Down to the Wire
I usually did my homework on the school bus the day it was assigned. I always send my tax information to my accountant the first week of January. I RSVP as soon as I receive an invitation. I went through undergrad in two years. My suitcase is packed the afternoon before I leave for the airport. I’m usually in a hurry. I hate to put things off. I love to get them done.
This approach has served me well in most of the things I’ve done in my life. It worked well when I was an attorney, because a missed motion deadline could result in dismissal of a client’s case. It worked well when I traded commodities, where there’s very little time to ponder the next move. It worked well in triathlons and ski races, where the whole idea is simply to get to the finish line as quickly as possible.
When I’m writing, it doesn’t work so well. You have to go slowly.
Writing an outline is one way I slow down. The process of thinking about every step in the plot keeps me from rushing headlong to the fun parts, like action and climaxes. When I’m outlining it may not look like I’m working hard, because I take regular breaks from writing to ride my bike or snowboard. I dust. I wander through art galleries. It’s a strategy to slow the process down, and slowing down is hard work for me.
When the outline is completed, I do let myself race through the first draft. Even then I jump ahead to daydream about the ending. I jot down closing lines. I visualize the final scene as though it were a movie. After finish the first draft, I slam on the brakes. I treat myself to a celebration and put the work aside for two weeks.
Then come the revisions, which is a part of the job I should be able to hurtle through. Why, then, oh why, do revisions seem to take forever? I write nearly every day, and I want nothing more than to pronounce a story or book truly and completely finished, so why does it usually take me until the eleventh hour to do all the revisions I have to do? I don’t know why. It just does.
I make the job of revising tolerable by dividing it into a lot of little jobs. With each pass I make through a story or book, I look at something different. Does the plot hang together? Are the characters fully-developed? How is the pace? Are the key story elements there? Is the three-act structure intact? By treating each go-through as a separate assignment, I not only can set reasonable deadlines, I also get the pleasure of finishing more tasks.
Finishing is what I like. Oh, I’m a bit of a perfectionist too, but I like finishing things too much to hold on to a project in pursuit of absolute perfection. I’m pretty sure when it’s the best I can do, and I have no problem letting go.
Deadlines help, because completion is pre-determined, and because I know that under pressure, my brain kicks into high gear. At trial, it meant better cross examinations and closing arguments. In writing, it means better ideas and better execution. My prose is more concise. My focus doesn’t waver.
Like many other people, I work best under pressure. Usually I put that pressure on myself. When I have deadline pressure, writing is most fun. I can see that finish line getting closer with every word.
Who's the Boss?
“Stop bossing me!” my little brother used to say when we were kids.
I was sure I was smarter, not just older and taller, so I was the one who planned and directed all our after-school and weekend adventures. When we pretended we were musketeers on our ponies, or made parachutes from sheets and jumped from the roof (onto a pile of mulch), or started a neighborhood newspaper—all those were my great ideas.
When I was twelve and he was ten I stopped “bossing” him. It took some effort, and I can’t remember what motivated me to give up my autocratic ways, but I began to let him make suggestions and even choices for both of us. Some of his turned out quite badly (fruitlessly digging for buried treasure), but some were great (sneaking into an A’s World Series game).
After I graduated from law school, my natural bossiness returned. I brought cases into my firm, directed the lawyers on how to handle them, and made all the trial appearances. I planned the goings-on in my personal life with equal rigor. Everything on my calendar—social events/sports/travels—was determined by me. I was, as they say, a control freak.
When I stopped practicing law and had no responsibilities and no one to boss, I enjoyed it for a while. I had business cards printed that listed my profession as a “creature of leisure.”
Then I was bitten by the writing bug. Nearly overnight, I had a whole new crew to dominate and control—my characters. I outlined my first book in great detail. I knew exactly what each character would do, how they all would feel, and exactly how the plot would unfold from the first word to the last.
That worked fairly well for that first Pinnacle Peak mystery, but writing book number two was more like life with my brother. My new protagonist wasn’t as easygoing as the first one. I tried to get her to do what I wanted her to do, but she and I butted heads on everything. If I planned to have her ride her bike to town, she somehow ended up riding a horse into the desert. When I created Mr. Right for her, she dumped him. She also did remarkable things: she resolved a subplot I hadn’t even realized was there, and she showed a depth of compassion I had never imagined she was capable of.
When I stopped fretting over how different—and difficult—it was to write that second book, I remembered that old lesson it seems I must always relearn—trying to control everything isn’t the only way to work, and maybe it isn’t even the best way. Instead of trying to change my heroine’s character, I changed my attitude toward her. I let the character and the story develop more freely. Maybe my becoming a writer was a seductive regression for me because I thought I could at least control people I had invented, but it just wasn’t true. They didn’t want me to boss them. They wanted their freedom, too.
Now I come up with the basic story and assemble a cast of characters, but I allow them, even encourage them, to go their own ways, sometimes quite far from the path I started out thinking they should take. I want my characters to come alive and take over their destinies. The stories are richer that way, and the characters become who they really are only when I’ve stopped bossing them around.
Nature v. Nurture
Last month, I taught my friend Thomas how to skate-ski, which is a Nordic form that requires three basic techniques: one for climbing hills, one for accelerating on the flats, and one for in-between. You can read more about it here.
At first, Thomas did nothing but slip and fall—skate skis are skinnier than their downhill cousins, and the skier’s heel is free—but after I showed him proper body position and explained about weight shift and timing, and he practiced for about ninety minutes, he was roughly competent at the in-between and hill-climbing techniques. After two more lessons, he could do it all fairly well. As a matter of fact, he had done far better than I would ever have expected.
After daily practice, morning and afternoon for several weeks, Thomas entered a race on the local circuit and came in second, ahead of many more seasoned skiers. Even though he had been a good Alpine skier, I was surprised at how quickly he honed his brand new set of skills, and I wondered whether his rapid success was a result of his natural talent, my brilliant teaching, or something else.
In OUTLIERS, Malcolm Gladwell challenges the idea that success is a result of natural talent. In his stories of people who did certain things really well, Gladwell traces success to practice, timing, circumstances, upbringing, culture, and opportunity. Those really smart, successful people we admire—Mozart, Bill Gates, the Beatles—weren’t destined for great achievements from birth. They were mainly lucky—they had the right upbringing; they were in all the right places at the right times; and through the magic 10,000 hours of practice and a few lucky opportunities they turned out to be geniuses.
After watching Thomas develop as a skate-skier and thinking about OUTLIERS, I began to wonder about myself.
I didn’t start writing fiction until my early forties, but I was always a voracious reader. I also loved to tell stories. In my family, you had to know how to recount things in an interesting way if you wanted to be listened to. I always shone and was rewarded with a lot of attention.
