Everyone is Fair Game

Did you base any characters in your books off of friends or family?

by Paul D. Marks

Most of my characters are based on people I know or have known, or see or have seen in my various life adventures, at least in part. Those adventures can be anything from mundane daily life events like walking the dogs, going to the market or bookstore, to more exciting things, such as SCUBA diving and a hopefully once-in-a-lifetime experience like pulling a gun on the LAPD! They are also, of course, based on me and most of them have a part of me in them. It could be a big part or a little part, but since I know me better than I know anyone else there’s always some seepage by osmosis. Sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously.

Both my lead and secondary characters are based on people I’ve known through the years. And then there’s part of a name here or there, from people I’ve known. Bad guys are often based on people I, uh, don’t like... But to say that this character or that is based on me or so-and-so wouldn’t be accurate because for the most part they’re composites of people I know or have come across.

And some of them are simply based on observations of people I see here or there. For example, I was in the original Barney’s Beanery (click the link for Barney’s to read a history of it, it’s pretty interesting: https://barneysbeanery.com/about/), a famous LA dive and two guys were playing pool, got into a fight. Beer flying. Pool cues cracking. It ended up as a scene in something I was working on.

My latest story, Nature of the Beast, up at David Cranmer’s Beat to a Pulp (http://www.beattoapulp.com/wz20160303-pdm-natureofthebeast.html), is a noir story about a

hitman with a heart of lead. Now, I’m not saying I do or don’t know any hitmen. But either way, the character of hitman Jack Lake is based on the experiences and world outlooks of people I’ve known over the years, as well as on parts of my own experiences (and no, I’m not a hitman). We extrapolate traits, characteristics and motivations for characters from our own lives or the lives of people we’ve known or have come across, even if the characters are different in some ways from the real people. So you can take character traits from anyone and insert them into any character that they’ll work for. I may not know any hitmen, but I know some hard people and so their traits make it into Jack.

Everything and everyone is fair game. Writers observe and borrow from everything – people watching in the airport, making up stories in our heads about who they are and what they’re doing. Or sometimes a friend does something or tells us about an experience in their life that we find compelling, which we “borrow” for a story. Often they’ll be very loosely based on something we’ve heard or read about. For example a friend might have gone through an unpleasant divorce and told you about it, but in your story you embellish so one of the divorcing couple plots to murder the other, whereas in real life the unpleasantness might have only been in arguing over who gets to keep the dog. So watch what you say or do in front of a writer, you might just end up in their next book….

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And now for the usual BSP: Check out David Cranmer's interview with me at: http://davidcranmer.blogspot.com/2016/03/drinking-with-nilsson-freaking-out-mork.html

And check out my article on Vortex and the Green Absinthe Fairy at Mystery Playground's Drinks with Reads:
http://www.mysteryplayground.net/2016/02/vortex-and-green-absinthe-fairy.html

Anthony voters please consider my short story, "My Enemies Have Sweet Voices", from Down & Out Books’ anthology Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea, for Best Short Story.

And please consider Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea for Best Anthology.

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www.PaulDMarks.com

Doreen and Laura

By Catriona

Do I ever base characters on real people?

Well, let's get this out of the way. I never base nasty characters on people I don't like, lovingly describing their bad clothes, breath and personalities. I mean, truly, hardly ever. Seldom. Not for while. In short, yes.

Moving on.

The second Dandy Gilver novel THE BURRY MAN'S DAY was set in the village where I was born, like my father before me, and begins during the second weekend of August in 1923, when my Godmother, the redoubtable Auntie Doreen, was just six weeks old.

I had Dandy get landed with the unpleasant task of judging the bonny baby competition at the local fair and, despite the advice of the judges in the agricultural categories (who do it pretty much by weight), Dandy found herself diverted by a little red-haired scrap with speedwell blue eyes who reached out and stroked Dandy's fox fur with delight.

That was my Auntie Doreen all over. She adored expensive clothes, shoes and cosmetics and would buy a Jenner's dress the wrong colour that didn't fit and have it altered and dyed, rather than go next door to Marks and Spencer's and get the perfect thing for a third of the price. (She died before I started dumpster-diving so she never had to deal with that horror.)

Then last year in The Child Garden I revisited another, very different but just as redoubtable, woman who used to be part of my life. Laura McRoberts was my Step-Grandmother-in-law and she was a splendid old trout. She had been a minister's wife, although that probably only sums her for Scots. Americans should imagine absolute self-assurance and a brusque kindliness delivered in ringing tones. With scones.

