consciousness long before it occurred to me that I might writeone day. His passion for the mystery genre was something I picked up at an early age.
I wasn’t cut out to be a ballerina
When I was growing up long, long ago, girls had limited career options. In alphabetical order, the choices were: ballerina, nurse, salesclerk, secretary, stewardess, or teacher.
I had no physical talents whatever, so there went
Swan Lake
. I suspected that teaching, which is extremely fulfilling for some people, would be a bore for me. I was married and a young mother, so Pan Am was out of the question. I was interested in medicine, although perhaps not for the loftiest of reasons. When I was in my early twenties, the two most popular television series were
Dr. Kildare
and
Marcus Welby, M.D
. In my fevered imagination, I conjured myself in a white cap, white shoes, and a crisp white uniform, awash in purity of purpose, sacrifice, dedication, drama, emergencies, lives saved, and all made right with the world. How much better could a job be?
Unfortunately, I’m squeamish about blood and suffering. I’m also needle-phobic. So becoming a nurse in real life meant I’d actually spend my days stretched out on the floor in a dead faint.
I’ve mentioned the sorry results of my dreams of working at Sears. So my last hope rested on my untapped secretarial aspirations. Hell, I was game. I taught myself how to type, pretended I knew medical terminology, and got a job as an admissions clerk, and then as a secretary, in a hospital clinic for the indigent. Later, I processed applications and typed up intern and resident rotations in a hospital. Later still, I ran the front officefor a family physician. All of this, please note, in the white uniform and white shoes I’d originally pictured myself wearing.
After work every night I’d come home, cook supper, wash dishes, chat with my then-husband, and put the children to bed. Then I’d sit down at my desk where I wrote from nine p.m. until midnight. Within the space of four years, I’d finished three full-length novels, which never saw the light of day. The fourth,
Keziah Dane
, was published in 1967 when I was twenty-five years old. My advance was fifteen hundred dollars. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
Doctor of literature
Mystery writers are the neurosurgeons of literature. Or maybe magicians. We work by sleight of hand.
Constructing a credible detective story takes ingenuity, patience, and skill. The writer has to find the perfect balance between right brain, the creative function, and left brain, the analytical. We have to develop character and plot at the same time—and by “plot” I’m not talking about a formula. Plotting is the way a story proceeds. It’s the sequence of events that unfolds and builds, scene by scene, to a satisfying conclusion.
A mystery is the only literary form that pits the reader and the writer against each other. The writer’s side of the deal is to play fair. That means letting the reader make the same discoveries the detective makes in any given moment, putting all the information on the table in plain view.
The trick is to conceal one’s purpose, distracting the reader’s attention while laying out the bits and pieces that will eventually point to the resolution. If a story’s too convoluted, the readergets annoyed by having to keep track of unnecessary or implausible twists and turns. If a story’s too simple, and the answer to the question of “whodunit” is obvious, the reader’s annoyed because that takes away the pleasure of outsmarting the writer, who’s trying to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes.
The fact that any mystery writer succeeds at this impossible commission can only be described as miraculous.
Sue Grafton’s Wisdom for Writers
There are no secrets and there are no shortcuts. As an aspiring writer, what you need to know is that learning to write is self-taught, and learning to write
well
takes years.
You’ve got
I wasn’t cut out to be a ballerina
When I was growing up long, long ago, girls had limited career options. In alphabetical order, the choices were: ballerina, nurse, salesclerk, secretary, stewardess, or teacher.
I had no physical talents whatever, so there went
Swan Lake
. I suspected that teaching, which is extremely fulfilling for some people, would be a bore for me. I was married and a young mother, so Pan Am was out of the question. I was interested in medicine, although perhaps not for the loftiest of reasons. When I was in my early twenties, the two most popular television series were
Dr. Kildare
and
Marcus Welby, M.D
. In my fevered imagination, I conjured myself in a white cap, white shoes, and a crisp white uniform, awash in purity of purpose, sacrifice, dedication, drama, emergencies, lives saved, and all made right with the world. How much better could a job be?
Unfortunately, I’m squeamish about blood and suffering. I’m also needle-phobic. So becoming a nurse in real life meant I’d actually spend my days stretched out on the floor in a dead faint.
I’ve mentioned the sorry results of my dreams of working at Sears. So my last hope rested on my untapped secretarial aspirations. Hell, I was game. I taught myself how to type, pretended I knew medical terminology, and got a job as an admissions clerk, and then as a secretary, in a hospital clinic for the indigent. Later, I processed applications and typed up intern and resident rotations in a hospital. Later still, I ran the front officefor a family physician. All of this, please note, in the white uniform and white shoes I’d originally pictured myself wearing.
After work every night I’d come home, cook supper, wash dishes, chat with my then-husband, and put the children to bed. Then I’d sit down at my desk where I wrote from nine p.m. until midnight. Within the space of four years, I’d finished three full-length novels, which never saw the light of day. The fourth,
Keziah Dane
, was published in 1967 when I was twenty-five years old. My advance was fifteen hundred dollars. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
Doctor of literature
Mystery writers are the neurosurgeons of literature. Or maybe magicians. We work by sleight of hand.
Constructing a credible detective story takes ingenuity, patience, and skill. The writer has to find the perfect balance between right brain, the creative function, and left brain, the analytical. We have to develop character and plot at the same time—and by “plot” I’m not talking about a formula. Plotting is the way a story proceeds. It’s the sequence of events that unfolds and builds, scene by scene, to a satisfying conclusion.
A mystery is the only literary form that pits the reader and the writer against each other. The writer’s side of the deal is to play fair. That means letting the reader make the same discoveries the detective makes in any given moment, putting all the information on the table in plain view.
The trick is to conceal one’s purpose, distracting the reader’s attention while laying out the bits and pieces that will eventually point to the resolution. If a story’s too convoluted, the readergets annoyed by having to keep track of unnecessary or implausible twists and turns. If a story’s too simple, and the answer to the question of “whodunit” is obvious, the reader’s annoyed because that takes away the pleasure of outsmarting the writer, who’s trying to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes.
The fact that any mystery writer succeeds at this impossible commission can only be described as miraculous.
Sue Grafton’s Wisdom for Writers
There are no secrets and there are no shortcuts. As an aspiring writer, what you need to know is that learning to write is self-taught, and learning to write
well
takes years.
You’ve got
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