I did pretty well as a trial lawyer, and I think it was mainly because of my ability to weave the evidence into a compelling tale. I structured my opening statements and closing arguments like the plots of books I’d read, so even though I wasn’t writing fiction (some defense attorneys would disagree), I was honing my story-telling skills.
When I retired from law, I had plenty of time free to do a lot of writing. I was also lucky that mystery writers (a kind and generous bunch) were always willing to give me advice, blurb my books, and invite me to contribute stories to anthologies they were editing.
And, yes, I was committed. My experience in school and sports gave me the sense that I could master anything I set my mind to. (Sure, I was often wrong, but I never went in thinking that falling short was an option.) Not thinking failure is a real possibility gives me a lot of confidence and determination—and willingness to put in the hours. I can’t say whether it’s taken 10,000 or something short of that, but I wanted to be a writer, and I never stopped working at it.
My grandmother used to say I was a born story-teller (she believed it was the Irish in me), but I think it was more that in my family I was encouraged to tell stories and rewarded when I did. It’s because I gained confidence from that support, early success, and positive feedback that I had the determination to keep working hard when my first efforts at writing were like Thomas’s first efforts on skate skis.
We’re born with certain abilities, but the conditions of our lives have a lot to do with how well we develop them. There’s no set formula. In my life, commitment, positive feedback, and help from other people have been very important. So in the spirit of the season, to all those who’ve given me so much: THANK YOU.
And One Percent...
I went looking for inspiration recently—at the opera and the museum. The opera was La Bohème—as a writer, I’m partial to stories with scenes in garrets—and the museum was the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which featured, in its 75th Anniversary Show, works by the well-known (Matisse, Pollack), the lesser-known (Shows, McGee), and the unknown (an assemblage of a thousand photos of the sun posted on Flickr, wax impressions of the knees of five famous artists).
Some artists, including writers, think of inspiration as a divine influence, a bolt from the blue that bypasses their faculties and propels them to create spontaneously. Some even wait around for this sort of inspiration to strike, and they produce no work (not even rough drafts or preliminary sketches) until they’re inspired.
I don’t think of inspiration this way. Ideas don’t come because the Muse whispers into the artist’s passive ear. They come because the artist has prepared her brain to generate them, sometimes without realizing it.
A productive writer has probably trained herself to think in a certain way—to observe, to notice her observations, and to organize them into plots and characters and settings that are as fresh and compelling as her observations were. She has trained herself to extract from her experiences ideas she can use to create fiction. Divine inspiration happens only when the writer has prepared her mind to receive it.
I usually did my homework on the school bus the day it was assigned. I always send my tax information to my accountant the first week of January. I RSVP as soon as I receive an invitation. I went through undergrad in two years. My suitcase is packed the afternoon before I leave for the airport. I’m usually in a hurry. I hate to put things off. I love to get them done.
This approach has served me well in most of the things I’ve done in my life. It worked well when I was an attorney, because a missed motion deadline could result in dismissal of a client’s case. It worked well when I traded commodities, where there’s very little time to ponder the next move. It worked well in triathlons and ski races, where the whole idea is simply to get to the finish line as quickly as possible.
When I’m writing, it doesn’t work so well. You have to go slowly.
Writing an outline is one way I slow down. The process of thinking about every step in the plot keeps me from rushing headlong to the fun parts, like action and climaxes. When I’m outlining it may not look like I’m working hard, because I take regular breaks from writing to ride my bike or snowboard. I dust. I wander through art galleries. It’s a strategy to slow the process down, and slowing down is hard work for me.
When the outline is completed, I do let myself race through the first draft. Even then I jump ahead to daydream about the ending. I jot down closing lines. I visualize the final scene as though it were a movie. After finish the first draft, I slam on the brakes. I treat myself to a celebration and put the work aside for two weeks.
Then come the revisions, which is a part of the job I should be able to hurtle through. Why, then, oh why, do revisions seem to take forever? I write nearly every day, and I want nothing more than to pronounce a story or book truly and completely finished, so why does it usually take me until the eleventh hour to do all the revisions I have to do? I don’t know why. It just does.
I make the job of revising tolerable by dividing it into a lot of little jobs. With each pass I make through a story or book, I look at something different. Does the plot hang together? Are the characters fully-developed? How is the pace? Are the key story elements there? Is the three-act structure intact? By treating each go-through as a separate assignment, I not only can set reasonable deadlines, I also get the pleasure of finishing more tasks.Finishing is what I like. Oh, I’m a bit of a perfectionist too, but I like finishing things too much to hold on to a project in pursuit of absolute perfection. I’m pretty sure when it’s the best I can do, and I have no problem letting go.
Deadlines help, because completion is pre-determined, and because I know that under pressure, my brain kicks into high gear. At trial, it meant better cross examinations and closing arguments. In writing, it means better ideas and better execution. My prose is more concise. My focus doesn’t waver.
Like many other people, I work best under pressure. Usually I put that pressure on myself. When I have deadline pressure, writing is most fun. I can see that finish line getting closer with every word.
Who's the Boss?
“Stop bossing me!” my little brother used to say when we were kids.
I was sure I was smarter, not just older and taller, so I was the one who planned and directed all our after-school and weekend adventures. When we pretended we were musketeers on our ponies, or made parachutes from sheets and jumped from the roof (onto a pile of mulch), or started a neighborhood newspaper—all those were my great ideas.
When I was twelve and he was ten I stopped “bossing” him. It took some effort, and I can’t remember what motivated me to give up my autocratic ways, but I began to let him make suggestions and even choices for both of us. Some of his turned out quite badly (fruitlessly digging for buried treasure), but some were great (sneaking into an A’s World Series game).
After I graduated from law school, my natural bossiness returned. I brought cases into my firm, directed the lawyers on how to handle them, and made all the trial appearances. I planned the goings-on in my personal life with equal rigor. Everything on my calendar—social events/sports/travels—was determined by me. I was, as they say, a control freak.
When I stopped practicing law and had no responsibilities and no one to boss, I enjoyed it for a while. I had business cards printed that listed my profession as a “creature of leisure.”
Then I was bitten by the writing bug. Nearly overnight, I had a whole new crew to dominate and control—my characters. I outlined my first book in great detail. I knew exactly what each character would do, how they all would feel, and exactly how the plot would unfold from the first word to the last.
