John Le Carre was a government agent before he started writing spy novels. Hank Phillippi Ryan is an investigative reporter who writes about an investigative reporter. On the other hand, Tom Clancy was an insurance salesman before he wrote espionage novels. Lee Child was a TV producer, among other jobs, before he started the Jack Reacher series. Readers of our blog know I’m a cyber crime fighter who writes about cyber crime. How about you, my fellow Miss Demeanors? Do you write what you know, or do you write based on research or another source of inspiration? Cate: I’m a former business journalist who covered technology companies, often the cute social networking startups that ended up taking over the world. I was also a television news producer. I think the decade of journalism, working for newspapers and magazines, taught me how to research and write tight. I bring that to my fiction. My stories, however, are more close to home than anything that I covered. As a domestic suspense writer (or psychological suspense, given my upcoming book), I write about close relationships that go wrong. The macro is not as important as the micro for me. Michele: I’ve done some writing using a lawyer as a protagonist, but I’ve had the most fun writing the character of rogue lawyer turned island bar owner, Neil Perry, Sabrina Salter’s significant other. Neil is your typical irreverent, smart, bad boy lawyer. My lawyer colleagues all love him. Some of them think they are him. There is no inspiration better for understanding human depth and conflict than witnessing the agony of people who find themselves in family court. I had more than thirty years of this kind of “inspiration” as a family law attorney and mediator. There are no stakes higher than the threat of the loss of your family as you know it. Paula: I follow my own advice, outlined in my writing books: Write what you know. Write what you love. Write what you’d love to know. I started off as a reporter, and that has served me very well in terms of research as well as craft. I also was an acquisitions editor for many years and that has served me well as an agent and as a writer. But in terms of specifics, I can trace the influences in my work pretty easily, as I think most of us can: 1) Growing up in a military family informs my fascination for all things military and law-enforcement.2) My mother read mysteries and so I did, too.3) My love affair with British literature (and I include crime fiction in that) began when we were stationed in Europe when I was a kid and our British friends introduced me to Sherlock Holmes, and grew as I grew and discovered Jane Austen and Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. My mother took me to Paris and I learned to speak French and I fell in love with all things French as well, including the magnificent George Simenon. Any excuse to weave in anything about Europe or the UK or Shakespeare or Paris is one I can rarely resist.4) I grew up with dogs and cats and I have dogs and cats, so there are always dogs and cats in my stories.5) I am a woman of enthusiasms and these always show up in my books, from chaos theory to potager gardens to Greek mythology. When it comes right down to it, I use whatever I can to help make a story work. And everything I’ve ever done, everything I’m doing now, and everything I will do in the future helps me prime the pump. Tracee: Certainly my life and interests have influenced my writing and my characters. I practiced architecture and think that plays out in my enthusiasm for the nuances of locales. At the same time, I’ve lived and traveled extensively in the US and abroad, and the places I’ve been, and the people I’ve met, walk through my pages. I am also influenced by my early (early grade school) love of mysteries…. how could I not want to contribute to the genre? Ultimately I think that what plays out in my writing is that I am interested in about everything…. I may not be an expert in anything, but I love new experiences and ideas and situations and that plays a role in inspiring the next story. Writing is living vicariously. What a joy it is! Susan: I would add to Paula’s list (which I agree with 100%!) that I also try to write about things I have something to say about. I love cozies. I think Agatha Christie saw me through my childhood, and when I began writing my Maggie Dove mysteries, I was very mindful of Miss Marple, but also wanted to put a Susan Breen spin on that. So I brought in my enthusiasms for church and small villages and feral cats and the Hudson River and economics and Russian history and so on. Alexia: I’m a physician (family medicine) who’s chosen a career in public service instead of private practice. Yes, I’m one of the oft-maligned career Civil Servants. I started out in a primary care clinic at a Military Treatment Facility, changed to Veterans’ Administration outpatient clinics, then decided adventure in the primary care clinic at an Alaskan Native Hospital was the way to go. (I was wrong.) I headed back to the Lower 48 where I took a job at a Military Entrance Processing Station examining applicants for the military. (Think of George Bailey’s 4-F scene in It’s a Wonderful Life.) Then I moved up into a policy job at the HQ (the job I have now) where I work on medical policy governing medical qualification for military service. My first non-clinical job. Oddly, I don’t write about medicine. I get so wrapped up in work, writing serves as a check and balance. Writing reminds me that life exists outside of medicine. I did try to write a mystery (What else?) featuring a physician protagonist but I ended up going off on a rant about the current state of primary care. Okay for the op-ed page, perhaps, but not for a novel. I may create a physician-sleuth someday, once I get to the point where I can take a step (dozens of steps) back from the practice of medicine and approach it objectively. As Jonathan Kellerman said (Yes, Jonathan Kellerman actually spoke to me.) at Left Coast Crime, my career gives me a lot of material to work with.  

