Today I'd like to give a warm welcome to Margaret Coel, author of Blood Memory & The Perfect Suspect. I will be reviewing both of these books tomorrow.
Onto the guest post...
I’m on my way to an author event in Denver where the hostess is known for asking authors what they are thinking as they write books. I can’t wait to hear what I’m going to say. What was I thinking when I was writing The Perfect Suspect? It’s easier to talk about what I was not thinking and what I am never thinking as I write.
I am not thinking about the words I type on the screen. Sometimes the words don’t make any sense. I don’t care. Sometimes I can’t wrest out of my brain the exact word to fit the situation, so I type a series of X’s and write on. I am not thinking about grammar, which was why, years ago, I had to learn how to turn off that doggoned computer function that corrects my grammar before I killed it. (I do write mystery novels.) I am not thinking about whether whatever I’m writing should be in another chapter. In short I am not cutting, editing and polishing to a shiny hue my first venture into a story. Which means I will have a one word answer to the question. What was I thinking about? Story.
From the moment I turn on the screen and type in Chapter One, I am lost in the story. All other thoughts are banished. The house could burn down around me. I’m not sure when I might notice. A blizzard could be raging outside, but if my story is set in the hot summer, I am mopping the sweat from my brow. Out my window may be a view of the rooftops of Boulder, but what I see are the wide open plains of the Wind River reservation in Wyoming when I’m writing a novel in my Wind River series. For The Perfect Suspect, all I saw were the streets, bungalows and neighborhoods of Denver as Catherine McLeod investigative reporter, chases down a killer.
Every novel is about story. Authors enter into the story in different ways.
I’ve heard authors compare writing to watching a play. The actors enter stage right, say and do something and make their exits, while the writer types away recording every move and word. For me, writing is a way of being right up there on the stage. I live the lives of all the characters simultaneously, laughing and crying when they do (oh, yes, I’ve shed a lot of tears over my keyboard), plotting revenge or forcing myself to do the right thing, making a general mess of my characters’ lives, then trying to extricate them (and myself) from the mess.
In The Perfect Suspect, I walked down Denver’s streets with Catherine McLeod, seeing what she saw, saying what she thought, and figuring out, as she did, how to find the person who had murdered the popular politician sure to be Colorado’s next governor. I’m scared to death, right along with Catherine, when she realizes she is now the one hunted by an increasingly psychotic killer. I’m madly in love with Detective Nick Bustamante, as is Catherine, and worried about the ups and downs of their relationship, as does she. An Arapaho, raised in a white family in Denver, Catherine is just beginning to get in touch with her own culture. I love the settled feeling that comes over her—and me—in the moments when she draws closer to the ancestors and to herself.
Non-writers think that writing is lonely work. After all, writers sit all day in front of a computer, no fellow office workers around, no one to shoot the bull with over the water cooler. Nothing could be further from the truth. Writers are never alone. We are surrounded all day by dozens of fascinating people, talking, acting up, doing all sorts of profoundly interesting things.
That’s because we are telling a story to ourselves, and story is the most critical piece of a novel. I have no patience for the so-called post-modern, minimalist, theme-driven novels—or whatever tag may be current in literary circles--because they have abandoned story. And story is what we live by, what connects us to other human beings and helps us to make sense of our own lives. All great novels tell great stories.
Only when The Perfect Suspect was safely tucked inside my computer did I allow myself to think about anything other than story. At that point, I could step out of the story, observe Catherine as she moved through the events, as if I were in the audience, and launch into the rewriting, editing, cutting, polishing and other feats of craftsmanship that, I hope, pushed Catherine’s story to stage front and center, in the spotlight where it belongs.
By Margaret Coel
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Special thanks to Margaret Coel for stopping by today. I just finished reading Blood Memory & The Perfect Suspect and will be reviewing them tomorrow. These were two great, suspenseful thrillers and I enjoyed reading a bit about Margaret's writing process.
I do agree she did, as Margaret puts it, 'pushed Catherine’s story to stage front and center, in the spotlight where it belongs'.
Special thanks to Kaitlyn over @ the Penguin Group for making this possible.
