Where Story Ideas Come From: How Story Flows into Daily Challenges, A Core Story Question

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Simmering in the background in the architectural world for some time has been the issue of security in building design. Yes, there are guidances (we non-architects might call them “standards”) for security, just as there are for accessibility and, increasingly, sustainability.

But these are often considered a ceiling, not a floor.

When the authorities confront the protagonist of my forthcoming novel, architect Archer Landis, with information that his murdered associate (and lover) was affiliated with the Arab American community, they jump to the conclusion, terrorism. Was she trying to ferret out details on the vulnerabilities of key buildings his firm has designed? Was she going to turn sensitive information over to the bad guys? They say yes, but he’s sure they’re wrong.

As a conscientious businessman, he has to do more than bluster about this. He is angry, but how can he turn the situation around? For many buildings—especially ones like embassies and government structures, military facilities, transportation hubs, stadiums and other places where many people congregate—a balance is needed between security and openness. Countries don’t want their embassies looking like fortresses, littered with clunky bollards. A new building’s design has to include features that not only help thwart any attack, but also make the structure a less attractive target in the first place. There’s psychology involved.

Without inserting an essay on this balancing act into the novel, I had to find ways to talk about these real-world concerns in what I hope is an interesting way. Certainly, they are uppermost in Landis’s mind once the attacks on him, his family, and his business begin. All this is part of making him seem to readers like a real person, with real-world concerns.Architect of Courage is coming from Black Opal Books on June 4.

Listen Up!

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earphones

Plug into into 2022’s crime/mystery/thriller hits and award nominees–all of them worthwhile in print, with some audio standouts..

Joe Country by Mick Herron

You can’t go wrong with Herron’s books about Slough House, the career dead-end for London’s MI5 security personnel who’ve suffered, let’s call them, lapses. If working for ill-tempered and slovenly Jackson Lamb weren’t disheartening enough, they have troubled back stories, and book by book you get to know them. Even better is that Joe Country is narrated by Gerard Doyle, who is just as good here as always.

Clark and Division by Naomi Hirahara

This is a rare instance where I’d recommend you stick to print. In Hirahara’s WWII-era novel, a Japanese American family released from internment camp arrives in Chicago to rejoin their older daughter, only to learn she committed suicide the previous day. In that the younger daughter, Aki, sets out to discover the truth about her sister’s death, it’s a detective story; in that it’s set in a Nisei world with all its constraints and opportunities, it’s social history. Nominated for a Mary Higgins Clark Award from Mystery Writers of America (MWA) and an Agatha Award from Malice Domestic.

Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

Adam Lazarre-White does a spectacular job with his rendering of this story’s characters. And the two leads couldn’t be more different: Ike, a taciturn black landscape service owner, and Buddy Lee, a voluble white man down—way down—on his luck. Their sons fell in love and married, something both dads have trouble with. But the young men were happy—that is, until they were murdered. Now their fathers want to know who did it. It’s a compelling story, and Lazarre-White delivers it with feeling and humor. Nominated for an Audie Award by the Audio Publishers Association. Edgar award nominee for Best Novel from MWA.

Trouble is What I Do by Walter Mosley

Dion Graham narrates this story in Mosley’s popular series about private investigator Leonid McGill. In this story, his challenge is to protect an elderly Mississippi bluesman, upending the wealthy and the corrupt in the process, always a task to McGill’s taste. The reading is smooth as silk. Finalist for a 2021 Audie Award for Mystery.

Djinn Patrol in the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

This novel has three narrators—Indira Varma, Himesh Patel, and Antonio Aakeel. Ordinarily, I don’t find multiple narrators necessary. Most of story is told by nine-year-old Jai, and the actor conveys both his enthusiasm and naivete. When his schoolmates begin to disappear from their slum neighborhood without a trace, Jai and his friends decide to investigate. Author Anappara, a former journalist, based the story real-life child disappearances, which, in India, occur every eight minutes. 2021 Edgar Award for Best Novel.

“America’s Westminster Abbey”

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Established in 1757, Princeton Cemetery, owned by Nassau Presbyterian Church but nondenominational, has been called “the Westminster Abbey of the United States.” It certainly contains a microcosm of American history. By Zoom and a walking tour today, the Princeton Historical Society provided a fascinating overview of its history. Perhaps 23,000 people are buried in its approximately 19 acres, and efforts are nearing conclusion to digitize the disparate burial records—scribbled in ledgers, on file cards, and the like.

