Mystery Women Authors

How I Wrote That Story

by Sue Grafton

From Amazon.com

Anything can trigger a book. For instance, with "B Is for Burglar" I was lifting a window sash and I heard the window weights knocking in the wall. You know, a window sash has a rope and a weight? I thought, what a keen way to kill somebody! Take the window frame off, remove the window weight, bash somebody in the head, neatly put the weight back in the wall, and who would ever know? And so I just sat and thought about how all that would work, and that became the murder weapon. And then I had to build backward to figure out where the story began and what else it was about.

Sometimes I get ideas from doing research. I'll be out tracking down a piece of information. When I was working on, I think, "A Is for Alibi," I went to look at some morgue, because I knew at the end of "A Is for Alibi" ... I pictured [Kinsey] rolling herself into one of those drawers you see on TV where they keep the corpses. Well, as I did research, I found out that there aren't any drawers. Most morgues don't keep bodies in those drawers. Some probably do now, but mostly it's an artifact of television. So I had started going to morgues to see how it was actually done, you know, how bodies are kept. Somebody finally said to me, don't you know this person said, "Sometimes we have these bodies for years." I went, "What?" "Oh, yeah, you know, once they're embalmed you can keep them for a long time, and some are just here for years." And I thought, what a keen place to hide a murder weapon! Because who would ever look in a corpse? So that's where I came up with that, and then, again, I worked backward to figure out what the rest of it was.

I keep an extensive journal for each book that I write. And the journal usually consists of a lot of handwringing and self-doubt and whining and dead ends and despair and suicide attempts--just your typical day in the life of a writer. But if you write about what you want to write, you will see a story begin to form. Usually I start with some kind of notion of what I might do next.

For instance, with "K Is for Killer," I wanted to see if I could write a book set entirely at night. I thought that would be interesting. Now, I personally go to bed at about 9:30 every night, so I thought, I wonder who's out there? I wonder what goes on at night? I didn't have a clue. So I started getting in my pickup truck, driving around, and seeing who was up and what was going on. And so then I would write that all in my journal, and gradually I began to think about who was up, what kind of people were awake at night, what did they do, and what would happen if a day person like Kinsey Millhone began to make the shift and started functioning as a night person. What would that cost, psychologically?

So part of the story evolves from whatever interests me at the moment. Some of it comes from actually being out in the world and looking to see what's out there.

You can read the rest of this interview with Sue Grafton at http://www.amazon.com/grafton-interview

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Last updated 03-Mar-2002