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those oft-quoted words. It’s the first thing I write in new notebooks and have since junior high. It’s more meaningful than ever to me now.  I write cyber crime thrillers. It’s a subject I know way too much about – I’ve been fighting cyber crime for nearly 20 years. Being that close to a complex technical subject means, as a writer, I wrestle daily with terminology. Simplifying computer science concepts that take days, weeks, months and sometimes years to learn is a challenge. I do my best to distill these concepts in plain English. It’s when my development editor, beta readers and agent all unanimously agree that I know I’ve pulled it off. Only 1 of the 3 are on board with the most recent draft of one of my WIPs which means I’ve got work to do. It’s helpful that media and culture are starting to catch up to raise awareness of technology issues but I fell into a trap of overconfidence (or habit) because of that. Thus Emerson’s words came back to me. Keeping it simple isn’t just about the phrasing, it’s also recognizing when the “how” is beside the point. Most people don’t know, or care, how our cell phones work. We just want to know if we get reception and where we left the charger. My lesson these days is focusing the spotlight on the “who” and “why.” Simply put, it’s the characters, silly. 

On a walk yesterday I mulled over the traits of a particular character I’m creating while enjoying a perfect San Francisco spring day. About half the folks I saw bustling alongside me on the sidewalks wore headphones. Writers should never, ever do this.  The sights, sounds, smells and energy of the city all feed my imagination. Yesterday, in particular, it was the snippets of overheard conversations. Here are examples of some bits and pieces: “It’s important to me to eat the meat I kill.” “…then we started tap dancing and I…” “But when he went to Tijuana…” “Frankly, it made me uncomfortable…” “My wife is an architect. She’s in another time zone.” One of these lines helped fling me over a hurdle that ground a work in progress to a halt. When I eavesdrop…er, happen to catch parts of other people’s conversations, I let my brain go wild. I play games with the fragments to piece together stories, the more outrageous, the better. Standing at the crosswalk, dreaming up a story of a vegetarian killer targeting meat-eaters in Tijuana while on tour with his tap dancing troupe, a completely unrelated inspiration blossomed. It unlocked the puzzle I’d been working through about the character in my novel. I don’t know why this works but it does. For me, at least. Maybe it’s because my subconscious takes over pulling at whatever thread frustrates me when I occupy my conscious brain with word games. All I know is that I take these walks often and rarely get “writer’s block.” This may be one of the reasons writing prompts are popular. I just happen to get mine from total strangers. Where do you get your writing prompts/inspiration? 

Did anyone else see Glenn Close on Stephen Colbert last week? He asked her why she’s reprising her Tony-award winning role on Broadway, knowing full well that she’ll be ineligible for another Tony. Her response stuck with me. You can watch it here (thanks CBS!):   Ms. Close’s obvious passion for her craft and enthusiasm for the connection with her audience is what resonated with me. I write for the same reasons. It’s something that I can’t *not* do. Constantly honing my craft, creating visceral experiences through the power of my words, that’s my bliss. The world around us changes and evolves and the publishing markets change and evolve with it. This means there’s always more to learn therefore always room to grow. There’s also that thrill of connecting with readers, or, more accurately, inspiring that sense of connection in someone I’ll likely never even see. Those are the magical moments that keep me going and coming back for more. So, dear reader, please tell me – why do you write? 

