8,10..etc. The red one in a 2,4,6,8,10. Untouched.   It still disturbs me. And now when I buy two of something, it gives me chills. I'm seeing scary movie, got to say.

NOT Rhys's great-grandmother.

 RHYS BOWEN: My great aunt Min (really Sarah Ann) told many stories of the family history on my mother's mother's side. My favorite story was that my great great grandfather was disinherited when he ran off to marry a gypsy. It's always intrigued me to know I might have gypsy blood. My great grandmother on my mother's father's side must have been a fabulous woman. She was French--Josephine--and she married a 35 year old Welshman when she was just 17.(I've no idea how or where they could possibly have met) She had 14 children with him. I have a picture of her, surrounded by her grown children, and she still looks incredibly young with a tiny waist. When my great grandfather died she married again. He died. In her eighties she decided to go out to Australia, to her daughter. So she went alone on a ship. I clearly get my adventurous spirit from her, although I wish I had her waist! 

INGRID THOFT: My grandfather came to the United States, through Ellis Island, when he was seventeen-years-old, his only companion his best friend.  That journey would be a tale all its own, but after making his way across the country, he drove an ambulance in San Francisco at the time of the great earthquake in 1906.  He was still a teenager; I guess anyone was allowed to drive an ambulance?!  Eventually, he married my grandmother and became a homesteader in Montana.  My maternal grandmother, who I’ve mentioned before on the blog, was a radio actress on WBZ Radio Boston in the 1920s and 1930s.  I think her stage name, Constance D’Arcy, would be a great jumping off point for a historical murder mystery!

JENN McKINLAY: I am descended from pirates, thieves, and other assorted ne'er do wells. Shocker, I know! Scottish, English, Irish, and Russian - my grandparents  were all escaping something and arrived in America to start anew. My aristocratic Russian grandmother married an Irish fisherman - much to the dismay of

both their families - and my Scots and English grandparents met at a dance in the basement of a church in Yonkers where they were carousing - playing piano, dancing, smoking, and drinking gin. My grandmother told me they got into big trouble for that! My people seem to think of the rule of law as more like a set of "guidelines". LOL.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: We had a family story that didn't come out until my mother and her siblings were adults. My maternal grandmother was the cherished younger granddaughter of the Most Important Family in our upstate NY town, so when she left her parent's farm after graduating from the Argyle academy to waitress at a speakeasy in a neighboring town, eyebrows were raised. 

But that was nothing compared to the man she brought home and told her parents she wanted to marry. First off, he was German. Secondly, he was ten years older than she. Finally, he had been married before - and his wife had died in childbirth, along with their baby. My grandmother would not be deterred, and so she became Mrs. Greuling. It wasn't until the birth of their first child that her parents softened up enough to visit the couple.

But what none of the family knew, until after both Grandpa and Grandma had passed away, was that Theodore Greuling had been married TWICE before. Unbelievably, and tragically, his second wife had also died while giving birth to a girl, who didn't survive. A family member tracked down their gravestones. The baby's name was Lois, and her mother was Lila... which were the names of my mother and her older sister. Grandma never knew her husband had named two of their daughters after his lost wife and child. 

Now THAT'S a novel-worthy family tale!

How about you red readers, do you have plots in your family history? Will you share them?

And Now, My Pretty, I have you in my Power...

I've been re-reading a Mary Stewart book. I used to adore her when I was a teenager. Now I found her plot annoyingly improbable. Evil Nazi wants man dead so sends his mistress to marry him, make it look as if he killed his best friend and then to be hanged for it. Wouldn't it have been easier to hire a sharp shooter and finish him off through the window of his car?

I feel the same way when a brutal killer locks up the heroine, keeping her alive for no real reason other than that the book would finish earlier and less satisfactorily if he killed her. I think I have become less tolerant of illogical plots since I became a mystery writer. Ditto weak motives for murder. It would take something pretty terrible to make me kill--protecting my child, revenging my child maybe. I don't think I'd kill if a bad secret about me was about to be revealed--I suppose it depends how bad. I certainly wouldn't kill to get my hands on money, or someone else's husband. And certainly not to let my daughter make the cheerleading squad as some woman did in Texas.

I suppose we writers have to examine our plots in such meticulous detail that we're now aware of the flaws in others. For example although I adore Harry Potter I can see so many inconsistencies. For example characters can aspirate to move instantly from place to place, yet when the Order of the Phoenix members come to rescue Harry, they use broomsticks--surely a more dangerous way to escape. And why can't Harry point his wand at himself and improve his eyesight so that he doesn't have to wear glasses? Isn't there a "reparo" spell for shortsightedness? The point is that if it is a magic universe, then magic should be able to take care of everything, shouldn't it?

There are the obviously dumb plot twists, of course... the heroine going down to the basement, carrying a candle, in the middle of the night, when the phone lines are out in a storm... because she hears a noise... and there's a serial killer in the neighborhood. I hope I've never written anything like that. Please shoot me if I have.

Do other writers find that they get annoyed with illogical plots or plot inconsistencies, or can you overlook them if the story is good otherwise? And what about motives? I think the motive for murder is the first thing I come up with when I'm toying with a book idea--before deciding who my killer or victim might be.

