Natasha Alexander » mystery

I Love a Winner!

Natasha — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:25:30 +0000

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.

Well, Cathryn Grant’s Book and Kindle Giveaway is over – you can find out who won the contest here.

But I gotta say – I really feel like I was a big winner last week. It was fun to welcome new visitors to my blog and to visit those blogs in return. I discovered several new-to-me blogs to follow regularly, and that’s a real treat. I learned something about the passions that fuel people’s need to read and to write.

Of course I look at everything through my own lens, but getting into someone’s head – whether a fictional character, an author, or your own head as a reader/writer – to learn a bit more about human nature is a thread running through most of the comments. I get that, wanting to write about characters who climb into the brain somehow, want to read about them.

I’m reading Elizabeth George’s For the Sake of Elena right now. George has an amazing talent for slowly tossing little pieces of a character out like breadcrumbs that you just have to follow, hungry to learn more.

I bought the book at a used book fair last year and when I opened it, I found a little purple card taped on the inside front cover with this written on it: Absolutely the best Elizabeth George. If you like this one, you can go back and read all of them.

oh. yeah.

It was a dark and stormy night…

Natasha — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:21:17 +0000

…perfect baking weather, in my mind. So I made apricot-orange oat scones and then, since the kitchen was already a mess, cranberry chocolate chip cookies. C’mon over. I just put on a pot of coffee.

I was awake a lot during the night since bands of rain kept slamming the bedroom windows. And of course while I was lying there in bed listening to the wind, voluptuous prose started flowing out of my mind.

Did I get up to write any of it down? Nah. Am I pissed at myself for being a slouch? You bet. Full disclosure: most of the time when I have gotten up to write down those middle-of-the-night pearls, I find they’re not quite so pearly in the light of day. Last night could have been a breakaway point, though. We’ll never know, will we?

I just finished reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. I carried it with me everywhere for the past couple of days so I could pop it open whenever anyone paused for longer than 2 seconds in conversation or I was waiting at a red light. Yeah, it definitely got under my skin.

I’m glad I didn’t see the movie, and I won’t. Too much really nasty stuff happens in the book, and I don’t want to see it replayed in color on the big screen. But it is making me think I’ll keep, maybe even expand on, some of what was making me a tad squeamish during my recent NaNo writing.

It probably goes without saying that NONE of my characters can hold a candle to Lisbeth Salander, the sociopathic main character in the Millennium trilogy. (Tattoo is the first book of the series.) That’s a problem – you’re boring – when you write what you know and you’ve led a fairly low-impact, neutral existence.

Larsson died before any of the books in his Millennium trilogy was even published. On Stieg Larsson came out last week. It includes a series of emails between him and his book editor, Eva Gedin, as they were editing the trilogy. A couple of those emails were printed in this Wall Street Journal article, The Man Who Launched a Blockbuster. I felt a little voyeuristic reading the emails, which of course adds to their appeal. I am looking forward to reading the entire book.

This exchange from the article stood out for me as I read it [possible spoilers but I don’t think they would stand in the way of your enjoyment if/when you got into the series]:

A rule of thumb has been never to romanticize crime and criminals, nor to stereotype victims of crime. I base my serial murderer in book I on a composite of three authentic cases. Everything described in the book can be found in actual police investigations.

The description of the rape of Lisbeth Salander is based on an incident that actually took place in the Ostermalm district of Stockholm three years ago. And so on.

The email went on to describe his thoughts about many of his characters, especially his so-called secondary characters who he believed were as important as his main characters in creating a “realistic universe”.

Larsson led a vastly more exciting personal life than most of us sitting at our kitchen tables pounding out whatever we’re pounding out while eating homemade scones. Even so, he got way outside his own skin to build his characters and his stories.

That’s part of the writer’s struggle, isn’t it, whether your life is exciting or mundane? To get outside your own skin and cast a wide net, troll around for those wrinkles and eccentricities, pick up the flotsam and jetsam of real lives that float in during a storm. Research. Listen. Get up in the middle of the night and write it down. Dream.

Getting outside your own skin. And then putting what you find there together in a way that will get under your readers’.

Still working on it.

Crossing the 50K Line with NaNoWriMo

Natasha — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 03:32:42 +0000

DING! DING! DING! Yesterday I crossed the National Novel Writing Month finish line when I wrote the 50,000th word of Pelican Island, my NaNo murder mystery. I didn’t stop writing even though the flashing lights and buzzers went crazy and someone started pouring champagne while a brass band played.

oh. wait.

maybe it didn’t happen quite like that.

Maybe no one even noticed when I got to word 50,001. And that brass band must have been playing on a different island. I just kept on slogging, slogging, slogging until I got to the end of the scene I was writing and I noticed I’d made it to the finish line. The champagne was NOT flowing freely. I’d come up with a sort of okay ending and written it a few days earlier, but the road to the ending was and still is filled with gaping plot holes.