Among the many luminaries buried there are one U.S. President—Grover Cleveland (left above)—and most presidents of the University, but not Woodrow Wilson, who’s buried at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The graves of Cleveland and his wife are often decorated with leis, as the people of Hawaii revere him for opposing Hawaiian annexation. Among those University Presidents was Aaron Burr, Sr., whose namesake son (of Hamilton notoriety) is also buried nearby (center above).

John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the children of Richard Stockton, another signer, are there. In a literary and artistic vein, you’ll find John O’Hara, African American artist Rex Goreleigh, and Sylvia Beach (right above), founder of the Paris bookshop, Shakespeare & Company. Milligan Sloane (d 1928) is buried there, founder and first president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. When the Olympic Torch came through Princeton en route to Atlanta for the 1994 Games, the entourage made a stop at the cemetery to honor him.

A large section of the cemetery is occupied by African Americans, many of them freedmen, former slaves, war veterans, early graduates of local schools after integration, and prominent citizens. Among them are the parents of Paul Robeson. Their graves have a clear view of the church where Robeson’s father preached and the street where they lived (Robeson himself is buried in New York State).

Princeton was originally a Presbyterian school, and Old Opequon (Presbyterian) church was the Valley of Virginia’s first place of worship. Its minister, the Rev John Hogue, graduated in the first class, “fresh from (Princeton’s) Nassau Hall.” (He’s my first cousin, seven times removed.) In addition, Moses Hogue, the sixth President of Hampden Sydney College, is another Princeton graduate who became a Presbyterian minister. He’s my fifth-great-half-uncle. I’m more pleased at how genealogy has enabled me to calculate these relationships than in their very attenuated existence!

You might have the impression that Princeton is the last bastion of WASP America, but the names in the newer part of the cemetery demonstrate a much wider heritage than you might expect.

Ancestor Trouble

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Regular readers of this blog know one of my passions is genealogy. My latest adventure? Learning how to customize maps to show my ancestors’ travels across geography as well as time. Not everything I’ve learned about their migrations is happy news.

So I listened with interest to a recent presentation by the author of the just-published and much-anticipated memoir, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation by Maud Newton, sponsored by the New England Historic and Genealogical Society.

I don’t write memoir, but from friends who do, I know that figuring out how to tell these stories and how much to tell is a big part of the challenge. Newton had wrestled with her family’s difficult past for a long time, and she’s used both genealogy and DNA research to try to sort out fact from fiction. For example, did her paternal grandfather really marry thirteen times? (Newton has found records of 10 of his marriages to nine different women.) Did he really murder a neighbor with a hay hook? (Yes, but it was self-defense, after her grandfather came to the aid of the neighbor’s step-daughter whom the man was assaulting.) And did he die in a mental institution? (Yes, and Newton has put a gravestone on his formerly unmarked grave. It’s inscribed “Not Forgotten.”)

Her family, including her mother, were great Texas storytellers, and Newton had decided that, given everything else she knew about the family and the mental illnesses that plagued many of them across generations, many of her family stories seemed improbable but not unlikely. On her mother’s side, the family was very poor, yet in the early 1800s, they did own slaves. Even a Massachusetts ancestor, who in the 1600s was tried twice for being a witch and exonerated both times, may have owned a slave, slavery being not as unknown in New England as generally believed.

The details and corroboration of these and many other stories were a lot for family members to bring on board. Not only was the research difficult, the bigger challenge was for the family to come to the reconciliation Newton alludes to in the book’s title. Unfortunately, some family members’ approach to the past is to “sweep it under the rug.” That’s a loss in a much greater sense, because, as Newton says, “without each of the people who came before, who contributed to the genes that ultimately contributed to ours, we wouldn’t exist as we do now.”

Where Writers’ Ideas Come From: Creating a 360-degree Character

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Archer Landis, protagonist of my forthcoming murder mystery, Architect of Courage, is not one of those characters who seems to have no life outside the confines and events of the story. Writing about his role as the head of a large architecture firm with offices across the United States and in Dubai, with all its challenges and demands, allowed me to develop him as a more fully rounded character, a person with a “real life.” Using a single point of view in this story may make that total immersion easier.

