Who Can We Write?

LUCY BURDETTE: I went to hear Betsy Lerner speak at RJ Julia booksellers two weeks ago about her new book, SHRED SISTERS. She was a long time nonfiction agent and editor before starting to write her first novel. I became most intrigued with her answer to how she could write about such a young woman when she is a long way from that age. She answered: I carry that girl with me everywhere. 

For me, this was like hitting a gong that reverberated from head to toe. In the contemporary women’s fiction that I am slowly drafting, the main character is in her early 20s and arriving in Paris for the first time. What in the world would make me feel like I had the slightest idea about what she might be thinking and feeling? I realized that I was drawing from my own experience going to France for 5 months in the 1970’s, feeling overwhelmed and terribly homesick. My memories of landing in Paris and barely speaking the language and knowing not a soul are still seared in my psyche. I was farmed out to a French family to celebrate New Year’s Eve when I first arrived. They ate very late and very thoroughly and all the conversation was in fast French and they served RAW OYSTERS. OMG, I was dying. Many years from now (I hope) on my deathbed, I think that scared and overwhelmed girl will still be with me. 

Two questions for the day: As a writer, do you have any trouble writing characters who are much younger or otherwise different from you? Must powerful characters come from personal experience? 

HALLIE EPHRON: It’s a challenge for me to write in a VOICE (narrator) who’s a lot younger than myself. That’s where the internet is so helpful because you can go out and LISTEN to podcasts and videos that help tune your ear. (And it helps to have an extended family loaded with “experts” on how their generation says stuff and thinks.)

And yes, I absolutely think the most powerful characters come from personal experience – truly negative traumatic experiences can be spun into gold.

RHYS BOWEN: I got a letter from a reader once saying, “I’ve just seen your photo and until then I thought you were the same age as Lady Georgie.”  Flattering, I suppose. But I have to say that when I write first person as either Georgie or Molly Murphy I really do think and feel like them. When I started both series the voice came to me instantly so that it was almost like dictating what they were saying.  I have to be inside the head of my protagonist. I don’t know how I would handle a protagonist I didn’t like.  And I don’t think I see the world as an elderly woman. Inside the wrinkles is still that twenty something. 

JENN McKINLAY: My main characters in the romcoms and the mysteries have ranged in age from 27 to 50. Occasionally I feel like a fraud for writing about a twenty-something who upends her life but then I remember when I was 25, I threw all of my stuff and my cat and moved 3,000 miles across the country with no place to live or job and I didn’t have GPS or a cell phone. When I remember that version of me, I know I’m fine. I do think personal experience is critical for writing. How can you write about fear if you’ve never been afraid? Etc. And, yes, there are versions of me that are so powerful, I still draw on them when I need to. 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I don’t think I’d be able to write children as viewpoint characters, because those years seem so distant, and I can’t really connect with the emotions that child had. But the young woman I was? Oh, yes, so very much. Being in college, going abroad for school, the boys, the men, the dancing on the bar (Yes! Only once, though.) That somewhat wild young woman is still inside me, cleverly disguised by wrinkles and gray hair.

I do echo Hallie in that if I’m writing someone young TODAY, it helps enormously to have young people in your life to run the language past. Not just the slang terms - there are words and aphorisms most people under twenty don’t know. I said, “It’s a tempest in a teapot” to my 27-year-old K-drama-watching friend and she had never heard the phrase before. And when I went to explain it, I had to tackle “what is a tempest” first!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: This is a great question. I find it very easy to write little kids–age maybe 5 to 13. Their voices just come out of me, and it’s actually, I will admit, it’s  a pleasure. Not sure where it comes from, but I can hear them, and their hopes and fears and misconceptions.

A person older than 40, yes, got that, any gender.

But whoa, a thirty-something woman. That is so difficult, and I really have to think about it. Today’s 30’s are so different from mine–attitude, expectations, confidence. 

As for powerful–hmm. I have written powerful scenes that do not come out of my specific personal experience–I have never been kidnapped, for instance. But I can channel fear and darkness from my own fears, I guess, and apply them. It’s like method acting–I can pretend it happened, and then write that. And I do feel the fear–or suspicion, or anger– when I’m in that part of the book. I make myself be someone else. 

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I've always liked writing characters that were different from me. Two of my favorites from my very first book were women in the eighties. I felt so at home in their heads, even though I was on the cusp of forty at the time. I like writing children and teenagers, too–those ages are still in my head. Hank has a good point about writing about young women in their thirties and forties, who maybe have more confidence than I did at that age. But do they really feel any different about the basic things? 

LUCY AGAIN: As a human being, for everyone, is there a version of yourself that feels so powerful, you will never lose touch with it (even if you might want to?)

 

Age Discrimination?