By the time I met Laura she was blind and had had both legs amputated, but she still lived alone in her own little house and wouldn't let visitors help with the scones. She also had a granite belief in her recall of Edinburgh and would argue you to numb silence about the street lay-out and bus routes that she knew from the 60s . . . and you'd been on that morning, coming to see her.

God, she was infuriating. And how I loved her! Miss Drumm in THE CHILD GARDEN  is Laura from the peremptory remarks fired at lesser beings (that's just about everyone) to her soft-heartedness around animals and fierce contempt for anyone who harmed them. Writing it felt a lot like visiting her again.

Me, myself, and I, confess... by Cathy Ace

Did you base any characters in your books on friends or family?

To all my friends and family – the answer to this question is…if I did, I only did it for the nice characters!

To everyone else reading this…I have to admit, yes, I did. However, in the spirit of fairness, before I lay bare any secrets about other people, I’ll do it to myself.

                                                 

Me, myself, and even I, are very much the basis for Cait Morgan: she’s facing fifty (I was 52 when the first book was published, just fifty-and-a-half when I wrote it); she's a short, overindulgent Welsh Canadian foodie who teaches at a university in British Columbia (this was me when I began writing the series, though I have since left that day job); she’s quite bossy, judgmental and self-centered (sadly me); she has a difficult past when it comes to men (definitely me) including a dead

ex-boyfriend (unfortunately me – though I wasn’t arrested on suspicion of his murder, as Cait was); she finds herself with a chance of happiness she’d never expected and marriage to a wonderful man who balances her life in ways she never knew it needed (happily me).

Cait and I are from the same part of Swansea, went to the same school (Llwyn y bryn), attended the same university from which we both graduated in psychology, then we even took the same job – working in a marketing communications agency on a variety of advertising, PR and media accounts. At that point our career paths went off in different directions: I stayed in the world of marketing communications setting up my own business (at the idiotically tender age of 28) which I eventually grew to be the largest of its type in Europe. I sold it and “retired” at 40, only then entering the world of academe as an adjunct professor of marketing on the MBA course at the University of British Columbia and then at Simon Fraser University. Cait left the world of marketing communications in her early twenties – irritated by the folks she worked with – and took her Masters’ degree at Cambridge. She left the UK for Canada to escape the tabloids (I didn’t have to do this, thank goodness) and wound up at the University of Vancouver (a mash-up of UBC and SFU…because I can’t afford any lawsuits!). We both belong to Mensa, enjoy the company of Labradors and will always try something new to eat or drink, even if it’s a nose-wrinkling experience. Neither of us enjoys the idea of exercise, let alone doing it, and I like the fact she solves whodunits with her brain, not using any sort of a weapon (okay, maybe she’s resorted to bonking someone on the head with a champagne bottle, but that’s about it). 

Having exposed myself – what about anyone else? Cait has a sister, so do I. Cait’s sister is Sian, and she has some elements of my own sister in her: a love for, and deep understanding of, opera and classical music; a particular enjoyment of the voice of Jonas Kaufmann; an enviable ability to knit; Sian lives in Perth, Australia – my sister did so for years. That said, my sister isn’t married with children, so I gave Sian some “additions” my sister doesn’t have.

Me with "half of Annie Parker"

In the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries I have a few people in mind when I’m writing. Annie Parker is a mixture of two good friends: the real Londoner Annie has been my very good friend for more than twenty years and brings the clumsy elements of the character (even she’ll admit this is true), while Eustelle (of St Lucian heritage, with a love of hot sauce and an acrimonious relationship with her backside) was my next door neighbor in London for almost two decades – I’ve pinched her name for Annie Parker’s mother. Carol Hill is also a synthesis of two people I know well: Carol, who’s not Welsh but is lovely and wonderfully bright when it comes to anything to do with numbers, and Chris with whom I shared a flat at university, who came from a Welsh farm and was the gentlest person you could wish to meet, with a warm, ready smile and always ready lend a helping hand. Mavis MacDonald is a mix of another of my university room-mates, Jennifer, who was a sharp, intense Scot with a deeply-held belief that a life lived in the service of justice was the best way to be, and Rose, who was the lady who cleaned the office I had at UBC – she was doing it so she and the family could enjoy a couple of months in a condo in Maui every year…her reputation for not taking any nonsense from anyone (whatever their title) was well-earned. Christine Wilson-Smythe is based upon three people…all of whom will remain nameless, but with whom I used to spend a fair amount of “social time” in London during the ‘eighties  and ‘nineties. It was the heyday of the Sloane Rangers, let’s just leave it at that.

