What is your background?
I grew up in Saginaw, Michigan as an early
baby-boomer. In the late 1800s, Saginaw was one of the biggest
lumber-producing towns in the world and it transformed into a
General Motors town in the 20th century. The Saginaw River divided
the city in two, and the East Side held most of the factories, the
big business district, and the low-cost housing. Many of the factory
workers were Mexican or African American. The West Side had small
businesses but was mostly residential and almost entirely white. My
high school, Arthur Hill, graduated one African student in my class
of nearly 700 (Saginaw High, on the East Side, was probably over
half minority). There were several kids my age in the neighborhood,
so we played lots of baseball and football in the streets. TV was
making its first encroachments, so we played Cops & Robbers and
Cowboys & Indians because we saw all of those shows.
When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?
My family included a couple of reporters, a few
lawyers, several engineers and many teachers. In fact, my sister and
I are the two youngest of seven first cousins, at least four of whom
taught. People read to me constantly. I could "hear" rhythms of
speech when I was still quite young and read fluently before
kindergarten. The original Mickey Mouse Club serialized the first
Hardy Boys books, so I inhaled about thirty of those books when I
was about ten or eleven. Naturally, I started writing my own
stories, too. Each chapter was one wide-ruled page and ended with
someone going over the cliff in a car or being hit on the head. My
mother typed them up, and seeing my words in print was a huge
thrill. My family thought writing was "nice," but wanted me to get a
Real Job because they were afraid I'd starve. They were probably
right, so I started college in pre-dentistry, but hated it. I
shifted to an English major and ended up teaching, so the writing
was always hovering in the background.
What early influences shaped your writing?
Well, growing up in the 1950s, I saw "B" westerns
and Batman, Zorro, or Flash Gordon serials weekly at our local movie
theater. Dozens of westerns and cop shows jammed the TV networks,
too. All the kids in my neighborhood collected and traded comic
books, and our parents didnt care because it meant we were reading
SOMETHING. My parents, especially my mother, read the classic
mystery writers: Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout,
Ellery Queen, etc. My early understanding of story involved a Good
Guy and a Bad Guy. And those cliff-hangers. Somewhere along the
line, I read the Greek myths, too.
My ninth-grade English teacher taught me grammar
so well that I never thought about it again, and my tenth-grade
English teacher was about 25 years ahead of her time. She made us
all do what was later called "free-writing" and "peer editing," so I
gained a sense of my own voice and style from her. Then in grad
school, a short story course revived that urge to write and I wrote
five unpublished novels over the next nine or ten years. One of them
became my sixth-year thesis at Wesleyan University, where my advisor
helped me discover my most efficient process. By then, I was vaguely
"literary," but crime and mystery were always fundamental to me.
Is that still true?
Sure. People fascinate me, and they all want
something. Stories are about how much they will give up to get that
particular something they want. If you take a shortcut, like robbing
a bank or killing a woman's present lover, you create consequences.
And when you have to avoid those consequences, you get in deeper. So
now you have conflict and something at stake, too.
It doesn't matter whether you read Thomas Hardy
or the Hardy Boys. People want, and their desire will drive them
over that seductive little line while we sit back and watch. Crime
writing has been with us from the very beginning when Cain killed
Abel or Zeus overthrew Kronos. But innocence isn't lack of evil,
it's lack of knowledge of evil, so until we can make a choice (Hey,
Adam, want a piece?), it doesn't count.
Joyce Carol Oates has said that, in some form or
another, everything she writes is crime fiction. She's not alone.
Lord Jim, Beloved, Oedipus The King, Huckleberry Finn, Wuthering
Heights, The Scarlet Letter, Macbeth, The Brothers Karamazov, Pride
And Prejudice, Native Son, Our Mutual Friend, Anna Karenina, The
Great Gatsby, Sanctuary, Madame Bovary, and To Kill A Mockingbird
all have a crime at their core. And they barely chip enough off the
literary iceberg to cool your cocktail.
Not all of my writing is mystery, but most of it
involves a crime as a fairly important issue.
You taught high school English for 33 years. How much did that
help your own writing?
I was considered a "Good" and a "Tough" writing
teacher when I retired, but I'm a much better writer now than I was
then, and I still have about a 99% rejection rate for what I send
out. The sad truth is that high school English classes have too many
students in them to be able to give the individual attention someone
needs to become a really good writer. The material is too
generalized and-frankly-too easy to make anyone except the truly
talented and self-motivated kid more than adequate. On the other
hand, all those years of meeting interesting people gave me material
that I can use in stories.
How important is setting to your work?
Overall, setting isn't so much a creative choice
for me as a matter of expedience. Maybe that's something I still
have to look at more critically.
I've sold several stories to markets that wanted
New England writers or settings, but I think some of my rhythms
still betray my Midwest upbringing even though I've lived 2/3 of my
life in Connecticut. The unpublished sixth-year thesis came from a
local scandal during my senior year of high school, and the values
and attitudes of mid-sixties Michigan were important to that story.
I'm working on a PI series that's set in Detroit because it was
inspired by a woman I met at my high school reunion and the Detroit
rock scene felt appropriate for it.
You just mentioned the Detroit rock scene, and many of your
works allude to music. How important is music to you?
When I was growing up, music was everywhere, and
I couldn't hide from it even if I wanted to, which I didn't. My
parents were excellent dancers (I'm terrible) and loved swing and
show tunes. Country was big in Saginaw, too, along with the fifties
crooners before rock. When I was ten, I wanted to learn piano
because my aunt had a baby grand in her living room. My parents
weren't willing to drive me over to her house to practice, so I
settled unhappily for a year of violin. When Elvis came along, my
parents hated rock 'n roll, but I knew about it from the other kids
and our transistor radios.