LUCY BURDETTE:  I’d been working along on my latest manuscript and thinking about a plot for another book in the Key West series, when it occurred to me to wonder whether I was really qualified to write about the inner life of a 20 something? Or even a 30 something? On the other hand, I realized that I’d never had a main character over the age of 40. Hayley Snow is in her twenties, nearing thirty (maybe) and Cooper Hunziker is in her 30s. 

One theory to explain the phenomenon might be that this is what publishers want. And they believe this is what the reading public wants. Another might be that I write about an age in my life that is strongly imprinted in my memory, maybe a time when I went through important changes. What do you think Reds? What age do you write? 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: My main characters range from early fifties to late twenties, but i have everyone from grandparents in their eighties to little kids in my books. As someone was in college and was a young working single during the Regan years, the hardest ages for me to write are the twenties and thirties. Despite slang and social media, teens have not altered much since my day, probably because the job of those years - figuring out who you are and how you relate to the world - is the same. 

But Millennials have gone through a whole different kind of youth than I did - online from an early age, graduating during the Great Recession, burdened with school loans and social expectations that bear no resemblance to what I had to deal with. I'm lucky in that I have kids between the ages of 18 - 26, and I have godchildren aged 29 - 35, so I have a lot of sources to help me get it right. I'm comfortable with writing Hadley Knox, who's a mother of two and in her mid-thirties, but I'd really have to stretch to write a main character who was, say, the Smithie's age. I'd want to spend a lot of time reading fiction with twenty-somethings before I tackled it.

HALLIE EPHRON: I like to write generations of women, young and hip and old and prickly. YOU'LL NEVER KNOW, DEAR has three generations -- a 30-something, her mother, and her grandmother. Or working the other way, a woman in her 70s, her daughter, and her granddaughter. In THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN I've got an 80+ year old with her neighbor's daughter who's in her 30s. I feel like the different perspectives sparks misunderstandings, conflict. 

Besides, older women are hot. Right now. And not just on the BBC. ( (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Pelosi, Janet Yellen, Angela Merkel, Helen Mirren, Glenn Close...) 

LUCY: And that reminds me Hallie, that Hayley Snow’s roommate, 80-year-old Miss Gloria, is probably the character from the Key West books that I hear most about!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I was talking to a big time person who should know (not an author) who says the best age for a character in FICTION (the kind we're talking about here) is about 33. I don't wanna debate it--I'm just saying that's what she said. She says that's who readers want.  Mid-forties is too old for a main character.  Agree or not--but that's from pretty on high.

 I'm most comfortable writing from the viewpoint of--and this is so odd--kids who are about nine.  The difficult age for me is that 30's group--because a thirty-something now is SO different from 30-something me. But I do love to get to be that age again, through fiction--because of course you have to channel how they feel, and understand how that's the result of their particular experiences.

A main player in THE MURDER LIST is referred to as "a grandmother " by a court clerk, and indeed she is. She's also treated with super-hyper-partronizing kid gloves by a judge.  But when I parsed out how old she really was, she was, um, my age.  Ahh.

JENN McKINLAY: I've never really thought about it. My characters pretty much arrive on scene with their age already established. My protagonists range from 25 to 35 because those seem to be the big life change years where the relationships are the big ones, the career choices are solid, etc. The supporting cast is always diverse in age and ethnicity and sexual orientation. I try to get into the head of each character so that they are authentic. Mostly, I try not to overthink it. 

RHYS BOWEN: my main characters seem to be young women in their twenties, apart from Constable Evans who was in his late twenties, and Hugo who was in his thirties. I'm lucky because most of my stories take place in the past so I don't have to worry about what is current or what young people want. I have plenty of young female fans. I have received fan letters that say " I've just seen your photo and until now I thought you were the same age as Lady Georgie. I have to say her first person voice and Molly's voice came to me so easily and naturally.

I would not want to write a book starring an elderly woman. It's much more fun to be twenty again!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: My four main series characters range between late twenties, mid-thirties, and early forties (since they are aging VERY slowly) but I've always loved writing all ages. Even my first novel had a stroppy fifteen-year-old and a couple of elderly sisters. I adore Hallie's Mina and Lucy's Miss Gloria--I certainly don't have a prejudice against reading books with older protagonists. And I guess it's a good thing nobody told J.K. Rowling she couldn't sell a book with an eleven-year-old protagonist...

Reds, any thoughts about this? And what age characters do you prefer to read about?

The Mystery of the Missing Character: a guest blog by Jill Edmondson

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: The descriptions for Jill Edmondson's Sasha Jackson series include words like "classy madam," "fetish party," "naughty sex" and "talking dirty," so you KNOW the Reds are all over this like gin on olives. 

Ahem. Because, of course, we're fascinated by the way Jill has set the traditional PI story on its head. In a field crowded with flat-foots and and gumshoes, her sleuth has a penchant for high-heels and phone sex. When a unique character like Sasha Jackson pops up, it's easy for other writers to say, "Why didn't I think of that?" Well, you're in luck, because Jill is going to tell us exactly what sort of research and planning goes into "thinking of that."