HANK: I'll come back and write more when I stop laughing after thinking about why Harry can't fix his eyesight. OCULOSO!

HALLIE: Laughing too, about Harry Potter. Aspirate? What a lovely transposition of the term she uses, which I think is apparate (and its converse, disapparate). LOVE the Harry Potter vocabulary. Rowlings rivals the best of Roald Dahl (anyone remember 'frobscottle' in "The BFG? It's a fizzy drink with bubbles that float DOWN instead of up resulting in surfeit of 'whizzpopping.' Or disgusting snozzcumbers?)

Being a mystery writer sure takes the fun out of reading, with that little critic sniping away in my head. Illogical plot twists and dumb characters drive me nuts, not to mention stuff that only authors notice like sliding viewpoint. But oh, what pleasure when a book delivers!

RO: Can't weigh in on Harry Potter - haven't read and haven't seen.
Yes and no. A lot of us write amateur sleuths so our characters are by definition not going to do what a regular person would do. I hope I haven't ventured into TSTL territory (too stupid to live)but I'm not writing about myself so my character can and must be more adventurous. Simply calling the cops is not an option. I'm not going to have her take on a gang of bikers with only a weed whacker and a set of keys (oh, wait, she may have done that in book two...)but within reason she can get in and out of trouble.

It did bother me in one chapter of a recent read, but the rest of the book was so good I gave the author a bye. I'm still pretty new so perhaps I'm more forgiving. And I rarely finish mysteries I don't like, so perhaps it just doesn't come up that much for me.

Personally I'm relieved to learn it would take a lot to drive you to murder - some of my characters are not so well-adjusted.

JAN: So if we are being completely honest.....the answer is no. If the book is written in a realistic style, I can't forgive an illogical plot twist. I'm a total witch about it. (Comedic or stylistic books are a different story.)

This is one of the real reasons I don't read many thrillers, particularly male-written thrillers. They tend to start out brilliantly with a really interesting, fast action and logical plot. Then, at the end, as if there's some sort of ongoing contest these writers have to outdo each other, they go for ONE LAST PLOT TWIST. And frankly, I always find them preposterous.

Examples? I don't want to get too specific, or I'll ruin the books for anyone who hasn't read it. But since this one has already been made into the movie and widely seen... . I'll say that I absolutely loved Dennis Lehane's Gone Baby Gone, with its rich and brilliantly written characters until....The end. I found the final plot twist and motivation for the kidnapping, not just stupid, but preposterous. So illogical and unrealistic -- in a book written in a realistic style -- that It ruined the book for me. (My son saw the movie, and without us discussing the book first, came home with the exact same reaction.)

The worst part is that the final, irrational plot twist is usually completely unnecessary, just tagged on at the end. This has happened to me in at three other thrillers, each by a different best-selling male author.

HANK: Just chiming in--yes, the endings are so difficult! Because something BIG has to happen. And the proof of the difficulty is that so often the ending is outrageous. The worst ever: Angels and Demons. Sorry ,Dan. But you can't jump out of a...oh, I don't want to ruin it for anywone who hasn't read it. But trust me, it CANNOT happen.

ROBERTA: That "go down in the basement" thing is very hard to resist, though, especially with amateur sleuths as Ro points out. My agent is currently circulating a new book in which exactly that happens. But my character is a Realtor and someone left a light on in her client's basement. She HAS to go! the key may be building the character up clearly enough so that her motivation for doing something ridiculous hangs together and doesn't pull the reader out of the story.

I would say that I'm a pretty forgiving reader. I love Randy Wayne White's Doc Ford series but the plots have become more and more preposterous. But I read them anyway because I'm crazy about Doc.

RHYS: Sorry about the 'aspirate' versus apparate mix up. I have just blogged on my solo blog (www.rhysbowen.blogspot.com) that my brain and hands don't always coordinate which results in horrible typing bloopers. Example in point "she shook her fish at him."
I think the problem wish so many thrillers is that the writer comes up with a brilliant concept--wouldn't it be great if... but it's not thought through to a logical ending. Maybe there isn't a satisfactory outcome for the particular concept so you wind up with unbelievable endings.

So friends--how tolerant are you of improbably plot twists?

Perchance to Dream

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on..."

RHYS: Sorry to be waxing so Shakespearean today. At least it proves that I did occasionally pay attention in English class!But my blog today is on dreams.

Recently I haven't been feeling too well, battling a stomach complaint, and one of the things that has happened is that I have difficulty sleeping. I fall asleep just fine, then wake at midnight or one o'clock wide awake and not able to sleep again. So my sleep pattern has become horribly disturbed.

