In the Beginning

 

Terry here, with this week's question: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Who hurt you? The question is not so much when I knew I wanted to be a writer, but when I knew I wanted to write crime fiction. I was always a writer.

I loved writing stories, and when my junior high school teacher assigned a story and she read mine aloud in class, I was hooked. I liked watching people hear the story read and being wowed by it. The fact is, even if she hadn’t read it aloud, I loved the story and was proud of it. I wanted to write more…and more. 

 My first published stories were not mysteries, except in the sense that every story has a mystery at its heart. No, I wrote, and wanted to write “literary” fiction. In college I had stories published in small literary magazines and thought I was a hot commodity. I’d get out of school and become a novelist and before you knew it I’d be famous. Pipe dreams. 

 Somewhere along the line, I heard that getting published was hard (duh), and that it was easier to get a mystery published. So in my brilliance I thought, “I’ll write a mystery, get it published, and then turn my attention to the Great American Novel.” 

 Not so fast, sweetie. Writing a mystery was harder than I thought, especially since I neglected to know when I started out who the killer was. I just thought of a good hook, assembled some characters, and started writing. About 75% of the way through, I suddenly came to a grinding halt with the question that haunts every mystery novelist: Who dunnit? 

 I came up with a convoluted resolution that in retrospect looks ridiculous. But at the time I thought it was “clever enough.” That word “enough” is not the word a budding writer needs to depend on. Thinking the book was good enough that an editor could whip into shape, I began sending it out. Meanwhile, I had enjoyed the process of writing a mystery and thought I should write another one with the same protagonist. This one by some miracle had an ending that seemed pretty good. “Pretty good.” That’s another no-no. Good enough. Clever enough. Pretty good. Sort of okay. Ish. It’s all in the same junk pile. I thought editors were there to take a sort of okay novel and make it into gold. No, they were there to find gold and polish it. It took me years to realize that. 

 None of those stories ever sold, but by then the desire to write the Great American Novel had become the desire to write the Great American MYSTERY novel. I wrote another one with different protagonists. Then another one, each time thinking the idea was good and that if the writing was good, an editor would fix it. With that attitude, it only took me another twenty-five years to get published. 

Only when I realized that a book I sent out had to be the best it could possibly be did I start getting the attention of publishers. During this time, I had no trouble getting solid agents, but none of them could ever sell my books. I blamed the publishing industry for not recognizing my genius. 

 Then I took a workshop that revealed to me that “good enough” was not good enough. That I had to write not a careless “mystery,” but a book that meant something to me. A book that had characters who spoke real lines and had real thoughts. A book with a plot that not only made sense but told a good story. A book with heart. Two months after the workshop, I began writing A Killing at Cotton Hill, the first of what is now an 11-book series.

So who hurt me? I did, by not recognizing that a good idea is not enough. Even good writing isn’t enough. To be successful you have to write not just from the head, but from the heart. You have to learn the craft of writing a mystery novel—how to grab and keep a reader’s attention, and how to do that without resorting to clichés and tropes. The funny thing is that these are lessons that you have to learn again and again. With each new story, you have to dig down and find that part of the story that only you can tell, from your perspective, with your particular style and tone and voice. With a few twists.