The favorite hot sauce of "the other half of Annie Parker"

I hope no one comes after me with a knife for this! Honestly, even when I find myself using elements of someone I know for a character – be it a quirk of their movement or a phrase they use often (sometimes unwittingly) – I do it with love. If I didn’t enjoy spending time with my characters I’d never visit them again. I will also admit that the characteristics of many more friends and family members probably also seep into my writing – unbidden and often unnoticed by even this author herself.

Cathy Ace writes the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries (book #2 THE CASE OF THE MISSING MORRIS DANCER was published in February, and book #1 THE CASE OF THE DOTTY DOWAGER was published in trade paperback on March 1st) and the Cait Morgan Mysteries (book #7 THE CORPSE WITH THE GARNET FACE is published in paperback in April). Find out more about Cathy and her work, and sign up for her newsletter at http://cathyace.com/  (Sign up by April 1st and you'll be entered to win a signed copy of The Corpse with the Garnet Face.)

Did you base any characters in your books on friends or family?"

- from Susan

1.     Absolutely not.

2.     Yes, of course.

3.     This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All of the above are true for me in different books and for different characters. Real people morph into characters who live (or die) only on the page. Invented characters take on the eyes, lips, voices of people I know the deeper I dig into the story. Real people I never want to see again in the flesh provide the irritating personalities I need to telegraph villains and their enablers. People I love smile and insinuate their most endearing traits into characters I want my readers to like. All this is perfectly normal and not legally actionable.

It won’t come out until 2017, but the first book in my new series is about an American couple plopped down in a tiny French town with nothing but their artistic talents, their good will, and a couple of unruly dogs to serve as introduction to their new neighbors. That situation is based closely on the lives of my dear friends Alice and David, who were delighted to be the inspirations for Love and Death in Burgundy.

 The real "Katherine," who is actually Alice.

Katherine, the protagonist, is based on Alice, an artist, a woman of a certain age who faces life with a mixture of high optimism and internal fretting. Alice is an artist, she does sally forth into the world with her chin held high, her desire for friendship intense, and her charmingly eccentric style as her calling card. From there, Katherine and Alice part company, however. Katherine keeps injecting herself into other people’s business, competing for popularity, creating a shaky tower of relationships that is too vulnerable to survive a stiff breeze, never mind a mysterious death.

Alice has read the book, loves it, relishes finding bits and pieces of her, her husband, and their lives inside the fictional story. She has blessed what is, for me, the closest I’ve come to using a real person in a novel. Maybe she approves because she lives her life in some measure as if it were a novel, which I mean in the most complimentary way. My story is an homage to Alice and David, who built a fairy tale life with little more than style and courage, and open hearts toward their adopted home.

 

It Takes A Village … of Books

A couple of years ago I stole Sue Ann Jaffarian’s spot here on Criminal Minds. Okay, she asked me to take her place when she left, but since this is a crime writing blog doesn’t the first way sound better? Anyway, she’s baaaaaaack, guest blogging for me today.

Sue Ann’s a great writer and a great person and I consider her a good friend. She writes the popular and very funny Odelia Grey and Ghost of Granny Apples mystery series, as well as the Madison Rose vampire mysteries and now, under the pen name Meg Chambers, the Winnie Wilde erotic romance novellas. She’s very prolific—I envy her output.

Her latest books are A Body to Spare (Odelia Grey series), The Ghost of Mistletoe Mary (Ghost of Granny Apples series) and Wilde Women (Winnie Wilde series).

And if you’re voting for the Anthony Awards, please consider Ghost in the Guacamole, A Body to Spare and The Ghost of Mistletoe Mary when filling out your ballot.

Thanks Sue Ann! Good to have you back.

—Paul

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“If you had to name a single book that inspired you to be a writer, what would it be?”

by Sue Ann Jaffarian

When I first received this topic, I thought easy peasy, and one book came instantly to mind: Murder Runs in the Family by the late Anne George.

But truth be told, that book didn’t inspire me to be a writer, it inspired me to be a writer of humorous mysteries. Early in that book, as I was laughing out loud (I mean really laughing out loud, not the ubiquitous LOL), I realized that I wanted to entertain readers and give them a belly laugh or two or three or an entire barrel.

