The Images in My Head

 Q: What inspires you in your day-to-day life, something that influences your writing?

-from Susan

 

People. People and their quirks, their heroics, their embarrassments, their bonhomie or opaqueness, their pride, their charms, their prejudices…oh, just everything!

 

It’s not just the people I already know or have met formally. It’s the lumpy man in flip flops shuffling down Mission Street muttering to himself about an insult he wants to avenge, and the young woman waving a Starbucks coffee cup as she trips along Sausalito’s upscale Bridgeway in stilettos, talking rapidly into the air – oh wait, it’s a phone that might as well be invisible – about a deal she’s trying to finalize at her real estate job. He’s saying, “Goddamm, he had no right to talk to me that way.” She’s saying, “That creep had no business saying that in front of the couple.”

 

I wonder if he’s homeless and that he saw that the guy who told him to get lost had just knifed someone. What will he do? She could be a dishonest broker whose multi-million dollar sale just got dinged. Will she try something illegal to complete the sale?

 

My four French village mysteries were all inspired by a couple I thank in my books, California friends who moved on a whim to a hamlet in France about 25 years ago, where I visited them several times. 

When he died, his widow moved a few kilometers away into a somewhat larger town, and I have visited her there several times. Her health is declining now and there may be no more visits. But I have walked the perimeter of that town, met her friends and neighbors, been in the modest little shops, and eaten many meals at their tables. In recent years, I have admired her constant companion, a handsome young French hunting dog.

I have heard my friends’ stories and frankly borrowed their experiences of being ex-pats. 

 

Location. In all of my books, the other major inspiration is place: Santa Fe, Manhattan, New England, France. I know these settings, can see, smell, and taste their pleasures from my own life. 

If I love a place, I can call it up in my fiction almost at will. I even have a couple of places I really didn’t enjoy that can be folded into my fiction. My hunch is I’m saying nothing new to writers because we don’t create fiction in a vacuum. We create it from what we know, can imagine, fear, hope for, and love.