I have read every Elizabeth George mystery novel, from A Great Deliverance (1988) to The Punishment She Deserves (2018). I have loved Detective Lynley and admired Barbara Havers, and I have followed their prickly partnership through all their cases and tragedies. I had a slight falling out of love with Elizabeth George after she killed off Helen, and I struggled through several subsequent novels where the author herself seemed to be grieving and off her game. I cheered with joy when I read her most recent novels. She was back! For George, it’s not the murder component, though it is brilliantly devised and written. Her stories are compelling. Her characters have emotional depth. They exhibit critical flaws and live complicated, multi-dimensional lives.
I say I want to be like her because I hold her books up as the model for my own attempts at writing in the mystery genre. I have read and re-read her writer’s guide, “Write Away.” In developing my story, I diligently devised character prompts and story arcs. I devoured chapters on dialog, description and atmosphere. I also tried to maintain writing journals in which I outline, ideas, problems, progress or lack thereof. I purchased the requisite journals and notebooks, but I have found that I lack the discipline to do this every day. Instead, my journaling is sporadic, and, sadly, I tend to write my editing notes on scraps of paper that get discarded or in the margins of earlier versions. I seem to have misplaced that sense of order that served me so well in my academic life.
I have wanted to write fiction since I was young. I remember my earliest “book,” Babe, about a girl who raised a cow for the 4H. This ten-page masterpiece was written long before the Disney story about Babe the pig, and I have always been upset that Disney stole my story… but enough about that. I also wrote a story, based loosely on Hansel and Gretel, about two children who wander off and get lost. I don’t remember the exact plot, but the most memorable line that I remember was when the father came home from work, and the mother admitted that she had lost the kids. His response: “Don’t worry, honey. Here’s some money. Go shopping and enjoy yourself.”
Over the years, in between raising children and real jobs, I wrote an article and a short story, both of which earned rejections. Later, I completed two novels, one a romance that I immediately burned in the wood stove, and the second that hides in a file cabinet buried in the basement.
During my last year of teaching at Grand Valley State University, I dreamed of a retirement during which I would write that mystery novel floating around in my brain. I was looking for inspiration and found a writer’s retreat at Interlochen Academy. A mystery writer’s retreat fit into my schedule and appealed to me: Learn to write mysteries; character development, plot, with daily peer and faculty evaluations. I signed up and took the class with a local mystery writer.
“This will be fun,” I thought. “A mystery will be easy. I love mysteries.” I packed up my suitcase, my computer and all my enthusiasm and drove Interlochen. The retreat was fun, the ideas and group conversations stimulating, and I enjoyed sitting in my room at night concocting crime scenes, victim and perpetrator character sketches, and reading these to the group. The basic ideas I developed during this workshop became the focus of Human Sacrifice, the novel I have finally completed. George’s “Write Away” served as my model for organizing and writing.
Human Sacrifice has evolved over many years, more time than it took to conduct my anthropological fieldwork in Mexico and write and defend my doctoral dissertation. Since that first writer’s workshop, I have written and rewritten more versions than I care to admit. I have discovered how difficult it is to develop a timeline that withstands the ability of characters to muck up my story. When I realized that Claire (my protagonist) can’t possibly know a bit of information (who saw the victim on the pyramid) in Chapter 20 because she wasn’t at the critical meeting in Chapter 4 where it was disclosed, my beautiful timeline and plot arc had to be revised…again and again… forward and backward.
Happily, persistence and hard work have paid off and I have finished Human Sacrifice, my first mystery! It is not Elizabeth George, but it is mine! It takes place in Merida, Mexico and involves a female anthropologist participating in a conference of Mayan Scholars. I have also written a draft sequel where Claire continues her relationship with the Mexican detective of the first book and they solve a murder (or two) in a retirement community in Central Florida, titled Culture Shock. Even though I have improved my ability to develop detailed timelines, my characters don’t always cooperate; they still resist showing up at the place and time I had planned.
But I muddle on.