Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

by Susan McBride

One of the questions that writers are asked most frequently has to be, "Where do you get your ideas?" I remember hearing Denise Swanson once tell someone, "I order mine from J.C. Penney," which I thought was pretty funny. Personally, I pluck mine from the Idea Tree which grows right beside the Money Tree in my backyard (oh, man, don't I wish!).

Okay, seriously, I find ideas everywhere all the time. It's almost impossible for me to go out anymore--or to take a shower or get on the treadmill--without the seed for a plot planting itself in my mind. When I first began writing seriously post-college, I'd cut stories from the newspaper that intrigued me, usually those concerning a missing person or a baffling homicide that got me thinking, "What if it had happened this way instead?"

That's how I wrote AND THEN SHE WAS GONE, my very first published mystery. A little girl had gone missing from a public park in broad daylight in Plano, Texas, with loads of people around watching T-ball games; yet no one had seen a thing. That bothered me to no end until I had to sit down and write about it. The next Maggie Ryan book to follow, OVERKILL, had its plot loosely based on a school bus shooting in St. Louis. Something about being able to control what happened in my fictional tales had a soothing effect on me, like justice did win out (even if it doesn't always in real-life).

Once I started writing the humorous Debutante Dropout Mysteries, I couldn't exactly use such heart-wrenching real-life stories as my jumping-off point. I had to tone things down a lot (although there's no on-the-page violence or much of anything graphic except emotion in either GONE or OVERKILL). BLUE BLOOD, the first in the series to feature society rebel Andy Kendricks, involved the murder of the loathsome owner of a restaurant called Jugs (think "Hooters" with a hillbilly theme). I'd gotten so sick of seeing ginormous Hooters billboards all over Dallas that it felt pretty good to exterminate Bud Hartman, a sexist and hardly beloved character. Next, in THE GOOD GIRL'S GUIDE TO MURDER, I offed a Texan version of Martha Stewart after watching one too many of Martha's holiday specials and feeling like an inadequate dolt. I must admit, that felt very cathartic, too.

When I was asked to write THE DEBS young adult series, I had to change my mind-set. I mean, I wasn't going to kill anyone in those books (except maybe with dirty looks and reputation-destroying words). Then I got to thinking about the teens and twentysomethings I know, and I realized that technology might have changed since my high school days but emotions had not. So the ideas for the plotlines in THE DEBS; LOVE, LIES, AND TEXAS DIPS; and the forthcoming GLOVES OFF stemmed from relationship issues. Who hasn't experienced a friend's betrayal, a broken heart, a mother's ultimatum, or a dream dashed? The best part about writing those novels was getting to re-enact some of my high school drama via the characters in the book...and getting to have my debs say all the witty and acerbic things that I wish I'd said in similar circumstances. Ah, sometimes it's really therapeutic playing God, at least on the page.

When the chance came to write THE COUGAR CLUB, I leapt at it. I'd been dying to write about women my age who happened to date younger men (I only dated one but I ended up marrying him). I'd gotten sick and tired of the way the media portrays "Cougars" as desperate old hags with fake boobs, tummy tucks, spray-on tans, platinum hair, and Botoxed features. My friends in their 40s and 50s who've dated and/or married younger guys are smart, successful, classy, and real. So I came up with the idea of three women who'd been friends in childhood but slowly drifted apart through the years because of jobs, marriage, children, and distance. When they're all 45, they end up coming together again as they each hit huge potholes in their respective roads. What they help each other to realize is that true friendship never dies, the only way to live is real, and you're never too old to follow your heart. These are the middle-aged (but hardly old) women I know. Heck, the kind of woman I am.

I've got a zillion ideas floating around my brain for the next books I need to write (namely, a young adult novel that isn't a DEBS book and another stand-alone novel to follow THE COUGAR CLUB). The hardest part for me is getting the ideas down on paper for my agents and editors to see in a way that makes sense and conveys all the nuances I'm imagining. But enough about my Idea Tree. I'd love to hear from y'all. Do you order from J.C. Penney like Denise? Cut out pieces from the newspaper? Eavesdrop in restaurants? Inquiring minds want to know!

A Writer's Whirlwind

With my current publicity photo as proof, you can see that while some authors get writer’s block, I get stumped!

Hurricane Ike was due to hit the Louisiana coast near Lake Charles on September 12, 2008. I boarded up the windows and delivered my wife Raejean and our dog to my mother’s house on higher ground. Forecasters predicted the storm surge would put River Road under three feet of water (and two feet under our house, which sits on eight-foot pilings on the Calcasieu River near the I-10 bridge). Throughout the night, I watched the water rise, rip our dock apart, and slosh past the predicted mark under our house to engulf equipment I had placed on sawhorses. Then the churning water lurched up the stairs until there was six feet of water under our house. At daybreak, I remembered promising my neighbors to feed their cat, so I waded through rushing, neck-deep water with wind-driven rain stinging my face.

Ike, the third most destructive hurricane ever to make landfall in the United States, left us with thousands of dollars worth of damage and one magnificent gift, a two-ton cypress stump that drifted over our “hurricane” fence from the swamp that had been clearcut in the 1920s. Five days later, a neighbor boated me to the head of River Road, where Raejean picked me up.