When bad things start happening to Landis, he has to take into account their effects on his family and staff. He’s running a big business, he employs hundreds of people and encourages new architects, clients have invested millions of dollars in projects his firm is leading. The world isn’t waiting while he recovers from events directed at him; decisions have to be made. He can’t just ignore all that and, in the story, dealing with familiar issues reassures him he can handle the unexpected.

As an example in which the character’s life didn’t mesh realistically with the story, I think of a mystery in which the protagonist (a police detective) had a partner who was a female hockey player. Possibly interesting, no? Some possible plot implications too, right? In that novel, the women’s hockey team had an important all-star game coming up. The pressure was on. But in the month or so of story time, she never attends a single practice. The author introduced hockey as an important part of her world and barely mentioned it thereafter. Missed opportunity.

One of the parts of Archer Landis I gave attention to is his role as mentor to his principal assistants. How much leeway does he give them? How does he reward, critique, and support them? They responded in unexpected ways, as people do, and there are still some Grand Canyon sized opportunities for misunderstanding. Landis is devoted to many aspects of his work, but one he doesn’t like? H.R. problems. And there are always those.

His relationships with his fellow architects, several of whom are close friends, are also important, if dwelt on less. When he needs them, they rally around. As do his firm’s attorney and public relations manager. It’s clear he’s been the kind of person whom others have confidence in and want to help, even though he’s stumbled here and there. I never have to come out and say this, it’s obvious in their actions toward him. Showing, not telling. At least that’s my hope!

Unconventional Content in Your Fiction

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Award-winning Australian author Sophie Masson provided her thoughts for writers about using unconventional content in a recent Writer Unboxed column. Masson is an internationally published author of more than 70 books. Unconventional content includes “newspaper articles, extracts from books, diary entries, audio transcripts, records of phone calls, email chains, text messages, social media posts,” and the like to enhance and extend a story.

Such content can be a succinct way to sum up a situation, convey factual information, or provide another perspective without having to delve into lengthy exposition. (The worst example of this I’ve seen was a description of the merits of a particular weapon reduced to bullet points.)

Susan Rigetti’s exciting new novel Cover Story consists entirely of these scraps. Much of it is a diary kept by the main character, Lora, Ricci, in which she reveals her personal take on her situation much more candidly than dialog likely would. Like a troublesome Greek chorus, messages between an FBI agent and prosecutor, interspersed among the diary entries, make clear that not everyone sees the situation as Lora does. Messages, emails, and other scraps of information also serve to build the fictional edifice.

As Masson points out, such unconventional content “allow authors to create a richly-textured story-world with many varied strands to its narrative tapestry.” The most familiar form of this is the epistolary novel. You probably know that Jane Austen liked the epistolary form and that Pride and Prejudice was originally written that way. Letters (remember them?) play a large part in that story, even after she converted it to a more conventional narrative.

Masson says these different forms shouldn’t be introduced arbitrarily. They need a real reason to be there;  to “really belong in your story.” I’ve written four short stories featuring Brianna Yamato, a rookie reporter at the Sweetwater, Texas, Register. Each story ends with the newspaper article that results from her digging. It’s fun writing those stories in newspaper style, and in them, each clue Brianna followed is slotted in place so that the whole picture of events emerges. There’s a sound reason for the newspaper story to be there; that’s her job.

Masson ends with some advice: do your research to make the unconventional content sound appropriate to its era and style, whether an 18th century newspaper story or 21st century texts; similarly, read aloud any audio transcripts or social media posts to check their voice; use these pieces strategically and fairly sparingly, unless the story consists solely of them, like Cover Story, or another example Masson provides, the crime novel The Twyford Code, by Janice Hallett.

Spies, Spies, Spies!

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You might with justification believe that John le Carré’s death marked the end of sophisticated spy fiction. Three reasons to take heart.

First up, le Carré may be gone, but his work isn’t quite finished. While I enjoyed what at the time was termed his “last” espionage novel—Agent Running in the Field—the posthumously published, rather slender, novel Silverview is also worth a read. Both are expert at focusing your attention in one direction, while all along, the protagonist is engaged in a much bigger, much more complicated game. It’s that combination of spywork and grifter that I find so intriguing.