This is hard to accept for me, who has always been the sort of person who zonks out the moment my head touches the pillow and wakes again when it's light. And because my sleep has been disturbed, I've been doing less dreaming. I'm currently writing a new Molly book and I've been finding it hard going. I wondered why, as I have such a great story in my head, until it occurred to me that maybe the lack of dreaming may have something to do with it.
So I'm wondering--does a writer or other creative person need to dream to create? Do all creative people dream all the time and vividly? My theory is now that we need that brain rewiring, cleaning and debugging before we can create. We may also need those dreams to pre-plan where we are going with the story,

I have always had incredibly vivid dreams--always in color and with the five senses often involved. I taste food, enjoy scents, hear music , even better than a great movie, or even more terrifying if it's a nightmare. One of the best courses I took at college was one on dream pschology. It was in Germany and taught by an eminent German dream psychologist. So ever since then I can interpret my own (and my friends') dreams. Of course most dreams are only the brain reexamining and processing events of the day, or descrambling crossed wires, but certain symbols are pertinent and recurring dreams always mean something.
I often dream the stress dreams--rushing to catch the train, trying to pack my clothes before I miss the flight or finding myself in school with an exam I can't finish. It's funny that the stress dreams are always school and not college. I geuss college was an all around good experience for me. But if I'm dreaming something odd and different, I talk it through and often find that I use the words to tell me what's wrong. An example: a friend said she kept on dreaming she ran into Marks and Spencer(the big department store in England) and she wanted to buy something but they were closing and the shelves were amost empty. She asked what it meant. I told her that she'd given the clue by choosing Marks and Spenser as her store. She'd always wanted to go go art school. Her parents had sent her out to get a job instead and she'd always regretted it. Hence she dreamed of going to a place where there were "marks" which we say instead of grades in UK. But she's worried she's left it too late.

So if you have a dream you want interpreted, ask me.And fellow Jungle Reds--do you dream a lot and vividly? Do you think that is something common to all creative people,ANDhave you ever dreamed a good plot that you've later used?

JAN: I dream A LOT and vividly. Sometimes I dream really loud sounds that wake me up. My brain switches right into wild dreams even as I doze off. I have to meditate with my eyes open so it doesn't happen.
Last night I dreamt I was making YOUTUBE videos for a living. It was a lot of fun, but I have yet to incorporate a dream into life or even a plot.

When I was a health reporter, I interviewed a Harvard brain researcher who was convinced that we used our dream cycles to process the trauma and emotion in our life. And that was one of the reasons people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) couldn't process their trauma -- because the trauma itself interrupted the dream cycle. So that could also support your theory on creativity, Rhys. The brain needs to rest and mend to process life and create.

ROBERTA: First of all Rhys, I'm very sympathetic to the sleep problems. I've had them for a

while, and lately of just the variety you describe: wake up at 2-3 pm and lie there for hours. I've had several people recommend melatonin and I'm going to try it.
On to dreams: As a psychologist I was always listening for them. I was not taught to interpret certain dream figments as having meaning in themselves, but to explore the patient's thoughts and associations around the dream. In other words, the dream might reveal thoughts/problems/feelings that the person was not aware of in conscious life. And as Rebecca Butterman would say, the more we know about ourselves, the less we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
I have two unpleasant recurring dreams. One involves driving a car backwards downhill out of control. Haven't had that for a while and hope not to!! The second (I had a variation of this last night) is a golf dream. I'm trying to hit the ball off the tee, but I can't get my tee into the ground, or the fairway is extremely narrow or even a tunnel. I think it's very much like those school anxiety dreams but a different setting. I only wish I would dream a good plot--I could use one about now!

HANK: Oh, Roberta, I've never ever had a golf dream. (And I must say those have a bit of Freudian overtones...but I'll leave that to the experts.)
Yes, the school dreams: classes that disappear, tests I should have known about, rooms that I can't find. Also about TV, with the time ticking by and I had no implement to write my story for the news with. Once I woke up in the middle of the night, stressed and terrified, having been dreaming that I was writing on my notepad with a fingernail since there were no pencils. For years I was plagued with those.
Then one night I had a dream that I was in a play. Curtain up--and I had no idea what I was supposed to do onstage. I didn't know the words or the steps. And then, in the dream, I said to myself: This is a dream. So no probelm. And besides, I know the words and the steps. I never had the dream again.
Now, I dream in beautiful color about a house I didn't know I had. It's the same house every time, with secret gorgeous rooms full of wonderful things. And I could describe it to you perfectly.

HALLIE: It's so nice to know everyone else has those anxiety dreams. The play. The exams. The class I'm taking but I don't know when it meets or where. Last night I dreamed that, in addition to having two magazine articles and a novel to complete, four weeks of travel to take, and my daughter’s August wedding to plan, my husband and I had sold our house and needed to move. I had no trouble interpreting that. It’s the too-much-to-do-so-you-might-as-well-give-up dream.
Once I had a great dream (I can’t remember what it was about) and woke thinking: I can use that in a book. I wrote it down and in the morning there was a piece of paper on my bedside on which I’d scrawled “pink gravy.” Or at least I think that’s what it said

RHYS: It's interesting that I've also had the car running backward dream and Hank's dream of standing in the wings waiting to go onstage and suddenly realizing that I have no idea what my lines are. Sometimes this works out well and I step onstage and just seem to know what to say, other times I'm rushing around looking for the script. What a bunch of neurotics we are!

So has anyone out there ever dreamed a whole plot?