I’m going to keep on slogging forward, but I’ll tell you a secret:

I hated NaNo more days than I felt the love.

I felt chained to this process that brought out the very worst of my writing capabilities. I was so bent on coming up with plot points that I forgot to tell a story. I killed my most interesting characters. I used clunky and banal language. My only funny scene was a funeral, and that happened at the beginning of the book.

My family learned to tread softly when my word count was advancing too slowly for the calendar. I wondered what in hell ever made me think I could tell a story anyway, ’cause I sure wasn’t banging it out here.

Here’s another secret:

I already miss NaNo.

I miss the urgency that kept me glued to my chair and would. not. release. me. until I’d met my daily word quota. I miss competing (yes I do) with my writing buddies, and cheering them forward as well. I miss that single-minded focus and intensity on my writing, even my bad writing. I miss having a deadline that forced me to approach writing in a totally different way than I was comfortable with, and to crank out that many words that quickly, quality be damned.

I’m looking forward to putting Pelican Island to sleep for a while. And reading — I’ve already started The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And blogging again. And a host of other things that went on hold during NaNo.

And then, sometime in January, I’ll pick up Pelican Island again. Who knows what I’ll find in it then. Or in myself.

Paper Rats, JCO, Nancy Drew and me: The ‘Inside the Writers’ Studio’ Interview

Natasha — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 16:16:01 +0000

I was honored, flattered and just plain excited when the lovely and talented Paper Rats, Kris and R.J., invited me Inside the Writers’ Studio for an interview. ME? They wanted to interview me?

YES!

So here’s the link to today’s interview: Natasha Drew on mystery, muses, and Joyce Carol Oates. You’ll get to learn about my 5th grade writing disasters and what’s happening in my current NaNoWriMo novel, among other things.

Head on over and read the interview, and then check out some of the Paper Rats videos if you haven’t seen them yet. You’re in for a treat.

Right now — that’s it.

And then have a nice week-end, ya’ll.

Georges Simenon, Norman Bates, NaNoWriMo and me

Natasha — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 03:05:47 +0000

Paris Noir, Brassai - 1934

Over the weekend I read a review by Patrick Marnham of Pedigree, an autobiographical novel that Georges Simenon wrote in 1948. Back in the olden days before I became a workaholic and a mother, I read a lot of mysteries, including several of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret series. I don’t remember specifics but I enjoyed the books and thought that Maigret – and, of course, Simenon – had a real handle on his characters and what drove them.

Since I’ll be writing a mystery for my National Novel Writing Month foray, I perked up on seeing Simenon’s name in the paper. Here’s what I learned from the article: first that he had written 76 Maigret mysteries, each of which generally took him about three weeks to write. (More on that later.)

Pedigree, on the other hand, took several years and included enough real life examples that three different people later sued him for libel. The review described the “lifelong trauma” that was Simenon’s relationship with his “volcanic, unloving” mother and that informed much of Pedigree.

I also ~~wasted~~ spent some time this weekend browsing through one of those Scariest Movies of All Times lists that crops up every Halloween and ended up watching the shower scene from Psycho for the hell of it. So I was already geared up for a monstrous mother. (Yes, there’s a BATES MOTEL hand towel in our guest bathroom. I got it at the Universal Studios gift shop and not the motel, but that can be our little secret, okay? It’s what Mother would want…)

After 76 Maigret books, Simenon wanted to concentrate on dark literary fiction, what he called romans durs or “hard novels” — hoping to win the Nobel Prize. He didn’t win it, but he did write 117 romans durs. Almost two hundred novels. Phew. That makes Joyce Carol Oates look sorta like a piker.

How did he do it? According to Patrick Marnham’s review:

His working methods were notorious. He did not just write his stories; he lived them. He immersed himself in the personality of his leading character, went into “a sort of trance” and, possessed by the world he was creating, worked in short bursts at tremendous speed.

He would type a page every 20 minutes, 1,500 words an hour, 4,500 words a day for 20 days. In this way he could produce three or four books a year and take nine or more months off. While he was writing he could drink two liters of red wine a day and still lose weight. His children would watch him from the window, notice how his walk changed and try to guess what sort of character would emerge in the next book.

Simenon’s mother? Shortly before she died, she visited him and gave him back every cent he’d ever given her over the years.

When she died, Simenon’s inspiration died too. The man who had published 76 Maigrets and 117 dark novels battled on for 12 months and then gave up writing fiction.

Yeow. Talk about a muse.

SO: Am I ready for NaNo now? Nah. I’m still trying to figure out what, or who, or where my muse is. I suspect that I’ll never follow Simenon’s methods – and that’s probably a good thing. I have the skeleton of an outline and I’m fleshing it out now. But the “sort of a trance” while immersing myself in my characters is useful, I think, to help me get to know my characters better.

Especially my darker characters.

I just need to be careful in the shower.