Over his career, le Carré had done such a convincing job of peopling the various sides in the Cold War and setting their minions against one another, that I for one wondered what he would write about after the breakup. I shouldn’t have worried. Not only were there many more books, but the Russian menace was apparently just on pause. Too bad he’s not still here to probe its current-day secrets. (You’ll recall that in The Russia House, set in the Gorbachev years, le Carré’s premise was that the Soviet military menace was not all it was cracked up to be. Fast-forward to 2022.)

Second, let me introduce you to a 21st century spy novelist who I believe is a potential heir to le Carré’s mantle as chronicler of the cynical, conflicted, mistake-prone and sometimes baffling and baffled espionage agent: author James Wolff. A member of the UK government for fifteen years, he writes under a pseudonym. His two books—2018’s Beside the Syrian Sea, and 2021’s How to Betray Your Country—are a different breed than the usual spy story, more complex, like the people he portrays.

In Wolff’s work, you have a strong sense that the context and actions of the characters are grounded in reality, as the agents are, too, flaws and all. As Wolff said in an interview with the Harrogate Festivals, “I don’t think that a book can be thrilling if the reader doesn’t believe that the characters are real.” No need to amp up the energy with over-the-top, implausible situations and confrontations. I’ve lost patience with authors struggling to pack in yet another far-fetched idea or action scene.

And third, finally, Apple TV has finally started showing its original production of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, witty and quick-witted. As Apple describes it, the spy drama “follows a dysfunctional team of MI5 agents—and their obnoxious boss, the notorious Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman)—as they navigate the espionage world’s smoke and mirrors to defend England from sinister forces.” And Mick Jagger singing the theme song! What more can you ask? There are eight novels and three novellas in Herron’s series, so, fingers crossed, there will be lots of good watching ahead.

Books on Exuberant Display

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It takes more than a some Ikea bookshelves to make a memorable display. A beautiful, thoughtfully designed library or bookstore incites the imagination. People who love to read are certain a beautiful display of books–whether bookstore or library–holds unknown, but discoverable treasures of knowledge and imagination.

We recently visited Manhattan’s beautiful Morgan Library to see the Hans Holbein the Younger exhibit and were equally intrigued by the exhibit on Woody Guthrie. Two more different experiences are hard to imagine, except with the common thread of explaining and reflecting their times, separated by five centuries. The accompanying photo shows the library behind an open copy of the Gutenberg Bible.

One library that turns up on every list of “world’s most beautiful” is the Admont Abbey Library, (above), part of a Benedictine monastery in Admont, Austria. The gold-and-white library is a confection of baroque excess. Not only is it the world’s largest library in a monastery (about 70,000 volumes), it looks like it belongs on a dessert plate.

We’re visiting Portugal later this year, and the bookstore, Livraria Lello, in the city of Porto is something I hope to see. Porto is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the bookstore is more than 115 years old.

This neo-Gothic structure, with its pinnacled grey exterior, is one of the oldest bookstores in the country. Not only does it contain a wealth of history, but keeps one foot firmly in the modern era.

JK Rowling once lived in Porto and reputedly frequented the store while she was working on the Harry Potter series. You now need a paid voucher system to enjoy this exuberant architecture.

One of my favorite bookstores is the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, Arizona. As its name suggests, it mainly features the crime, mystery, and thriller novels I enjoy. Plus it offers an ambitious program of conversations with noted authors. A Rogues’ Gallery of past presenters is tacked to the ceiling beams, and, if you like this genre, you’ll find many favorite authors pictured, some from their early writing days. We heard Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child talk about their most recent work there. Someone in the audience asked Preston, whose background is in science, about his predictions about the likelihood—even the inevitability of—a major pandemic. Barely a month later, we were in lockdown.

Where Writers’ Ideas Come From: Staying Oriented in Time and Space

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Harold Lloyd, clock, cliff-hanger

Everyone works differently, but it really seems to help me to visualize what I’m writing as if I were watching a movie. That helps me know where my characters are in space (in the living room, the bodega, the office) with all the site details that potentially shed light on their situation and is even more helpful in tracking time.

Although where characters are in space seems relatively straightforward, you occasionally find a book where characters must have some undisclosed teleportation super-power. How else did they start out in one place and suddenly end up in another?