That worked fairly well for that first Pinnacle Peak mystery, but writing book number two was more like life with my brother. My new protagonist wasn’t as easygoing as the first one. I tried to get her to do what I wanted her to do, but she and I butted heads on everything. If I planned to have her ride her bike to town, she somehow ended up riding a horse into the desert. When I created Mr. Right for her, she dumped him. She also did remarkable things: she resolved a subplot I hadn’t even realized was there, and she showed a depth of compassion I had never imagined she was capable of.When I stopped fretting over how different—and difficult—it was to write that second book, I remembered that old lesson it seems I must always relearn—trying to control everything isn’t the only way to work, and maybe it isn’t even the best way. Instead of trying to change my heroine’s character, I changed my attitude toward her. I let the character and the story develop more freely. Maybe my becoming a writer was a seductive regression for me because I thought I could at least control people I had invented, but it just wasn’t true. They didn’t want me to boss them. They wanted their freedom, too.
Now I come up with the basic story and assemble a cast of characters, but I allow them, even encourage them, to go their own ways, sometimes quite far from the path I started out thinking they should take. I want my characters to come alive and take over their destinies. The stories are richer that way, and the characters become who they really are only when I’ve stopped bossing them around.
Nature v. Nurture
Last month, I taught my friend Thomas how to skate-ski, which is a Nordic form that requires three basic techniques: one for climbing hills, one for accelerating on the flats, and one for in-between. You can read more about it here.
At first, Thomas did nothing but slip and fall—skate skis are skinnier than their downhill cousins, and the skier’s heel is free—but after I showed him proper body position and explained about weight shift and timing, and he practiced for about ninety minutes, he was roughly competent at the in-between and hill-climbing techniques. After two more lessons, he could do it all fairly well. As a matter of fact, he had done far better than I would ever have expected.After daily practice, morning and afternoon for several weeks, Thomas entered a race on the local circuit and came in second, ahead of many more seasoned skiers. Even though he had been a good Alpine skier, I was surprised at how quickly he honed his brand new set of skills, and I wondered whether his rapid success was a result of his natural talent, my brilliant teaching, or something else.
In OUTLIERS, Malcolm Gladwell challenges the idea that success is a result of natural talent. In his stories of people who did certain things really well, Gladwell traces success to practice, timing, circumstances, upbringing, culture, and opportunity. Those really smart, successful people we admire—Mozart, Bill Gates, the Beatles—weren’t destined for great achievements from birth. They were mainly lucky—they had the right upbringing; they were in all the right places at the right times; and through the magic 10,000 hours of practice and a few lucky opportunities they turned out to be geniuses.
After watching Thomas develop as a skate-skier and thinking about OUTLIERS, I began to wonder about myself.
I didn’t start writing fiction until my early forties, but I was always a voracious reader. I also loved to tell stories. In my family, you had to know how to recount things in an interesting way if you wanted to be listened to. I always shone and was rewarded with a lot of attention.
I did pretty well as a trial lawyer, and I think it was mainly because of my ability to weave the evidence into a compelling tale. I structured my opening statements and closing arguments like the plots of books I’d read, so even though I wasn’t writing fiction (some defense attorneys would disagree), I was honing my story-telling skills.
When I retired from law, I had plenty of time free to do a lot of writing. I was also lucky that mystery writers (a kind and generous bunch) were always willing to give me advice, blurb my books, and invite me to contribute stories to anthologies they were editing.And, yes, I was committed. My experience in school and sports gave me the sense that I could master anything I set my mind to. (Sure, I was often wrong, but I never went in thinking that falling short was an option.) Not thinking failure is a real possibility gives me a lot of confidence and determination—and willingness to put in the hours. I can’t say whether it’s taken 10,000 or something short of that, but I wanted to be a writer, and I never stopped working at it.
My grandmother used to say I was a born story-teller (she believed it was the Irish in me), but I think it was more that in my family I was encouraged to tell stories and rewarded when I did. It’s because I gained confidence from that support, early success, and positive feedback that I had the determination to keep working hard when my first efforts at writing were like Thomas’s first efforts on skate skis.
We’re born with certain abilities, but the conditions of our lives have a lot to do with how well we develop them. There’s no set formula. In my life, commitment, positive feedback, and help from other people have been very important. So in the spirit of the season, to all those who’ve given me so much: THANK YOU.
And One Percent...
I went looking for inspiration recently—at the opera and the museum. The opera was La Bohème—as a writer, I’m partial to stories with scenes in garrets—and the museum was the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which featured, in its 75th Anniversary Show, works by the well-known (Matisse, Pollack), the lesser-known (Shows, McGee), and the unknown (an assemblage of a thousand photos of the sun posted on Flickr, wax impressions of the knees of five famous artists).
Some artists, including writers, think of inspiration as a divine influence, a bolt from the blue that bypasses their faculties and propels them to create spontaneously. Some even wait around for this sort of inspiration to strike, and they produce no work (not even rough drafts or preliminary sketches) until they’re inspired.
I don’t think of inspiration this way. Ideas don’t come because the Muse whispers into the artist’s passive ear. They come because the artist has prepared her brain to generate them, sometimes without realizing it.A productive writer has probably trained herself to think in a certain way—to observe, to notice her observations, and to organize them into plots and characters and settings that are as fresh and compelling as her observations were. She has trained herself to extract from her experiences ideas she can use to create fiction. Divine inspiration happens only when the writer has prepared her mind to receive it.
Some writers don’t go into the world hunting for the raw material; their inspiration is fueled from what’s nearby or within. Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen were inspired to create stories and poems built out of their immediate experiences. No museums or operas for them, and they didn’t need them. Poe didn’t actually suffer through pits and pendulums and beating dead hearts. His inspiration came from his deep psychology.
I’m not in their company. I look at the world around me and hunt avidly for experiences that make my brain thrum and my fingertips tingle. When that happens, I can hardly get to the keyboard fast enough.
At the opera, I came up empty. I loved the excellent singing, expressive music, and scintillating company, but I didn’t get any fuel for my inspiration. At the art museum, however, I saw a painting that made my neurons fire. I begged a pen and a handful of napkins from the café and scribbled out ideas that I’ve turned into an outline for a story. It’s about a stolen painting, a murder, and a clue that’s in plain sight but abstract and obscure to most people.
In this case, the inspiration was logical and direct—the setting, characters, and plotline came straight from my visit to the museum. It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes a painting—or a football game or a plane flight—will affect me in a completely unpredictable and mysterious way, and I’ll end up writing about something else entirely. No one would ever be able to discern the source of my inspiration; sometimes even I wouldn’t know.
The unpredictability of when and how inspiration strikes is part of what makes writing so enjoyable to me. I have tickets to the symphony and a hockey game next week. I may come back with an idea for a tale about a violinist on skates—or something else entirely.
Spellcheck
As a kid, I played with language the way the boy next door (who grew up to be an architect) played with Legos and Lincoln Logs. I was in love with stories and their building blocks—words, syntax, and style.
