Guest blogger today is mystery author, Susan Oleksiw.

Beginning the Next Book

Over the last few years I’ve become very conscious of the little habits I have that get me into the next book. I don’t like to think that I rely on these—it makes me sound superstitious, but in all honesty writers often are superstitious. We have our little tics, like wearing our favorite yellow sweater when we write to our agent, or only using a certain kind of notebook (I favor Moleskins) when we travel. My habits when I begin a new mystery make sense, but they are compulsions nonetheless and help me get into the story.

I like to bring out a few photographs of the area where I’ve set the story, and in particular a house of other location that I plan to use. This is often a place I have seen a number of times and I know who is going to live in it, and which important scenes will take place there. Using real locations is one of the ways I ground a story. I believe strongly that something in a story must be real—a location, a particular crime or event, a character drawn from real life. A story that is one hundred percent fiction will feel thin. I use real locations and places to give the story greater heft.

Sometimes a story idea includes questions I can’t answer, and I head to the library (or the Internet) to do some basic research. This impetus to get answers must be controlled, or I’d spend my entire life doing research and never writing. I do enough to answer my basic question (when did a particular historical event occur; how does a particular bit of machinery work), knowing I can go back later if necessary.

The beginning of the story is also not quite the beginning—it is, for me, the odd bits of dialogue and visuals that start popping into my head. A character who is as yet unnamed, and barely visualized, will suddenly start spouting lines of dialogue or revealing phrases or expressions. I don’t know yet where they will go in the story, but I know I will use them. I jot them down in the file I’ve set up for this book. I call this part “keeping the story warm.” It’s one thing to get an idea—writers get those all the time. But getting an idea that keeps returning again and again means you’ve got a good one, one that will work. And once that becomes evident, the characters start emerging, throwing out their sparks in lines of dialogue or sudden tumbles into a crowd, or some other distinctive act or behavior. These too I write down. Sometimes I only have an impression of what a scene will be—one character stops at a fish store but instead of buying fish overhears a conversation that changes what she plans to do, or the fish seller warns her against a particular purchase. There’s more to the scene, but I won’t know that until much later. Right now I’m just recording the odd bits that come to me, knowing their place will become evident later.

After a few days or even weeks of this, I understand what the story is about. I have a sense of the whole. This can’t be forced, or induced. When I have a vision of the entire story, I write a single paragraph of the story’s “aboutness.” Sometimes this reads like a very brief plot summary, and if so, then I set it aside. The story isn’t quite ready. But usually, the paragraph is a brief synopsis of the entire novel. It’s important for me to remind myself here that this is a beginning, a vision of the distance to be traveled, and it does not preclude changes, additions, or discoveries that will lead me to rewrite that paragraph as I move along. The sense of the “aboutness” of a story gives me something coherent to work within, but it is malleable.

Will all this preparation, the story is warm and growing. The characters are alive in my imagination every day, jostling for attention, eager to get into life. This is when I begin writing, which for me sometimes feels like a form of transcribing. I know the characters, I know much of what they’re up to, and I know where they live. The rest is discovery.

Susan Oleksiw’s next book, The Wrath of Shiva: An Anita Ray Mystery (Five Star/Gale, Cengage), will be available in June 2012. She is also the author of the Mellingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva, who first appeared in Murder in Mellingham (1993). Her Reader’s Guide to the Classic British Mystery (1988) is, well, a classic.