I recently had the opportunity to provide a guest post for the lovely Jungle Red Writers and their readers. In the essay, I talked about the challenges and joys of creating a new series, populated by new characters, and what it takes to get to know these people who’ve only ever existed in my mind.

The discussion that ensued (because the Jungle Red ladies have the best, most engaged readers anywhere) was interesting in a number of ways, but I noticed in particular that it was pushing me to really think about the creation of characters and how that works in the grand scheme of writing a novel.

And I realized something I may have known before, but certainly never articulated: that for me, the plot is the last thing I worry about. (Strange admission for a mystery writer to make!)

When I say I’m a storyteller, what I’m really saying is that I create people and places that then conspire together to make things happen. I never think, “oh, there’s an idea for a story! Let me think about who I can cast in it and where I can situate it.” That has never ever happened to me. What I do, rather, is create characters, a whole web of them, who start interacting—and it’s in that interaction that the story, the plot, emerges.

Sometimes, I’ll concede, the place is what starts things off. I knew I wanted to set a series in Montréal, one of my favorite cities in the world. So that was number one. Number two wasn’t what the story should be—it was, rather, who is it that lives in Montréal and might have an interesting life—occupation, family, passions? It was only while I was starting to imagine Martine, start getting to know her, than my knowledge of some parts of the city’s past came into play and I wondered what she might do with them.

The result was a plot (I like to think a good one!) that flowed naturally out of the combination of the place and the character.

The same was true for the Sydney Riley Provincetown series. Of course I wanted to write stories about the town where I live. But it wasn’t until I started hearing Sydney’s voice—by turns witty and sarcastic—in my head, that I could also start to imagine how she might handle becoming an amateur detective.

One of the most popular questions I hear when I do public speaking is, “where do you get your ideas?” As though I were sitting in my garden and caught an idea on the fly; or even as though I saw a newspaper article and thought, “that would make a great plot for a novel.” (“Ripped from the headlines”? Any Law & Order fans out there?) That may be true for many writers; it may even be true fo

r most writers. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. In fact, it’s probably a better way to write, because if the plot is one’s focus, one is less likely to end up with all the plot holes that haunt my second drafts!

Instead, I go on a whale watch and suddenly my (new) main character informs me that she dyes her hair blue. Don’t ask me how, or why (humpbacks, after all, are not blue); I’d never even given a moment’s thought to what her hair might look like. But she was pretty insistent, and so when I got home I wrote that in. So what I’m catching on the fly are personality characteristics… not plots. (Though I did start one of my Provincetown novels with Sydney and her mother on a whale watch…!)

Hamlet was spot-on when he declared that stories move us, cause us to act or react. “The play’s the thing,” he says, “Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” I’ll never deny that. And I think I’m quite a decent storyteller, in fact. But we all find our stories in different places, through different means. For me, they will always grow out of the people who experience them and the place where they’re grounded—in other words, the context.

A little like… life.

The Story of My Stories

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