I was mad for Mad Libs and hung up on Hangman. Some friends wouldn’t play with me because they said I used “too-big” words. I admit I was ____________ [adjective] and a __ __ __ __ __.
Vocabulary and grammar quizzes were the highlight of seventh grade English, and served as counterweight to my less-than-stellar efforts in penmanship. I could recite homonyms, synonyms, and antonyms as well as my brother could quote baseball stats.
During high school, I was in a Scrabble phase, although I never bothered to memorize the list of Q words. As a devotee of the NYT’s On Language column, I took great delight in knowing the difference between rock and stone, done and finished, and whether countless could properly be used to describe things that could be counted. (It sometimes can.)
The Stanford Daily ran the New York Times crossword puzzle. A group of us picked up the paper every morning before Civil Procedure and—during class—raced to be first to complete it (in pen, of course). One day I was so excited I was done (er, finished), I pumped a triumphant fist. When the professor called on me, I blurted out the answer to 37 Across.
With the advent of the web came a plethora of wordplay and word game sites—limericks, haikus, palindromes, alliterations, and word scrambles. Whenever I moderate a panel at a mystery conference, I concoct an anagram from each panelist’s name. I’m pleased that Twist Phelan regroups into shalt pen wit. It also morphs into whip talents.
When I was writing the Pinnacle Peak mysteries, I couldn’t resist adding wordplay to the novels. Hannah Dain is the protagonist in FAMILY CLAIMS. The story is loosely modeled on Hamlet, the prince of Dain-mark.
Every writer constructs a style by choosing how to put words together, and while some of my choices would be approved by any grammar pedant, others would be thoroughly offensive. Oscar Wilde said in a note included with a manuscript he delivered to his publisher, “I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, the wills and shalls, thats and whichs.” If Oscar wasn’t concerned about the technical aspects of grammar, I’m certainly not going to be a language prude.
What I love about language is how it can seduce, charm, excite, please, and bliss us. Yes, I used bliss as a verb. If you don’t like it, avoid Shakespeare, who made a verb out of a noun every chance he got.
I also love the way usage can change, as well as the way it can remain useful over a long period of time. I try to use words and syntax and grammar that most accurately make the clear but nuanced impressions I want to make. There’s no point in sneering at the supermarket’s twelve items or less sign. Less and fewer might be a clear and useful distinction, but the meaning really doesn’t change enough to matter. Hopefully has come to mean “I hope that,” and nothing will change it back to what it was. It’s snobbish and elitist to put down other people for using language that’s perfectly clear in its meaning, even if it’s not what the OED recommends.
On the other hand, it’s worth making an effort to use words like uninterested and disinterested and imply and infer properly, because these words make useful distinctions between real actions. Holding onto their traditional meanings retains a richness in the language that has practical benefits in communicating accurately. But these may all be matters of opinion, and that’s okay because, as a writer, I’m creating a style—a composite of my choices—that expresses my taste in language. It may be a shame or not, but nobody writes like Shakespeare any more.
Amazing
Last weekend I got lost in a corn maze.
The corn maze at the Denver Botanical Gardens is an intricate network of paths—with many dead ends, double-backs, and tricky turns—harvested out of eight acres of towering corn stalks. The challenge is to locate all six checkpoints inside the maze and then find your way out. You can study a map before you enter, but serious maze-navigators don’t take one along.
I arrived at dusk. At first it was easy. I ran down the paths, using the sun and the surrounding mountains to keep myself oriented.
After sunset, the mountains disappeared into the darkness. I couldn’t tell where I was. It had never occurred to me to bring a flashlight, so I kept crashing into cornstalks. I turned a corner and hit a dead end. I backtracked and tried another way. This time the path led me in a circle. An hour in and I was lost.
I had understood that getting turned around would be part of the maze experience, but at this point, all I wanted to do was get from where I was to the exit. I didn’t surround myself with corn stalks for sightseeing purposes. For me, it was a competition: find each checkpoint and get to the end in the shortest possible time.
When I get lost in the maze of writing a story, I take an entirely different approach to finding my way to the end.
I always map out my novels, so I know—before I start writing—where the story begins, where it finishes, and generally the path the characters will travel to get to the conclusion. But while I’m writing that story, there always comes a point—sometimes two or three—where I realize I’m lost. I’ve wandered off what I thought would be my path. Sometimes I hit a dead-end, and I have to backtrack. Sometimes I’m on a road that isn’t as direct, interesting or logical as the route I originally planned. Sometimes I’m off in a new and better direction.
When you’re lost in a maze, you create new strategies to help you navigate—usually ones you could have thought of before you went in if you’d been smarter about it. After all, a maze is pretty simple. There’s one way in and there’s one way out. There may be an infinite number of wrong routes, but there is only one shortest, fastest way through.
Writing a story is different. There are more possible routes than anyone could imagine, and all of them are right—or could be. The best one isn’t the one that gets me there fastest or via the shortest distance. I want the twists and reverses. My outline is only gentle guidance, a starting point for a trip that can go almost anywhere. I’ve mapped out the lay of the land, not the route I have to take. Much that I learn about my characters as I’m writing steers me away from my original plan. I’m not lost. I’m wandering willfully, plotting a new course as I go.
I got out of the corn maze all right. I spotted a maze-wanderer who had a map, and I asked to take a peek. I followed another with a flashlight for a while. Finally I found a kid who swore he knew the way out, and I gave him two dollars to take me there.
On the way home, I stopped at Whole Foods to buy fresh corn to roast for dinner.
On the Bleeding Edge
I just bought a new Blackberry; my old one didn’t support the Kindle app.
Yesterday, I took my skis to the shop to have the new Salomon ProPulse bindings installed.
I’m debating between the Campy Super Record 11 and the SRAM Red gruppos for my new road bike.
I’ve always enjoyed owning the latest in technology and athletic equipment. I’m a compulsive adopter. Whatever the new generation gadget, I have to try it.
Remember the Apple Newton? I pre-ordered it as soon as it was announced. When TiVo debuted, I received a letter from the company founder, thanking me for being one of his first 100 customers. (He also sent me a hat with the little TiVo guy on it.) If the guys at Atomic tweaked their skate skis so they were a tad faster, I was at the head of the line to order a pair.
It’s not just tech and sports stuff. I’ve always tried to make sure that everything in my life is the latest and the greatest.
Last week I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond with a friend. While she shopped for towels, I checked out the gadgets in the kitchen department. There were things I had never heard of: mushroom brush, bacon press, olive stoner, S’mores maker. I’d put all of them in my basket before my friend grabbed me by the arm and led me into the china section.