I got my driver's license mere months before the
Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, and drove around with the British
Invasion and Motown as the sound track to high school. Naturally, I
wanted to play guitar like everyone else, and Saginaw had a thriving
teen scene with two local radio stations sponsoring weekend Battles
of the Bands. Some local musicians even went on to join Alice
Cooper, Lou Reed, or Grand Funk Railroad. Bob Seger was an
archangel.
In my sophomore year of college, I saw the Muddy
Waters Blues Band live and dropped my allegiance to the Monkees and
Paul Revere & The Raiders to start digging into the blues.
That's when I got my first guitar. A combination of little talent,
lousy practice habits, and a fractured wrist means I've never been
better than mediocre, but I still have several guitars. Many of my
generation who went to college listening to folk, folk-rock, and
psychedelic rock have strong emotional and historical ties to
certain songs from that era, and they make their way into my
stories. Megan Traine, the keyboard player in "Stranglehold" and
that Detroit PI series, is based on a high school classmate I met at
my reunion. She's been a gigging musician in Detroit for years and
has played with several big names, including Meat Loaf before he was
famous.
How often and how much do you write?
I try to write every day when I'm working on a
novel. For planning and outlining-I need to outline or I'll get lost
and never find my way back-it may only be a few minutes at a time
until I get a solid sense of the story, but once I start the first
draft, I try to produce at least 2000 words a day. All of it will
change in revision, but writing quickly helps me find the story's
rhythm and pace. If I'm not working on a novel, I still write ideas
or notes or stuff for a fiction workshop almost every day. It's like
sports: you have to stay in training.
How long does it take you to write a novel?
Plotting is hard for me. Coming up with 50 or 60
scenes takes me two or three months-although I'm getting a little
faster-and figure another two or three for a first draft. Then I put
it aside and work on something else for a month before I do a
revision. The revisions go fairly quickly, but I don't even think
the stuff is good enough to print out until about the fifth draft.
And there's no set limit to the number of drafts. I think the least
I've ever done for anything I've published is eight. "Stranglehold"
went through twenty as a short story and several more when I
realized it was a novella instead.
Do you use the same process for writing short stories?
I love short stories, but I probably work as hard
on one as I do for the first draft of a complete novel. I have to
reinvent the wheel for every new story because I haven't figured out
a process that always works for me yet. Every time I think I've
found a rule to live by, the next story violates it. When I get an
idea, I scribble details and ideas for a day or two, then jump in,
and I need several drafts to figure out where it's really going.
Right now, the only standard seems to be that my opening shouldn't
point too directly to how it will finish. If I'm telegraphing it,
the reader won't get much out of it.
How much does your theater experience help you write?
I think it helps me write dialogue, and maybe it
helps me with rhythm and pacing. It's strange. I've directed, acted,
produced, or designed for about ninety plays since the early 1980s,
but I've never been able to write a play I thought was good enough
to show anyone. Somewhere along the line, I became more comfortable
with brief narration to help the dialogue tell the story. While I
don't like to write description, it's easier than relying completely
on conversation and the visuals in stage directions. I've taught a
playwriting workshop a couple of times and had a great time doing
it. I've had students go on to write plays that were produced, too.
But I'm a better midwife to plays than I am a parent.
Where and how do you get ideas?
Anywhere. But they seem to work best when they
sneak up on me instead of my actually going out to look for them.
When I started the PI series with the idea of the
rock musician-after meeting my classmate-I compiled a list of song
titles as possible book titles, and several of them suggested a plot
idea. A few stories come from personal experience, like the thesis
novel that came from something that happened when I was in high
school. Another novel came from experiences I had as a teacher. If I
see an interesting person at the gym or overhear an interesting
snippet of conversation somewhere, I have to come up with the story
that explains the person or quote. All of it works sometimes, but
nothing works all of the time.
What do you read in your spare time?
I'm mildly dyslexic and still hear a voice saying
the words because of being read to so much as a child. That means I
read slowly and can't read as many books as I'd like to. I still
read lots of mysteries, but I like mainstream, too. Less literary
now-teaching may have burned me out a little for serious lit,
although there are some major writers I still enjoy. I used to do
lots of theater, but I seldom read plays anymore. If I'm reading
nonfiction, it's likely to be for research, but not always. I like
some romance writers for their dialogue and humor. Humor is very
hard for me and I wish I could do it better.
How do you do the research you just mentioned?
As much as possible, I tell stories that require
no information I don't have-unless I can get it from a person. I
love talking to people, and most of them love to share their
expertise, especially if you say it's for a book. People have great
stories that become details to flesh things out.
I don't like to do research on-line because I'm
so easily distracted by interesting trivia. I can blow two hours
going from link to link on something that has nothing to do with my
quest, but it caught my attention. I have the problem with books,
too, but it's harder to get pulled in so many directions as quickly.
For some stories, you need them both, so you just learn to focus.
People like Jodi Picoult and Chuck Palahniuk who can incorporate
reams of fascinating information into their stories amaze me.
How is your writing changing?
I like to think it's improving, but there are
some fundamental techniques I still don't do well. I don't like to
write description, so I tend to leave out too much of it. Plotting
is hard, but maybe I'm getting more efficient at it. Humor is VERY
hard. Working on different kinds of projects-genre and mainstream
novels, short stories, writing workshops-forces me to keep learning,
and that's good. I may not really be getting better, but I can
produce first drafts more quickly than I used to, so I can start
fixing them faster, too. It's all about the revising.
What would you like to accomplish as a writer?
I'd like to reach a point where I believe I can
do this. At some point, I'd like to have enough skill and knowledge
to help other writers as much as several people have helped me along
the way. I'd like to feel I was worthy of their confidence and
generosity. |