And here I am, 23 or so books later in my career, and I think I’ve accomplished that with both my Ghost of Granny Apples series and my Odelia Grey series. And recently Amazon, of its own accord, tagged my most recent series, the Winnie Wilde romance series written under the pen name of Meg Chambers, as erotic humor.

Guess I’m stuck in a rut, but it’s a good rut and one of my own making.

Okay, blog question answered. See, easy peasy.

  

However, that really didn’t answer the question of what book inspired me to be a writer, did it?  So back to the drawing board, or in this case the old memory bank.

In spite of giving this question considerable thought, I must say there was no book that inspired me to be a writer. There were bushels and bushels of them!

I remember pouring, as soon as I could read, over Golden Books and fairy tales, reading the stories over and over and over and over, as kids tend to do. When I entered elementary school, a bookmobile paid regular visits to the school and I never missed it. In addition, I owned batches of Bobbsey Twins and Trixie Belden books, and later many volumes of the Cherry Ames series.

When we moved from Massachusetts to California when I was 8, I was delighted to discover the Scholastic program that distributed catalogs to classrooms from which students could purchase books. My mother gave me a monthly book allowance and I’d study the catalogue carefully, making sure I spent my money well.  It was the birth of a book buyer!

I was also a library rat. I spent a lot of Saturdays at the library doing homework and reading. When I was a preteen, it was free child care if my parents had to both work that day. I’d have a sack lunch and would spend the day until my dad would pick me up. Of course, this would come with strict orders not to talk to strangers or leave the building. Later, I would spend Saturdays there just because it was my favorite place. It was at the library I was introduced to How Green Was My Valley,  The Yearling, The Member of the Wedding, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, A Patch of Blue, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as many others classics, long before they hit my school curriculum. 

It was there, at the public library, where I became inspired to become a writer. I really wanted to see my name on a book on a shelf in the library. To me, that was being somebody. It meant you were immortal.

On some of those long Saturdays I would write my name on scraps of paper, using one of those stubby pencils the library provided to jot notes, and insert it into the card catalogue where I JUST KNEW one day my name would be. I often went into the stacks and spread the novels apart to make room for the books I JUST KNEW I would write one day.

When my first published novel Too Big To Miss first showed up in my local library, I stared at it a long time as it sat on the shelf, and I cried.

The big wooden card catalogues are long gone, but my books remain, in the Js, right where I JUST KNEW they would be.

***

And now for the usual BSP: Anthony voters please consider my short story, "My Enemies Have Sweet Voices", from Down & Out Books’ anthology Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea, for Best Short Story.

And please consider Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea for Best Anthology.

Click here to Subscribe to my Newsletter
Check out my website: PaulDMarks.com

Perfect Timing

I've blogged before about what five books made me want to be a writer. Five books that each showed me something I never knew a book could be. They are: Pride and Prej, Catch-22, Gone with The Wind, The Water-Method Man and I Capture the Castle.

So today I'll talk about the book that made me believe I could be a writer, maybe even was a writer. And that's Stephen King's On Writing. Here's the view to the left of my desk right now. King is there between the Concise Oxford and Roget.

I had the great good fortune to start writing the year On Writing was published and boy did I need it.
I wrote my first book exactly how I wanted to: furtively, saying nothing to anyone; making it all up as I went along like Gromit laying the railway track for Wallace's speeding train; jotting down things to research once I'd finished the 100K words. It was the best fun I'd ever had.

Then I started reading writing manuals and going to meetings and found out I'd been doing it all wrong. Apparently I supposed to sketch out character biographies and make what I truly thought were "arks" and now know are "arcs" for everyone. I was supposed to have a critique group (no more furtive control-freakery) and I was supposed to have done all the research before I put fingers to keys or bum to chair.

I remember thinking that writing wasn't going to be as much fun as I had expected, after all. Thank God for Stephen King. Along he came, utterly serious and buoyantly larky at the same time, foul-mouthed and big-hearted, a man who found outlines pointless and workshops a distraction and yet had managed to write more than a book or two.

He even - Hallelujah! - did the research second. Since I read On Writing I've never doubted that writing was what I'm meant to do and I've never worried about how I do it. (Also, I've never tried to make anyone else worry about they do it either. What's with that?)

So above my desk right now, this is the view:

Looking at all those Stephen King novels makes me happy. It's bittersweet to look to the right at the small run of Jane Austen novels and think of what might have been. She died, Persuasion almost complete, when she was 41. Stephen King is 68 and still writing. (So I added my collection of Dorothy Whipples to the Austen shelf just to balance things up a bit. (And if you're thinking "Dorothy Who?" you've got a lot of pleasure in store.))