“Listen,” she said. “I’d like to introduce you to Twist. You hate to cook. You don’t read cookbooks. You don’t watch cooking shows. You don’t eat pork. The instructions are still taped to the top rack of your oven. You don’t need any of this stuff in your kitchen!”
Of course, she was right. Everything in my life doesn’t have to be the newest gimmick or the latest advancement. I put it all back, except the S’mores maker, which rests on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet—never used.
Keeping up is often about following someone else's agenda. The bloggers and tweeters who send out news of the latest beta. The marketers, publicists, and journalists who blanket us with coverage about the newest gear. The geniuses who invent the stuff. The producers who make it in vast quantities.
Too many of my priorities were getting sidelined or trampled when I got caught up in keeping up. The endless onslaught of new things met invented needs I readily embraced. They weren’t necessarily the things I really required for happiness and fulfillment. I think if I can stop trying to keep up with all the should-haves and must-haves, I’ll do better at staying current with the things that really matter to me.
Bike and ski stuff? You bet. New dictation software or an improved e-reader? Absolutely. Sunglasses with a built-in MP3 player or an interactive refrigerator? Not.
Is there a Girl Scout leader out there who needs a S’mores maker?
Used Up
Because I travel a lot, I have a large collection of luggage—hard-shell cases (for ski and bike adventures), large canvas duffels (for safaris and ocean voyages), garment bags (for trips requiring dresses or suits), suitcases (for journeys from three days to three weeks), and trunks (for extended stays).
On every trip, long or short, I’ve also taken my 16-inch rollaboard, which holds my laptop, jacket, books, electronic entertainment, energy bars, and small stuff I never want to check. It’s traveled with me around the world—I’ve stuffed it under airline seats or jammed it into overhead bins, thrown it into cabs, rental cars, and tenders, and pulled it across cobblestones, over curbs, across dirt roads, and through snow. I even tugboatted it across St. Mark’s Square in Venice when the water was waist high. I’ve replaced the telescoping handle twice (you still have to jiggle it just so to make it retract), the wheels three times, and the zippers more instances than I can count.
A few weeks ago, after I got home from my last trip, I noticed the bottom was ripped and another zipper had broken. I took it in to my favorite luggage repair person.
“I can’t fix this,” he said after examining the bag. “I’m sorry, but it’s worn out.”
It was a sad moment. The bag was my traveling companion for a decade and a half. I won’t be able to replace it. Nobody—not TravelPro nor Samsonite nor Tumi—makes sixteen-inch models like mine anymore.
A few days later, I had another trauma. I learned that I’d have to replace the carbon wheels on my road bike.
“Did I break them?” I asked my bike mechanic.
“No,” he said. “After a couple thousand miles, they just wear out.”
As I sent my favorite luggage on its last trip and my wheels on their last ride (in both cases, to the dumpster), it occurred to me that I had something to celebrate. I’d used the bag and the wheels hard and long enough to wear them out. If I hadn’t visited all those places, the rollaboard would be in my hall closet in mint condition. If I hadn’t ridden all those miles, my wheels would still be working fine.
Those items didn’t go out of style; they weren’t outdated; I didn’t break them; they weren’t flawed. I had simply used them up.
There’s a saying, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” I think it should be, “She who dies with the most worn-out toys wins.” I’m going to try to use up as many of my things as I can before new fashions or new inventions overtake them.
I feel beholden to the things I’ve enjoyed so much that they were worn out or used up. They gave their inanimate lives to make my life exciting and rich. They earned, in a way, their immortality. I don’t remember my first iPod, which I gave away when a new model came along, but my rollaboard and bike wheels will take their place in my pantheon of memories of favorite things.
Off to find my sparkly high heels. I have dances to dance and streets to explore if I’m going to wear holes in their soles.
The International Thriller Writers Association honored “A Stab in the Heart” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine) with the Thriller Award for Best Short Story of the Year. My trip to New York to accept the award was my rollaboard’s final journey.
Queen of the Road
I’m not in their company. I look at the world around me and hunt avidly for experiences that make my brain thrum and my fingertips tingle. When that happens, I can hardly get to the keyboard fast enough.
At the opera, I came up empty. I loved the excellent singing, expressive music, and scintillating company, but I didn’t get any fuel for my inspiration. At the art museum, however, I saw a painting that made my neurons fire. I begged a pen and a handful of napkins from the café and scribbled out ideas that I’ve turned into an outline for a story. It’s about a stolen painting, a murder, and a clue that’s in plain sight but abstract and obscure to most people.
In this case, the inspiration was logical and direct—the setting, characters, and plotline came straight from my visit to the museum. It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes a painting—or a football game or a plane flight—will affect me in a completely unpredictable and mysterious way, and I’ll end up writing about something else entirely. No one would ever be able to discern the source of my inspiration; sometimes even I wouldn’t know.
The unpredictability of when and how inspiration strikes is part of what makes writing so enjoyable to me. I have tickets to the symphony and a hockey game next week. I may come back with an idea for a tale about a violinist on skates—or something else entirely.
SpellcheckAs a kid, I played with language the way the boy next door (who grew up to be an architect) played with Legos and Lincoln Logs. I was in love with stories and their building blocks—words, syntax, and style.
I was mad for Mad Libs and hung up on Hangman. Some friends wouldn’t play with me because they said I used “too-big” words. I admit I was ____________ [adjective] and a __ __ __ __ __.
Vocabulary and grammar quizzes were the highlight of seventh grade English, and served as counterweight to my less-than-stellar efforts in penmanship. I could recite homonyms, synonyms, and antonyms as well as my brother could quote baseball stats.
During high school, I was in a Scrabble phase, although I never bothered to memorize the list of Q words. As a devotee of the NYT’s On Language column, I took great delight in knowing the difference between rock and stone, done and finished, and whether countless could properly be used to describe things that could be counted. (It sometimes can.)
The Stanford Daily ran the New York Times crossword puzzle. A group of us picked up the paper every morning before Civil Procedure and—during class—raced to be first to complete it (in pen, of course). One day I was so excited I was done (er, finished), I pumped a triumphant fist. When the professor called on me, I blurted out the answer to 37 Across.
With the advent of the web came a plethora of wordplay and word game sites—limericks, haikus, palindromes, alliterations, and word scrambles. Whenever I moderate a panel at a mystery conference, I concoct an anagram from each panelist’s name. I’m pleased that Twist Phelan regroups into shalt pen wit. It also morphs into whip talents.
When I was writing the Pinnacle Peak mysteries, I couldn’t resist adding wordplay to the novels. Hannah Dain is the protagonist in FAMILY CLAIMS. The story is loosely modeled on Hamlet, the prince of Dain-mark.