Attention All Aspiring Crime Writers!!!! Here’s a $1,000,000 dollar whodunit idea, and it’s yours this week for free! That’s right: FREE! You just have to read the rest of this post and then act on the advice contained herein...

First some background...

Quite some time ago, long before I was published or before I had even finished my first manuscript, I attended a seminar for wannabe mystery authors. The speaker emphasized that a writer should know – really and truly be familiar with her genre (whatever it may be). Get to know the best-selling and most prolific mystery authors of that genre. Get to know the characters, the settings and the conventions of whodunits. In addition to being a sort of training - which reading the genre most certainly is - a great degree of familiarity with whodunits will also help you to figure out WHAT’S MISSING FROM THE GENRE. And that’s what you should write.

Let me explain...

If there are few-to-no police procedurals, then you should write one. If there are few-to-no gay detectives, then you need to create one. If there are no visible minority private eyes, then that’s what you must invent.

Some more background (but this time it’s nerdy...)

As part of the course work for my MA, I did a number of papers on Crime Fiction, and in particular I looked at women in crime fiction. After reading something like 728,351 mystery novels featuring female main characters, I could safely say I knew what the genre had to offer when it came to female lead characters. There are bodacious bounty hunters, ingenious investigators, cunning caterers, awesome attorneys, terrific taxi-drivers and so much more.

It is interesting to note (and I’m not the first one to notice this) that crime fiction, overall, has mirrored and embraced demographic shifts. Verisimilitude is contemporary mystery fiction’s word of the day. Crime fiction protagonists are no longer overwhelmingly male (let’s give a round of applause to Marcia Muller for this). Whodunit protagonists are no longer isolated loners walking down those mean streets.

Modern sleuths now have families and close circles around them, whether those bonds are with traditional families or chosen ones, such as a “little sister”, an elderly landlord, a niece, or someone else. Indeed, many sleuths have children of their own, which is cool. It’s nice to see art imitate life.

In fact, there are even a number of single parents in the world of crime fiction. Two of the first hardboiled dicks to have offspring were Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder and Michael Z. Lewin’s Samson, although neither of these divorced dads has custody of his children. Les Roberts’s Milan Jacovich mysteries has dad taking the kids on alternate weekends. Then of course, there is the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly: full time cop and full time single dad with teenaged daughter. 
 

Single moms (more specifically: custodial single moms) abound in mystery as in real life. According to Parents without Partners, single mother families numbered 10 million in 2000, 46% of which have more than one child. Mystery readers can check out single moms like Elaine Viets’s Josie Marcus, Marianne MacDonald’s Dido Hoare, Diane Mott Davidson’s Goldie Bear, and Anne Underwood Grant’s protagonist Sydney Teague. What’s interesting to note is that these characters are a mystery shopper, a bookseller, a caterer, and an advertising agency owner respectively.

I’m almost at my point...

What you may have begun to notice is that the male single dads (whether custodial or not) are all officially employed in law enforcement on some level or another. They may not all be cops or licensed PI’s but they make their living from solving crimes. The female single mothers on the other hand, are all amateur sleuths – shopkeepers stumbling over dead bodies, chefs happening upon a cadaver. For too many of the single moms in mystery fiction, crime solving is an accident, a sideline, a by-product of their “real job”. 

So here’s the idea (and YES, I know!)...

If you want to write the character that the genre seems to be missing, then you should write a single mother who earns her living as a cop or an investigator or something along those lines. There’s room for a new series in which a female protagonist is employed in an official crime solving capacity, and not simply an anthropologist or a photographer who tripped on a corpse. She should have at least one kid her who lives with her full time.

Yes, yes, yes. I know about the Joanna Brady series by JA Jance (and, indeed, Joanna Brady is not the ONLY single mom who solves crime for a living, but given the number of titles in the series, she definitely stands out). The widowed Joanna is the Sheriff Cochise County in Arizona. Great series, love the character. But the genre has room for another Joanna, and mystery readers (you already know that more women buy mysteries than men do, right?) would most likely be happy to have one or two female versions of Harry Bosch.

So there you go: Create a supermom-supersleuth who juggles badges and baby bottles, handcuffs and homework, guns and gummi bears, and my guess is that you’d have a winner.

You’re welcome!

You're going to be thanking Jill for more than her clever writing tips. Dead Light District, the second book in the Sasha Jackson series, is available as a FREE Kindle download today and Sunday, the 14th and 15th of July. The Lies Have It, the third book in the series, will be available as a FREE Kindle download on Wednesday and Thursday, Julia 18 and 19. No e-reader? No problem!  Jill has three signed copies of her first mystery, Blood and Groom, to give away! Leave a comment letting us know what you'd like to see in an original sleuth, and you could be one of the lucky winners.


You can learn more about Jill Edmondson and her books at her website. Jill also blogs, and is on Twitter as @JillEdmondson