Author: Susan Breen

Description does not come easily to me. I can write pages and pages of dialogue, but ask me to describe a room and I start to twitch. I recognized some time ago that this might be a barrier to a career as an author and so I settled upon a way to force myself to observe. Every day I take a walk in the woods. With my dogs. Every day I observe the same thing, except it’s not the same thing, because it changes from day to day. There are the seasonal changes, of course, which are very evident now. Acorns are falling, leaves are drifting, chipmunks are chirping. That was a surprise to me. A chipmunk sounds like a bird.   There are also changes after storms. I love to walk in the woods after a bad storm and look at all the drama. Some of the trees are uprooted, and they fall sideways, and their skirts make me think of ladies in crinolines. Sometimes one tree crashes on top of another, and then they look like monsters fighting. Sometimes a storm will force all the leaves off a tree, so what was bright and gold yesterday will be bare today. But then there are all sorts of quiet changes. Mushrooms erupt. Shifting light makes an innocuous looking stump look ominous. Streams dry up, or they overflow. There is one particular rock that is driving me crazy. It is way too big to move, and yet it does. Sometimes it’s in the middle of the path, and sometimes to the side. I can’t figure it out. I feel like someone is following me and moving it around, though that seems unlikely. However, when my oldest son was young I did one day go in the woods, did my circuit, and when I got done I discovered that a troop of Boy Scouts had following me. Evidently I am so focused on observing that I’m not paying attention to anything else. (Not surprisingly, there’s a scene in Maggie Dove’s Detective Agency when she’s being followed in the woods, though not by Boy Scouts.) One of my favorite trees in the woods is an ash. The leaves stay green, then turn a beautiful pale silvery color and curl up and they’re there all through the winter. They always make me think of sea shells. Then spring comes and they all fall to the ground and new green ones grow. I’m always excited to see that tree because I’m never quite sure what it’s going to do next. 

When writing about a character, I like to ask her 10 questions. (Actually, I’m more likely to ask her 1,000 questions, but that would be a very long blog post.) 1. What is your happiest memory? 2. What do you worry about before you go to sleep? 3. What’s your favorite tree? (That was an easy one for Maggie Dove. An oak.) 4. What do you regret? 5. Do you like chocolate candy or Skittles, and why? 6. If your best friend’s husband flirted with you, would you flirt back? 7. Do you believe in evil? (This became an issue in Maggie Dove’s Detective Agency.) 8. What scares you? 9. If you won a million dollars, what would you do with it? 10. What’s your favorite book? The more questions I ask, the more real the character becomes to me, and what I love is when a character surprises me. When I asked Maggie Dove about her happiest memory, she told me about an afternoon she wore a red dress and surprised her husband. I didn’t see that coming, but I loved it and went with it and it’s one of my favorite moments in the book. What questions would you add to the list?

 The other day I wrote about being a cozy author, and there is no author cozier than Agatha Christie. She invented the genre, and sometimes I like to look through her quotes for inspiration. Here are some of my favorites. 1. “The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes. ”  2. “Do you know my friend that each one of us is a dark mystery, a maze of conflicting passions and desire and aptitudes?” ― Agatha Christie, Lord Edgware Dies 3. “The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.” ― Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 4. “Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.” ― Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles 5. “I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” ― Agatha Christie 6. “There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.” ― Agatha Christie, An Autobiography 7. “It is completely unimportant. That is why it is so interesting.” ― Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 8. “What good is money if it can’t buy happiness?” ― Agatha Christie, The Man in the Brown Suit 9. “There is too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will. I must concede you the Devil. God doesn’t really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We’re so busy punishing ourselves.” ― Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger 10. “There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.” ― Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage

The other day I saw a wonderful clip of J.K. Rowling on Facebook. She was talking about how she struggled with failure for a long time, but in the end concluded that it stripped away the inessential and gave her the freedom to write Harry Potter. Something she said stuck with me: “It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might not have lived at all, in which case you fail by default.” I suspect every writer in the world knows just what she’s talking about. Listening to her speak reminded me of my first novel, which was a fairly epic failure. I’m not referring here to The Fiction Class, which was published by Penguin in 2008. I like to think of that as a success. But I’m thinking of the first novel I wrote, titled PITCH. I started writing it in the mid-1990s, having spent many years writing and publishing short stories. I figured I knew what I was doing in that area, and so how difficult would it be to switch over. The novel is about a woman who trained to be a concert pianist, but suffered from stage-fright, and so was happy to walk away from that career when she became a wife and mother. She thought she was happy, anyway, until one day her old lover showed up on her doorstep. He was a great pianist, but he was fascinated by the music of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, and he was convinced that he’d become possessed by an evil spirit after having performed one of Scriabin’s sonatas that was said to call up the devil. (In fact, some pianists have died after performing it.) He needed her help, but that involved her betraying her husband and coming to terms with choices she had made. I spent seven years on that novel. The first chapter was fabulous and won a best novel prize at a big conference. Publishers were interested. One young editor read it and wanted it, but when she gave it to her senior editor, she said, “I just don’t know what this about.” I revised it. I resubmit. I learned how to play the piano. I was awful. My mother used to make fun of me. I revised it. I got wonderful rejections, but everyone said it was just a little odd. Or else they’d say if I’d written it ten years earlier, it would have been published in a minute. I changed the point of view. I changed the ending. I changed the middle, and finally I changed the beginning, which was the one part I knew really worked. Finally, after seven years of this, I put it aside. I then spent four years working on a novel titled COURTING DISASTER, about a woman who gets engaged 17 times, and then finally falls in love. That didn’t sell either, though I think it had a better narrative arc and best of all, there was a character in it, Chuck Jones, who I loved, and who became an important character in THE FICTION CLASS. I wish both those novels had sold, but they didn’t, and yet I learned so much from them. I consider them my very long M.F.A. degrees. Or perhaps Ph.Ds. I never would have chosen to work for so long on something that didn’t work, but I don’t regret what I did. I gave it my heart. The other day, I was thinking about a scene I might like to write in a new MAGGIE DOVE. There’s a piano teacher in the series, Arthur Cavanaugh, who doesn’t have a big role, but he could. In fact, it’s possible an old lover of his will show up, and will be concerned that she’s possessed by Scriabin’s ghost. I don’t know. Just a thought.