Every writer constructs a style by choosing how to put words together, and while some of my choices would be approved by any grammar pedant, others would be thoroughly offensive. Oscar Wilde said in a note included with a manuscript he delivered to his publisher, “I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, the wills and shalls, thats and whichs.” If Oscar wasn’t concerned about the technical aspects of grammar, I’m certainly not going to be a language prude.
What I love about language is how it can seduce, charm, excite, please, and bliss us. Yes, I used bliss as a verb. If you don’t like it, avoid Shakespeare, who made a verb out of a noun every chance he got.I also love the way usage can change, as well as the way it can remain useful over a long period of time. I try to use words and syntax and grammar that most accurately make the clear but nuanced impressions I want to make. There’s no point in sneering at the supermarket’s twelve items or less sign. Less and fewer might be a clear and useful distinction, but the meaning really doesn’t change enough to matter. Hopefully has come to mean “I hope that,” and nothing will change it back to what it was. It’s snobbish and elitist to put down other people for using language that’s perfectly clear in its meaning, even if it’s not what the OED recommends.
On the other hand, it’s worth making an effort to use words like uninterested and disinterested and imply and infer properly, because these words make useful distinctions between real actions. Holding onto their traditional meanings retains a richness in the language that has practical benefits in communicating accurately. But these may all be matters of opinion, and that’s okay because, as a writer, I’m creating a style—a composite of my choices—that expresses my taste in language. It may be a shame or not, but nobody writes like Shakespeare any more.
Amazing
Last weekend I got lost in a corn maze. The corn maze at the Denver Botanical Gardens is an intricate network of paths—with many dead ends, double-backs, and tricky turns—harvested out of eight acres of towering corn stalks. The challenge is to locate all six checkpoints inside the maze and then find your way out. You can study a map before you enter, but serious maze-navigators don’t take one along.
I arrived at dusk. At first it was easy. I ran down the paths, using the sun and the surrounding mountains to keep myself oriented.
After sunset, the mountains disappeared into the darkness. I couldn’t tell where I was. It had never occurred to me to bring a flashlight, so I kept crashing into cornstalks. I turned a corner and hit a dead end. I backtracked and tried another way. This time the path led me in a circle. An hour in and I was lost.
I had understood that getting turned around would be part of the maze experience, but at this point, all I wanted to do was get from where I was to the exit. I didn’t surround myself with corn stalks for sightseeing purposes. For me, it was a competition: find each checkpoint and get to the end in the shortest possible time. When I get lost in the maze of writing a story, I take an entirely different approach to finding my way to the end.
I always map out my novels, so I know—before I start writing—where the story begins, where it finishes, and generally the path the characters will travel to get to the conclusion. But while I’m writing that story, there always comes a point—sometimes two or three—where I realize I’m lost. I’ve wandered off what I thought would be my path. Sometimes I hit a dead-end, and I have to backtrack. Sometimes I’m on a road that isn’t as direct, interesting or logical as the route I originally planned. Sometimes I’m off in a new and better direction.
When you’re lost in a maze, you create new strategies to help you navigate—usually ones you could have thought of before you went in if you’d been smarter about it. After all, a maze is pretty simple. There’s one way in and there’s one way out. There may be an infinite number of wrong routes, but there is only one shortest, fastest way through.Writing a story is different. There are more possible routes than anyone could imagine, and all of them are right—or could be. The best one isn’t the one that gets me there fastest or via the shortest distance. I want the twists and reverses. My outline is only gentle guidance, a starting point for a trip that can go almost anywhere. I’ve mapped out the lay of the land, not the route I have to take. Much that I learn about my characters as I’m writing steers me away from my original plan. I’m not lost. I’m wandering willfully, plotting a new course as I go.
I got out of the corn maze all right. I spotted a maze-wanderer who had a map, and I asked to take a peek. I followed another with a flashlight for a while. Finally I found a kid who swore he knew the way out, and I gave him two dollars to take me there.
On the way home, I stopped at Whole Foods to buy fresh corn to roast for dinner.
On the Bleeding Edge
I just bought a new Blackberry; my old one didn’t support the Kindle app.
Yesterday, I took my skis to the shop to have the new Salomon ProPulse bindings installed.
I’m debating between the Campy Super Record 11 and the SRAM Red gruppos for my new road bike.
I’ve always enjoyed owning the latest in technology and athletic equipment. I’m a compulsive adopter. Whatever the new generation gadget, I have to try it.
Remember the Apple Newton? I pre-ordered it as soon as it was announced. When TiVo debuted, I received a letter from the company founder, thanking me for being one of his first 100 customers. (He also sent me a hat with the little TiVo guy on it.) If the guys at Atomic tweaked their skate skis so they were a tad faster, I was at the head of the line to order a pair.
It’s not just tech and sports stuff. I’ve always tried to make sure that everything in my life is the latest and the greatest. Last week I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond with a friend. While she shopped for towels, I checked out the gadgets in the kitchen department. There were things I had never heard of: mushroom brush, bacon press, olive stoner, S’mores maker. I’d put all of them in my basket before my friend grabbed me by the arm and led me into the china section.
“Listen,” she said. “I’d like to introduce you to Twist. You hate to cook. You don’t read cookbooks. You don’t watch cooking shows. You don’t eat pork. The instructions are still taped to the top rack of your oven. You don’t need any of this stuff in your kitchen!”
Of course, she was right. Everything in my life doesn’t have to be the newest gimmick or the latest advancement. I put it all back, except the S’mores maker, which rests on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet—never used.
Keeping up is often about following someone else's agenda. The bloggers and tweeters who send out news of the latest beta. The marketers, publicists, and journalists who blanket us with coverage about the newest gear. The geniuses who invent the stuff. The producers who make it in vast quantities.
Too many of my priorities were getting sidelined or trampled when I got caught up in keeping up. The endless onslaught of new things met invented needs I readily embraced. They weren’t necessarily the things I really required for happiness and fulfillment. I think if I can stop trying to keep up with all the should-haves and must-haves, I’ll do better at staying current with the things that really matter to me. Bike and ski stuff? You bet. New dictation software or an improved e-reader? Absolutely. Sunglasses with a built-in MP3 player or an interactive refrigerator? Not.
Is there a Girl Scout leader out there who needs a S’mores maker?
Used Up
Because I travel a lot, I have a large collection of luggage—hard-shell cases (for ski and bike adventures), large canvas duffels (for safaris and ocean voyages), garment bags (for trips requiring dresses or suits), suitcases (for journeys from three days to three weeks), and trunks (for extended stays).