That meeting was its own miracle, because Raejean and I had dated for two months in 1983, when I was teaching at Lamar University, then didn’t hear from each other for twenty-two years. One morning, I opened my e-mail and there she was again. After a whirlwind romance, we married on January 4, 2008.

The birth of A Savage Wisdom has its own drama. By 1992 I had published two small-press novels and thought I could interest a major press in the story of the only woman executed in Louisiana’s electric chair. After researching the Valentine’s Day crime of Toni Jo Henry—a drug addict and prostitute by 14—I realized that she was not a sympathetic character.

Instead, I became interested in how an innocent person could transform into a cold-blooded murderer, so, in my “imaginative reconstruction,” I reversed much of her story, making her an ingénue and the novel a study in deception. After four years of work, I knew it was the best novel I would ever write.

I submitted it again and again to agents and editors who all said the same thing: the writing is brilliant, but we don’t think we could sell this because it’s not really true crime, nor is it a murder mystery or any other sub-genre we know of.

After seven years, I decided that my next best chance would be to secure a major-house publication through one of their contests, so I packed it off to a competition sponsored by two well-known New York publishers.

I was thrilled when I heard that Savage was one of five finalists. After another wait, I was dejected by the news of its second-place finish. But here’s the shocker: the first-place novel was not even listed among the original five. What happened? I believe the final editors saw that a friend’s manuscript was not among the finalists and overrode the initial screeners’ decisions.

Two years later, I saw that a movie based on Toni Jo’s life would be released in
2008. Thinking that interest generated by the movie would increase sales, I luckily found a small press, Thunder Rain, willing to publish Savage quickly.

The novel has done exceedingly well in Louisiana, and in May of 2009 it launched as a Kindle book on Amazon.com, climbing three times to #5 in the competitive True Crime/Murder & Mayhem category.

Dr. Norman German
Winner of the Deep South Writers' Contest, and author of A Savage Wisdom (Thunder Rain Publishing.
http://www.asavagewisdom.com/

Writing Can Save Your Life

We’re writing about writing this week at the Stiletto Gang. After a very happy Hallopalooza, and a great big shout-out to Southern Evelyn David for thinking this up while working her tail off at her day job, we’re settling back in to posting about the things we love, the things we think about, and the things we’d like others to love and think about. So this week it’s writing and I have a lot to say.

Not that that’s different from any other week.

The Northern half of Evelyn David and I talk about this quite a bit and she was the impetus behind a talk I gave in Tennessee last year that I called “Writing Can Save Your Life.” See, I didn’t started writing in earnest until I turned 39. It seemed like I had passed through my thirties thinking “I’ll write later” when I was finished potty training, house breaking, and doing lots of little things every day that added up to big things when the day was done. I kept putting it off until a rather round birthday approached and I realized “I am middle aged. I’d better get moving.” So I started to write and cranked out Murder 101 in a year, focusing on little else. I started Extracurricular Activities while sending out query letters to agents until the wonderful Deborah came knocking. And I continued writing while I waited to hear from the wonderful Kelley that indeed, she wanted to publish my books. I was so glad I decided to write.

Fate had a different idea of how my story would turn out, though, for on the day that I received my contracts for the first two books in the Murder 101 series, I was also diagnosed with cancer. And not just any cancer, “a bad one” as an acquaintance would say when my husband told her about the news. But instead of focusing on how bad the situation was (and it was) and how I should have been able to focus on the happiness of seeing my dream come true (that’s life, baby), I continued to write. I wrote through three rounds of chemo, one horrendous surgery, twenty radiation treatments, more chemo, two biopsies, a clinical trial, more chemo, and finally, the clinical trial that changed my prognosis from dire to positive. Because as bad as Alison Bergeron’s life may seem to those of you who read about her in every installment, she has never had cancer and she never will.

What she has is man trouble, murder trouble, and dog trouble. She falls down in too-high heels, a lot. She says the wrong thing at the wrong time and zigs when she should zag. She deals with life’s little problems, which to her, seem like huge problems. That’s why I love her. And that’s why I write.

I love writing, but in particular, I love my characters and try to do the best by them. Because as bad a day as I am having, I can make theirs that much better. I can get out of my own head and into somebody else’s. I can let them live happily ever after or make them hit a giant bump in the road, a bump that will soon by smoothed over. They have their ups and downs and hopefully, always end in “up.” But ultimately, I always know what’s going to happen to them, and that kind of control is hard to come by in the real world.

I have been on a lot of medicine and have been attended to by the smartest people the best insurance in the world can get you access to. I’m lucky that way. But I’ve also been supported by devoted family and friends and despite what I have had to go through, been able to do what I’ve always dreamed of doing: write. Writing is my passion and it gives me purpose. Without it, I don’t know how I would have survived.

Do what you love every day. It doesn’t have to be writing, but if it is, make it a point to escape for a moment or two every day and go to your other “world.” Because for me, in a very real sense, writing saved my life.

Maggie Barbieri