“To begin at the beginning:” by Cathy Ace

If you had to name one single book that inspired you to be a writer, what would that be?

 I can’t choose just one. It didn’t happen that way for me. I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t either listening to, or reading, stories, and my love for them grew as the years passed. Here’s a selection of influential books.

Age 5: Little John Little was both written and illustrated by Charlotte Steiner, and my copy (yes, this is the one I read as a little girl) is still with me all these decades later. I adored this book, both the words and the pictures. Now that I live on five acres with lots of critters I still absolutely believe families of squirrels live just like this inside the trees I can see, with a dinner of specially prepared acorn dishes being served around a tiny table covered with a checked tablecloth, and an oil lamp in the four-paned window glowing yellow in the darkness. At this age I was delighted to have the pictures to bring the words to life, but that need passed very quickly, with words being able to conjure their own visions in my mind’s eye, showing me the power of words alone.

Age 7: With chapter-heading illustrations, Paddington Bear by Michael Bond allowed me to gradually move away from needing to have words interpreted for me, and made me reassess my attitude toward marmalade, amongst other things. He also allowed me to understand it was alright to be plucky, curious and prepared to try new things. I cannot imagine what possessed me to underline things in this book – it horrifies me! I am someone who can’t even mark a book with a pencil, and here I seem to have run amok with a Biro. Ack! 

Age 10: This is a new edition of a favorite Agatha Christie – it’s signed by Hallie Ephron telling me it’s her favorite Christie too, so I suppose I’m in good company. And my mum was thrilled when I first read it. My love of and for Christie’s work started when I was about ten, and has never left me. It was her work that first made me wonder if I could write crime fiction.

Age 13: The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien was part of a book prize I won when I was thirteen (the other books I chose were The Lord of the Rings and A History of Witchcraft – to be fair to my parents they didn’t panic, they realized I was going through a period when I was interested in many various mythologies and reading about them voraciously). I treasure it still, even though it’s almost falling apart. When I was about fourteen I took all my school notes in Tolkien’s elven runes. Out-geek that! 

Age 14: The A C Bradley book on Shakespearean Tragedy was already a classic back in 1926, which is when this book was printed. I “acquired it” (see my previous post revealing my nefarious plans to snap up desired tomes from my school library) in 1974. It’s been with me ever since and I still enjoy re-reading it. The second lecture in it, on the construction of Shakespeare’s tragedies, is still as valid as it was when it was written, and still gives food for thought for any author.

Age 15: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, amongst other of his works, showed me that Welsh people were allowed to write. To create. To play with language in a uniquely Welsh way. The title of this post is the opening line from the play, and upon first reading it I was hooked by the fifth line. Who wouldn’t be won over by character names like Mrs. Dai Bread One and Mrs. Dai Bread Two, Captain Cat, Polly Garter and Gossamer Beynon, let alone the thought of the Reverend Eli Jenkins delivering a “greenleaved sermon”. Both Shakespeare and Thomas allowed me to understand that language is a living, breathing, evolving thing, and words can be placed together in surprising ways to create an emotional response that goes beyond the literal.

Age 16: Ibsen’s plays taught me how language can be used as a weapon – a weapon to skewer society, even as he skewers his characters. A weapon that can win supporters for a character even as they are being assassinated. A weapon that can force the reader/audience to reconsider the solidity of the foundation of their understanding of morality and societal norms even as they see their own lives' dilemmas played out on the page and stage before them. He also was the first playwright whose work I read, other than Shakespeare and Thomas, that I then saw on the stage – always a powerful experience. I’ve read more recent translations of his work and, despite the fact they flow more easily from a twenty-first century tongue than this version, written in 1950, I cleave to this one, with all its mid-twentieth century vocabulary. The truth of his work, its timeless quality, always translates well.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of what inspired me to write, something that had become my dream by the time I turned sweet sixteen; indeed, it might be more of a list of what made me wonder if there was even any point trying! But these works certainly provided some lights along the path. I hope you find my list illuminating. 

Cathy Ace is the author of the Cait Morgan Mysteries (book #7 THE CORPSE WITH THE GARNET FACE will be published in April) and the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries (book #1 THE CASE OF THE DOTTY DOWAGER was released in paperback on March 1st, book #2 THE CASE OF THE MISSING MORRIS DANCER was published on February 1st). You can find out more about Cathy and her work here: http://cathyace.com/