On every trip, long or short, I’ve also taken my 16-inch rollaboard, which holds my laptop, jacket, books, electronic entertainment, energy bars, and small stuff I never want to check. It’s traveled with me around the world—I’ve stuffed it under airline seats or jammed it into overhead bins, thrown it into cabs, rental cars, and tenders, and pulled it across cobblestones, over curbs, across dirt roads, and through snow. I even tugboatted it across St. Mark’s Square in Venice when the water was waist high. I’ve replaced the telescoping handle twice (you still have to jiggle it just so to make it retract), the wheels three times, and the zippers more instances than I can count.A few weeks ago, after I got home from my last trip, I noticed the bottom was ripped and another zipper had broken. I took it in to my favorite luggage repair person.
“I can’t fix this,” he said after examining the bag. “I’m sorry, but it’s worn out.”
It was a sad moment. The bag was my traveling companion for a decade and a half. I won’t be able to replace it. Nobody—not TravelPro nor Samsonite nor Tumi—makes sixteen-inch models like mine anymore.
A few days later, I had another trauma. I learned that I’d have to replace the carbon wheels on my road bike.
“Did I break them?” I asked my bike mechanic.
“No,” he said. “After a couple thousand miles, they just wear out.”
As I sent my favorite luggage on its last trip and my wheels on their last ride (in both cases, to the dumpster), it occurred to me that I had something to celebrate. I’d used the bag and the wheels hard and long enough to wear them out. If I hadn’t visited all those places, the rollaboard would be in my hall closet in mint condition. If I hadn’t ridden all those miles, my wheels would still be working fine.
Those items didn’t go out of style; they weren’t outdated; I didn’t break them; they weren’t flawed. I had simply used them up.
There’s a saying, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” I think it should be, “She who dies with the most worn-out toys wins.” I’m going to try to use up as many of my things as I can before new fashions or new inventions overtake them.
I feel beholden to the things I’ve enjoyed so much that they were worn out or used up. They gave their inanimate lives to make my life exciting and rich. They earned, in a way, their immortality. I don’t remember my first iPod, which I gave away when a new model came along, but my rollaboard and bike wheels will take their place in my pantheon of memories of favorite things.Off to find my sparkly high heels. I have dances to dance and streets to explore if I’m going to wear holes in their soles.
The International Thriller Writers Association honored “A Stab in the Heart” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine) with the Thriller Award for Best Short Story of the Year. My trip to New York to accept the award was my rollaboard’s final journey.
Queen of the Road
Last month, I rode my bike for a week through the Colorado Rockies. I made between fifty and a hundred miles each day—a total of 553 “horizontal” miles—and I climbed more than thirty thousand vertical feet to reach altitudes of almost two miles. Up there it’s difficult to breathe even when you’re walking. I was on the bike between four and seven hours each day.
The occasion of my long ride was a joyful celebration of biking called Ride the Rockies in which thousands participate. This year’s ride was more challenging than last year’s; it was 170 miles longer, over tougher terrain.
On the flats, I took in the incomparable Rocky Mountain scenery. (One day I spotted a bear, and immediately pedaled as fast as I could to get ahead of the riders near me. The old joke is true—you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just the other people with you.) Descending at 50 mph in the freezing rain or fighting 35-mph headwinds on mountain roads with no guardrails meant I couldn’t look beyond the pavement directly ahead. And food never tasted so good. At the end of day six I actually made moaning sounds while eating a baked potato.
What struck me most about this year’s ride was neither the danger nor the beauty; it was that I had put myself into a situation where I didn’t have to make any choices. Once I’d decided to ride the Rockies, everything was predetermined. The hotels were assigned, and there was only one vegetarian dish at the group meals. There was one route to travel with a set number of aid stations. For safety reasons, we weren’t allowed to wear headphones on the bike, so there were no books or music to select. I pedaled as fast as I could over the assigned distance. I didn’t even have to choose my clothes: I had packed only cycling outfits, t-shirts, and shorts. Ride the bike, eat, sleep, repeat. That was my entire existence for seven days.
My autonomy is very important to me; an essential part of that is making choices. I like all my options—shelves of books and a well-stocked Kindle, an array of sporting equipment in the garage, the many attractions available in the city where I live—but having choices isn’t without cost. Decisions take time. Many are trivial or false or meaningless. Often I’ve felt there’s too little time left to enjoy the choices I’d made. I have no intention of giving up options in my “normal” life, but while riding the Rockies, I enjoyed the respite from weighing alternatives, making decisions, expressing my individuality. What I felt in the mountains was that life can be experienced at a powerful level when the distraction of choices—small and big—is taken away.
For a full week, my arduous cycling endeavor absorbed me, and I thought of almost nothing else. At the end of each day, my body was exhausted, but my mind was refreshed. The total immersion in a physical challenge and the break from the mundane familiarity of daily life were uplifting, but it was the freedom from distraction, the luxury of mono-tasking (and mono-thinking) that renewed my spirit.
I didn’t write at all during the time I was riding the Rockies. Creativity means making more than the usual amount of decisions per minute. When I'm writing, I confront a mountain of choices—every word, every sentence, every paragraph. What does the character say, how does this moment look, how does it flow, what is the right way to make each moment click, what is the best way to express the truth of the situation and the character? A writer lives inside her characters and makes all their choices for them. Pedaling over mountains is easy in comparison.
When the ride was over, my re-entry into the familiar was a bit of a shock. It started with a trip to the grocery store. So many fruits from which to choose, so many brands of toothpaste! I got out of the store as quickly as possible, already missing the serenity I’d felt so strongly the past week. Plus, I had another reason to make my selections quickly. If I got home before four, I could meet my friends for a bike ride.
I'm Doing It My Way
The occasion of my long ride was a joyful celebration of biking called Ride the Rockies in which thousands participate. This year’s ride was more challenging than last year’s; it was 170 miles longer, over tougher terrain.
On the flats, I took in the incomparable Rocky Mountain scenery. (One day I spotted a bear, and immediately pedaled as fast as I could to get ahead of the riders near me. The old joke is true—you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just the other people with you.) Descending at 50 mph in the freezing rain or fighting 35-mph headwinds on mountain roads with no guardrails meant I couldn’t look beyond the pavement directly ahead. And food never tasted so good. At the end of day six I actually made moaning sounds while eating a baked potato.
What struck me most about this year’s ride was neither the danger nor the beauty; it was that I had put myself into a situation where I didn’t have to make any choices. Once I’d decided to ride the Rockies, everything was predetermined. The hotels were assigned, and there was only one vegetarian dish at the group meals. There was one route to travel with a set number of aid stations. For safety reasons, we weren’t allowed to wear headphones on the bike, so there were no books or music to select. I pedaled as fast as I could over the assigned distance. I didn’t even have to choose my clothes: I had packed only cycling outfits, t-shirts, and shorts. Ride the bike, eat, sleep, repeat. That was my entire existence for seven days.
