Writing Mystery Fiction

ARE THE STORIES IN YOUR BOOKS BASED ON REAL EVENTS? No, but my stories are situations as old as humankind and as new as your morning paper -- someone dead and someone blamed. There really is no end to the ways humans can cause emotional and physical harm to their own kind and all the other creatures on the planet, and all of them bring on moral and legal debates about honor, duty, truth, fairness, justice, crime and punishment, and the criminal justice system. That's what I try to explore in my fiction writing. Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and I try to show that through the eyes of the different characters. The good people have flaws; the bad people have some good in them.

ARE YOUR CHARACTERS BASED ON REAL PEOPLE? As I tell my friends  -- which are fewer in number after I tell them this -- if I knew any real people other than my grandchildren as interesting as my characters, I wouldn't have to entertain myself by writing fiction. Of course, we tend to write what we know. My main characters are aging baby-boomers who spend more time assessing what they've made of their lives than charging at new windmills, just like some of the real people I know. Some are lawyers, so they're not always likeable, just like some of the real people I know. My lawyer characters are more jaded than idealistic as they struggle with the moral ambiguities they find between the code of ethics obligations of the legal profession and what they perceive as the honest and just thing to do. Just like real people, they struggle with family issues as well and sometimes make bad choices when trying to balance professional and personal lives.

HOW DO YOU MAKE YOUR CHARACTERS LIKABLE? Not all of them are, but I usually kill off the really obnoxious ones or turn them into villains. The protagonists, the heroes, I give lives cluttered with family, friends, co-workers, bosses, and more demands on their time than any human being ought to have to deal with, give them a murder mystery they have to solve as part of their day job, throw in some life-threatening events, then I don't let them take themselves seriously while muddling through as best they can. That is, I give them lives like yours and mine, plus a murder to solve, and hope they make the best of a bad situation. I want the reader to come away from the story thinking about how they might have handled the moral ambiguities the characters face.

WHAT DO YOU MOST ENJOY ABOUT WRITING FICTION? The characters. I invent them, they reinvent themselves, take over the story, take off on tangents I never intended. Like real people, they do pretty much what they want, and they often surprise me with the things they do. I'm not very good at controlling my characters, but I can prune ruthlessly. The delete key works wonders. Until you've got a publisher hovering over you with a publication deadline, you get unlimited do-overs with fiction. If the facts you make up to get the story moving don't add up when you get to the finger-pointing part of the plot, just go back and change them. About the only place you can do that in real life is as a spin doctor for a politician.

WHAT DO YOU FIND DIFFICULT ABOUT WRITING FICTION? Other than making myself sit down at the keyboard to actually accomplish any writing, the hard part for me is doing harm to characters I've gotten to know a dozen or so chapters even if they are bad guys. It's easy for me to be an advocate; it's hard for me to be a judge because it's been my experience that any human being can be the bad guy just as easily as he/she can be the good guy -- all those "reality" television shows prove how horrible ordinary people can be to each other.

Human beings can rationalize just about any violation of the big ten and all the minor rules of civilized society in the name of necessity -- winning (the girl, the game, the job), saving the world (from aliens, monsters, volcanoes, meteors, Communists, Saddam), for the greater good (survival of the fittest, eliminate weaklings, purify the race, cook the books, downsize, outsource), fighting evil (doing God's work -- Allah, Jehovah, the god of your choice), anything for the home team and its sub-parts (my boss told me to, the coach told me to, the general told me to), or I just couldn't help myself (I'm weak, I'm a sinner, I was drunk, I was temporarily insane, he/she provoked me). The excuses are endless. We are all expert in rationalizing our actions as good and our opponent's actions as bad. So I work from the premises that even the bad guys feel justified in doing whatever they're doing and the good guys aren't always sure they're doing good for the right reasons. Sometimes the bad guy's reasoning almost convinces me to let him/her get away with it. Of course, in life and in fiction, someone has to be the villain and someone has to be the hero, so I do what I have to do -- for the greater good, or because I can't help myself.

Now that I think about it, I need to amend my answers to another question (what are your novels about?). In addition to the character's story, my novels are also about this phenomena lawyers come to understand very early in their careers: (1) there are as many versions of a story as there are tellers, (2) most tellers are convinced they're telling the truth and/or lying for a good reason (see excuses above); (3) there are as many ways of evaluating the evidence in a case as there are lawyers, judges, jurors, and legal commentators; and (4) the law is seldom black and white -- Lady Justice often wears multi-shades of gray (and maybe a devilish red ribbon on her underwear).

I guess what all this rambling answer boils down to is that my novels tend to be character driven and my characters analyze everything to death! Don't know where they get that.

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Writing Fiction - Writing Mystery Fiction - Writing Mystery Novels