Were I to murder someone, I would choose poison as a weapon. (Note to my husband: chew carefully!) There are so many benefits. First of all, it’s not bloody. It requires no physical strength. And if you plan ahead, you don’t even need to be around. Also, it’s so hard to detect.  So you can imagine the pleasure I’m having reading Kathryn Harkup’s wonderful book, A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie. Harkup, who describes herself as a “chemist, author and Agatha Christie fanatic,” goes through 14 Christie novels, and explains the poisons used, the real-life cases that inspired Christie, and the occasional thing she got wrong. She also includes all sorts of weird information.  For example: Cleopatra considered poisoning herself with arsenic, but felt it would leave her corpse looking too unattractive, so she opted for the asp (though Harkup reports this would still not have been a pain-free way to die and her cadaver would have needed some cosmetic retouching.) In Sparkling Cyanide, there was a potential antidote on the dinner table in the form of sugar in champagne. She goes on to say that Rasputin (of Russian religious fanatic fame) might have survived the poisoning attempts against him because of all the Madeira he drank on his final night.  Then there’s the case of the real-life serial murderer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, who used strychnine on his victims. When he was eventually hanged, in the 1890s, is it said that he last words were, “I am Jack the…”   Of course the best part of reading this book is having a chance to go over Agatha Christie’s great stories again, and with a guide who enjoys them so much. It makes me want to pick up one of my favorites, and perhaps I will. How about you? Do you have a favorite Agatha Christie?   

What’s your favorite genre? It’s a loaded question to ask a group of mystery writers. We all love mysteries, thrillers and suspense novels. Otherwise, we wouldn’t write them. So I asked my fellow MissDemeanors, aside from mysteries, what genres they enjoyed the most. Mine is magical realism. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite books. I love the genre, I think, because it forces me to think differently: to imagine yellow butterflies and passionate love affairs and see history through the remove of fantasy.  My writing mind is more inclined towards present-day and the gritty realism of true crime headlines.   Here’s what the rest of the MissDemeanors read when not whittling down their TBR mystery lists.  Susan Breen:I love romance novels. The old-fashioned kind, like Georgette Heyer and Mary Stewart. In my first novel, The Fiction Class, I named my protagonist Arabella after the heroine of one of Georgette Heyer’s novels. There was one novel, Jamaica Inn, by Daphne DuMaurier that I liked so much when I was a girl that the library wouldn’t allow me to take it out anymore and so I tried to copy it out by hand. Pre-internet. Tracee de Hahn: My second genre is a toss up. I love reading history….. literal textbook kind (well, perhaps not textbooks but non fiction history). That makes it easy to believe that my second fiction genre is historical fiction (I add things to this that are only “historical” to our eyes- Tolstoy, Austen, you get the picture.). Writing this makes me want to pull out the Colleen McCullough Rome series…. takes me back to high school! C. Michele Dorsey:I’m more interested in reading good writing than focusing on what the genre is. I enjoy memoir, humor, travel, poetry, “literary” fiction (whatever that is), and yes, romance. I also read lots of nonfiction and I adore reading cookbooks, especially when they are about a particular place. Right now I’m reading May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude and Between You and Me, Confessions of a Comma Queen, and I’m ready for my next mystery from the TBR pile.  Alexia Gordon: Science fiction. Sci-fi has rockets and lasers and aliens and sexy, hotshot pilots/smugglers/rogues. Plus the occasional robot and awesome travel itineraries. Oh yeah, and important stuff like satire and commentary on human nature, bigotry, politics, commercialism, bureaucracy, war, and universal fears. But mostly hotshot pilots. (Faves: The Space Merchants by Kornbluth and Pohl and the Retief series by Laumer.) Paula Munier: Oh, geez, this is like choosing among your children. When I’m not reading crime fiction, I’m reading best sellers across genres, which as an agent is an obligatory pleasure, as I need to keep up on what’s working out there in the marketplace. I also read a lot of nonfiction, especially in the areas of science, business, memoir, and mind/body/spirit. I’m a sucker for anything about dogs, baseball, nature, writing, and/or yoga. When I need inspiration, I read poetry and Shakespeare. To wit: I read a lot. Robin Stuart: Hm, I’d say I’m genre-agnostic. I’m one of those people who chooses books by opening them to a random page and if I keep reading, I’ll buy it. The same rule applies to ebooks that allow me to “look inside,” in which case I’ll advance to a random page near the end of the look-see. My recent non-mystery/suspense/thriller reading list includes historical non-fiction (Hidden Figures, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), YA (This is Where It Ends) and literary (The Assistants, Beautiful Ruins). The “why” of being drawn to pick them up/look in the first place is usually because I read about the book or author in the New York Times or San Francisco Chronicle book sections.