I’m a fan of Chris Roerden’s Don’t Murder Your Mystery, and she has several chapters dealing with time and place. Her advice about choosing a setting—fewer bars and restaurants where the only thing that happens is an exchange of information—is especially valuable. Keeping track of time is trickier. Advice in her chapter titled “Crazy Time” has saved me on numerous occasions. It’s made me conscious of the benefit of small, but subtle, reality checks about time-of-day (light, sun, sounds).

As always, where these issues are managed well, they’re unnoticeable, but where they aren’t, you can learn by negative example. A book I read recently described the trees with their spring buds, then a chapter or two later—perhaps a week or so later in story time—the characters were complaining about a winter snowstorm. I flipped back a chapter or two, wondering whether my recollection of the spring blossoms was a misunderstanding, but it was not.

A pet peeve of someone in my writing group is ignoring the phases of the moon. Full moon sparkling on broken glass one night (thank you, Anton), and a dark, moonless night the next. If you’re putting the moon in one of your stories, check here to find out what it was doing on any particular date.

If I had to guess, I’d bet time and space errors crop up most often during revisions. It’s like changing the name of a character, the original name is almost impossible to expunge totally. It keeps sneaking back onto the page. If the writer wrote a draft set in winter, but decided to skip all those scarves and galoshes and changed the timing to spring, one winter reference stayed frozen in place.

I try to prevent such dislocations and discontinuities by just keeping track, in the computer or on paper, not in my head. Though I’m a pantser, this much organization is essential. I maintain a table with columns for chapter number, topic, date (e.g., Thursday, June 2), and word count. Couldn’t be simpler. The table saved my bacon when my editor asked me to compress Architect of Courage. I added a column for “New Date” and avoided mountains of bothersome recalculation.

Originally, the novel started on June 2 and ended August 16; the revision started the same date and ended July 22. I squeezed three-and-a-half weeks out of what had been eleven weeks of storytime, and I would never have been able to proofread all the glancing mentions of day and date otherwise.

Starting July 23, I hope my character Archer Landis takes a serious vacation. I put him through a lot in those weeks!

Nine Lives

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Author Peter Swanson has created another lively homage to classic mystery puzzles in his new novel, Nine Lives. Much like his earlier book, Rules for Perfect Murders, several of the characters in this new story recognize parallels to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (Ten Little Indians) and The ABC Murders—but Swanson gives these plot devices his own diabolical modern twists.

Nine strangers receive a letter containing a single sheet of paper with nine names on it in alphabetical order. The names aren’t familiar, the envelope lacks any identification. The recipients react in predictable, but different ways. A couple of them ignore the letter completely, several rack their brains trying to figure out what it means. Ultimately, most chalk it up to some species of computer mistake. Only one views it with much suspicion. She’s a female FBI agent, and it’s her job to be suspicious.

A day or two later, when a man whose name is on the list is found dead, the keen ears of the agent’s FBI supervisor perk up. The deceased, Frank Hopkins, was a man in his seventies and owned the Windward Resort in Kennewick, Maine. If he drank a little too much and got a little hazy at times, what killed him was having his head pushed into a tide pool where he drowned, a mysterious letter crumpled in his hand.

When a second person whose name is on the list is found shot to death, the possibility of a coincidence is too remote to contemplate. The FBI agent calls it “the second plane.” When the first airplane hit the World Trade Towers on 9/11, the shocked witnesses all assumed it was a tragic accident; when the second plane hit, everyone’s assessment changed, immediately and completely.

The FBI begins a massive effort to track down the seven remaining people, all but two of whom they do eventually identify and question. The recipients are clueless and the police offer protection. This makes no difference at all, as the next victim dies in his bed with a police officer sitting in the driveway. Now you’re firmly in And Then There Were None territory.

The people on the list are all interesting in their own ways, mostly under 40, but wildly diverse in where they live and what they do (aspiring actor, singer-songwriter, college professor, kept woman—does anyone still know what that means?—retiree, oncology nurse). Surprisingly, they’re mostly not deeply frightened, even as the body count rises.

Meanwhile, you can’t help but troll the text for clues of buried commonalities among the letter recipients. Several are estranged from their parents, three are in the arts, loosely speaking, two have cats (nine lives?). That kind of thing. You’ll likely enjoy trying to work out the puzzle Swanson lays before you. I did. Of course, one little fact has been withheld that would clinch your theory, but Swanson does provide enough information to get there without it. This book strikes me as an ideal vacation read, as it moves swiftly through the mayhem, while retaining a light touch.