Wowza - has it really been that long since I posted?
This is what happens when you have a demanding day job - that I love, mind you, but yet, still quite demanding.
George Guthridge over at Storytellers Unplugged talks about writing what you don't know about. In writing classes, we are often told to write what you do know about. Tony Hillerman talks about writing about what you want to know about.
Like any writing "rules", I think there's a truth in each of those positions.
When I first started the novel that became Matters of the Blood, my protagonist, then named Kate, was a freelance geek. I picked this because it's something I know about...uhm, am, actually (the geek part, not the freelance). As I began to create Kate's world, I realized two things:
- Any computer technology I'd mention would be woefully out of date in a year, not to mention by publication date.
- I really, really, really did not want to write about work-related stuff.
After that revelation, I knew I had to do something else, because for the purposes of the story I wanted to tell, I didn't want Kate to be tied down to a regular job.
In the drafts that followed, Kate became Keira, supernatural scion of a large powerful and equally supernatural family, with a trust fund, a house and way too much time on her hands. Suddenly, it worked.
Now, I have no earthly clue what having a trust fund is like, but I'm sure I can imagine some of it. Besides, that was 100% a plot device to remove an obstacle that had no part in the narrative. That said, her financial situation as contrasted with Marty's lack of finances did create for some tension. And as we all know, tension is what makes for good story.
I also wrote what I knew: a small Texas Hill Country town, where the value of town is more loose settlement than actual buildings, roads and people. Rio Seco, Texas is a thinly veiled Lago Vista, Texas as it was in the mid-to-late seventies, when I lived and went to high school there. It was the perfect setting for my characters, and I utterly know the parts of Lago that are still nestled in my heart and memories...which is exactly what I wanted. The then version, colored and shaded by my own interpretation, not the now version, easily searched for on Google and Google Earth. (Although, I do admit to finding Lago on Google Earth, but that was quite recently, long after MoB was completed).
In the creation of the story, I made Marty the local funeral home director/mortician. Did I know about this? Only in the sense that once upon a brief time I worked for a software company that was developing funeral home management software. I knew enough to whet my interest. I knew enough to know that I wanted certain aspects of the funeral industry to peek through. However, MoB is not about the industry. I just needed to research enough for verisimilitude. Enough so that casual readers, even those familiar with funeral homes would accept what I wrote without being jarred out of the narrative. I think I succeeded. And yes, I did some research. Google is a wonderful place and can lead you to such fabulous resources such as product catalogs, photos of actual embalming rooms, and industry trade magazines.
In essence, in my writing, I tend to combine all of the what you know, what you don't know and what you'd like to know in some mashup that seems to work for me. After all, it's just about telling the story that's in your head in a way that others enjoy it, too.
-30-
As many of you know, a dear friend of mine, Elaine Viets, suffered a stroke recently, right before the tour for her new book, Murder with Reservations. Since she can't tour, her friends are doing it for her. 