This past weekend I went to New Orleans to take part in the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, which consists of hordes of writers and readers coming together to talk about mysteries. This was my first time at Bouchercon and my first time in New Orleans and I am bubbling over with all the wonderful experiences I had. Here, in no particular order, are 10 of the best. 1. Drinking a Bulleit Old-Fashioned. It was pink and frothy and I won’t say it was strong, but I didn’t have anything else to drink for the next three days and I was perfectly happy. (Here’s a recipe, if you want to make one: https://www.bulleit.com/whiskey-drinks/frontier-old-fashioned/)   2. Seeing the Mississippi River. I’m sure I have seen it before over the long course of my life (perhaps when I was on the Lewis and Clark expedition). But I haven’t seen it lately, and when you look at it it’s hard not to be moved by the important role it’s played in our country’s history. 3. Talking to private detective and author Ben Keller, who gave me many fabulous suggestions for how to make Maggie Dove a better detective. I won’t share them now. You’ll have to read the book! 4. Being on a panel. My panel was titled, Endless Harmony, and it took place at 9:00 on Saturday morning. Of course I spent all Friday night agonizing, but when I actually got there, it was so much fun. Cathy Pickens was the moderator, and fellow cozy writers Kathi Daley, Sherry Harris, Sara Rosett and Julie Anne Lindsey were on the panel. Dru Ann Love was our time-keeper. Afterwards someone told me it looked like we were all great friends, and it felt that way too. 5. Walking around the French Quarter, which is just as beautiful as in the movies. 6. Going to the Sisters-in-Crime breakfast and hearing about all the wonderful things they have planned. They are a great resource for all mystery writers. 7. Going to the book bazaar. This was a huge room filled with books and everyone who attended Bouchercon got tickets that allowed them to pick out 6 or 8 (I forget) free books. I’m happy to report that there were bound copies of Maggie Dove there and they were all taken (and not just by me!) 8. Eating. So much good food. Praline bread pudding and beignets covered in confectioner’s sugar. And that was just breakfast. 9. Attending a dinner for Random House authors at Brennan’s restaurant. That had to be a career high, especially when I walked into the room and saw Lee Child and shook his hand. 10. Meeting the Miss Demeanors in person. (Okay, I saved the best for last). What a joy it was to meet everyone. (Or almost everyone, because Alexia is in Ireland, doing research.) We had great meals, we talked, we planned, we chatted with our fabulous agent, Paula Munier, who worked the whole time lining up opportunities for us. It was magical. So that was Bouchercon, or some of it. Next year, Toronto!  

I teach creative writing for Gotham Writers in Manhattan. The hardest part of my job is not the critiquing, or the lecturing, or the reading–though that’s certainly work. But the hardest thing to do is make sure that everyone likes each other. Or at least respects each other, and after years of working on this, I’ve discovered that the best predictor of whether a class is going to go well is whether people refer to each other by their names. Now you may think that sounds easy. All you have to do is introduce people and they’ll know each other’s names. But you’d be wrong. Most of us, especially when we’re nervous, which people usually are when they’re in a writing class, are not paying attention to extraneous information, such as the name of that guy sitting in the corner. So he might tell you his name is Joseph Conrad, but if you’re like me, it goes right out of your head. What you do not want is a group of people saying, “Yes, I agree with that lady in the blue shirt.” You want people connecting, and so my job is to harangue my students into remembering names (in a polite way). The difficulty is compounded by the fact that I teach in Times Square and my students come from all over the world. I grew up with people named Susan and Robert and very occasionally Priscilla. But in my classes I am presented with a true cornucopia of names, which is fabulous, but hard to get straight. So one of the things I do is write people’s name down using my own phonetic system and then I keep saying those names over and over again. Zagreb, would you hand Sushma a piece of paper? Alice, will you help Rothschild lower the window? And so on.  Sometimes, if even my best efforts don’t work, I do one of my favorite writing exercises, which is to have people write about how they got their name. Everyone has a story about her name. One of my favorites (I won’t use her name), was a woman whose parents had agreed on the name they were going to give her. But when her mother went into labor, her father left the hospital and went to a bar. Where he stayed for 36 hours. The mother was so angry that she decided to name her daughter after a television character in a TV series she knew he didn’t like. So every time that man said his daughter’s name, it was a rebuke. My own name comes as a result of a compromise between my parents. My father was Jewish, born in the Bronx, and my mother was Christian, born in Queens. My father was truly the best-natured person in the world, and he almost never said no to my mother, but when they were talking about baby names for me, my mother said she wanted to name me Christina. My father said, “Absolutely not! No Jew from the Bronx can have a daughter named Christina.” So they settled on Susan, which is an old Hebrew and Biblical name. All of this is a long way of saying that I have been thinking about community a lot, having just returned from my first trip to Bouchercon, which is a huge gathering of mystery writers and readers that takes place once a year, this year in New Orleans. One of the most fun parts was getting to meet people whose names I knew from Facebook or Twitter. In a reverse of the usual situation, I knew the name but not the person. But more about that on my blog tomorrow. How about you? Where does your name come from?