My autonomy is very important to me; an essential part of that is making choices. I like all my options—shelves of books and a well-stocked Kindle, an array of sporting equipment in the garage, the many attractions available in the city where I live—but having choices isn’t without cost. Decisions take time. Many are trivial or false or meaningless. Often I’ve felt there’s too little time left to enjoy the choices I’d made. I have no intention of giving up options in my “normal” life, but while riding the Rockies, I enjoyed the respite from weighing alternatives, making decisions, expressing my individuality. What I felt in the mountains was that life can be experienced at a powerful level when the distraction of choices—small and big—is taken away.
For a full week, my arduous cycling endeavor absorbed me, and I thought of almost nothing else. At the end of each day, my body was exhausted, but my mind was refreshed. The total immersion in a physical challenge and the break from the mundane familiarity of daily life were uplifting, but it was the freedom from distraction, the luxury of mono-tasking (and mono-thinking) that renewed my spirit.I didn’t write at all during the time I was riding the Rockies. Creativity means making more than the usual amount of decisions per minute. When I'm writing, I confront a mountain of choices—every word, every sentence, every paragraph. What does the character say, how does this moment look, how does it flow, what is the right way to make each moment click, what is the best way to express the truth of the situation and the character? A writer lives inside her characters and makes all their choices for them. Pedaling over mountains is easy in comparison.
When the ride was over, my re-entry into the familiar was a bit of a shock. It started with a trip to the grocery store. So many fruits from which to choose, so many brands of toothpaste! I got out of the store as quickly as possible, already missing the serenity I’d felt so strongly the past week. Plus, I had another reason to make my selections quickly. If I got home before four, I could meet my friends for a bike ride.
I'm Doing It My Way
I received an email from a reader of my short story “Floored,” which is set in the New York Mercantile Exchange. He took me to task for putting the traders’ locker room two, not three, floors below the trading floor. It’s been a while since I’ve been to the Merc, so I can’t remember whether he’s right, but if he is, I don’t think it matters. The characters and plot are imaginary, so why should the setting be a mirror image? This reader wanted to suspend my poetic license because my protagonist had to climb fewer stairs. Perhaps I should see it as a compliment; this reader didn’t realize he was reading about an invented place, the NYMEX of my imagination.
I avoided this potential hazard in my mystery series: I set the books in an imaginary town. As the deity-in-charge, if I needed a bank on a certain corner in Pinnacle Peak, Arizona, it was there. Make-believe doesn’t mean less realistic; I received emails on that one, too—from people looking for the town during their vacations.
When I read, I don’t care whether everything in the setting is the way it is in real life. An author can't move the Eiffel Tower, but she can certainly change the lay-out of le commissariat if she needs someone to break out of jail in a way that isn’t possible in the actual place.
I think the setting is like every other aspect of a novel. It’s not about being real, it’s about being realistic. Dialogue is a creation, not the way people actually talk. Characters in a novel aren’t real people; they’re composites of ideas about real people. A novel isn’t a guidebook. Readers will usually accept a setting if it seems authentic and furthers the story.
I decided to set my next book—a thriller—in Santa Fe, New Mexico, an intriguing town I'd visited just a few times. I wanted more than a map of the streets or even a Google View—I wanted the essence of the place. So I went there for a week with my thriller in mind, not as land surveyor or a travel writer but as a novelist. I walked and drove and bicycled around with camera and notebook, in search of the place I would invent with my words.
The “real” Santa Fe, where my story happens, will accommodate the action, enhance the tone, help ratchet up the suspense, and be a fertile ground for planting clues. It will be the Santa Fe my characters live in, but I will remain, as ever, the deity-in-charge.
Memorable
I avoided this potential hazard in my mystery series: I set the books in an imaginary town. As the deity-in-charge, if I needed a bank on a certain corner in Pinnacle Peak, Arizona, it was there. Make-believe doesn’t mean less realistic; I received emails on that one, too—from people looking for the town during their vacations.
When I read, I don’t care whether everything in the setting is the way it is in real life. An author can't move the Eiffel Tower, but she can certainly change the lay-out of le commissariat if she needs someone to break out of jail in a way that isn’t possible in the actual place. I think the setting is like every other aspect of a novel. It’s not about being real, it’s about being realistic. Dialogue is a creation, not the way people actually talk. Characters in a novel aren’t real people; they’re composites of ideas about real people. A novel isn’t a guidebook. Readers will usually accept a setting if it seems authentic and furthers the story.
I decided to set my next book—a thriller—in Santa Fe, New Mexico, an intriguing town I'd visited just a few times. I wanted more than a map of the streets or even a Google View—I wanted the essence of the place. So I went there for a week with my thriller in mind, not as land surveyor or a travel writer but as a novelist. I walked and drove and bicycled around with camera and notebook, in search of the place I would invent with my words.
The “real” Santa Fe, where my story happens, will accommodate the action, enhance the tone, help ratchet up the suspense, and be a fertile ground for planting clues. It will be the Santa Fe my characters live in, but I will remain, as ever, the deity-in-charge.
Memorable
It is one thing to forget. It is quite another to misremember. Everyday experience reveals how common this is. Ask two people what they said in a past argument, and each usually remembers differently. At least one of them must have it wrong. As a lawyer I saw how such "false memories" contaminated eye-witness reports.
I'm from the San Francisco area; I grew up in the East Bay and went to school on the Peninsula. Recently, after a long time away, I went back for a visit.
Some things were exactly as I remembered them. Some things had changed since I'd last seen them. And some hadn’t changed but were different from how I remembered them.
For lunch one day, I wanted sweet potato fries from a restaurant I recalled being just off the Marina Green. I used to go there after windsurfing when I was in college. I drove to where I thought it was. No restaurant. I went down the street a ways. No restaurant there either. When I finally faced up to my confusion and checked Google Maps, I discovered the restaurant was blocks away. And when I got there, the owner—the same person from my windsurfing days—told me he didn’t serve sweet potato fries, and never had.
When I go somewhere and see things have changed, I feel that I've lived. But when my memories prove false, it’s as though a piece of my life has been erased. All my recollections become suspect, and I wonder whether I really enjoyed those pleasures, had those high moments, overcame those obstacles. How much of my life is something I just imagined?
My search for the restaurant reminded me just how untrustworthy, inventive, even capricious memory is. Yet that is on what we rely when we construct our understanding of the world—including the world we create in books. Memory embroiders the reality I set down on the page, even supposedly cut-and-dried facts. No wonder the Greeks believed Mnemosyne—Memory—was the mother of the muses. Our creativity is never free from the past.
Now if I could just remember where I used to enjoy those sweet potato fries ...
