Laura Lippman Interview, Part III

By G.M. Malliet

Q: What advice do you have for new authors in dealing with the “mechanics” of writing—all those “he turned”s and “she turned her head”s, and all the business of getting people in and out of a room and settled into their chairs or whatever. Any tricks you can offer for smoothing out the rough edges?

A: I feel like such a fraud answering that question because I struggle with the same things. But I will say this much: “Said” is good. “Said” and “Asked” are pretty much all you need, and use them as sparingly as possible. (As James M. Cain said, “What else would they be doing? Gargling?” That’s a paraphrase, but close enough.)

I do think reading one’s work aloud is essential. As you move from draft to draft, no matter how carefully you try to read, the eye will start to skim. At least, mine does. But the mouth can’t skim and you’ll find that if you read work aloud in the final stages, your ear will catch things that the eye has missed. The overuse of certain words, even factual tendencies.

This may sound moronic, but I confess, I like some of those decorating shows on television and the experts often speak of “editing” a room. Of course, we all know we’re supposed to edit our work, but if you think about this more concrete practice – removing items, moving items about – it can be very helpful. This is, of course, another variation on “Kill your darlings.” It is remarkably sound advice, which is hard to take, because it means admitting that we simply can’t learn from past mistakes. I’ve written fifteen books and my fear is that I didn’t kill enough darlings. There’s a passage I love, from Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound, where the main character, a Roth-like writer, is confronted by a wannabe, who demands a critique of his work. The writer objects to one line, says it sounds labored. No, it came easily. And the writer says that might be the problem. The wannabe sees this as a frustrating contradiction, but the writer is right: It can come too easily, it can be too labored, but chances are, if you love, love, love a passage, it’s a candidate for deletion.


Q: Please name the writers (mystery or otherwise) who have had a major influence on your writing.

A: You know what? Every writer I read has an influence on me, some profound, some just as horrible examples. I am mindful of the fact there are writers who may not be considered great, yet have this amazing talent for getting readers to turn pages. That’s something that can’t really be learned, I think, because it flows from sincerity, an absolute belief in the material. You can’t fake your way through a page-turner, which is why some literary writers fail when they attempt crime novels; they don’t really believe in what they’re doing.

Q: What can we look forward to next from Laura Lippman?

A: Life Sentences is the newest novel (March 2009). After a shockingly prolific ’08 – a novel, a novella and a short story collection – it feels absolutely carefree to be back on a book-a-year schedule. Although, come to think of it, I owe two short stories as well.

More at http://www.lauralippman.com/

Here are links to Parts I and II of this interview.

Photo by Jan Cobb

Laura Lippman Interview, Part II

By G.M. Malliet

Q: How easy do you find it to alternate between your Tess Monaghan PI novels and your suspense novels?

A: I don’t know how easy it is; I’m not sure that writing a novel should ever be described as easy. It’s not physically demanding work and it can be incredibly invigorating, but if it were easy, I would worry.

That said, I find the switch keeps me on my toes. The writers I admire most tend to have large ranges – Stewart O'Nan, Jane Smiley, now Dennis Lehane. I don’t think my range will ever be that large, but I’d like to keep trying new things to stay fresh.


Q: As it happens, you and I were in approximately the same wave of post-Watergate students jamming the corridors of the journalism schools. You’ve said that where you really excelled even then, however, was in creative writing. Do you ever think you should have enrolled in something like the Iowa Writers' Workshop instead? Or in hindsight, did your career evolve exactly as it should?

A: Iowa would have destroyed me. I had led a somewhat sheltered life, through college. I needed to be in the world. That’s speaking strictly for myself. Eudora Welty, in “One Writer’s Beginnings,” notes that a sheltered life can be a daring one, because all serious daring starts within. And if one is an Ann Patchett – an Iowa alum – or someone else of similar talent, a writers workshop might work very well for you.

Then again, I was just re-reading Patchett’s “Truth and Beauty” last night and it’s when she’s left Iowa, gone through a divorce and ended up as a waitress at TGI Fridays that she really begins to get serious about her work. She has this epiphany while watching television in the middle of the night in Aberdeen, Scotland. So maybe we all need a little grit in our lives to get where we’re going. The sad fact is, the vast majority of Iowa graduates, of all MFA program graduates, won’t have particularly notable careers. Faced with those odds, I would have folded. I benefited from the bliss that is ignorance.


Q: What the Dead Know is based loosely on real events. Would you talk about the background for this book? And did you find it easier or harder to write because it had its roots in reality?

A: Most of my novels have been rooted in reality, just less well-known realities, if you will. But the disappearance of the Lyon sisters, in 1975, was a very well-known local story. They went out into their safe, suburban neighborhood one day during spring break and were never seen again.

Yet once I extracted that basic idea from reality – two sisters disappear in 1975 – and then added, “But someone shows up 30 years later, claiming to be the younger one,” I had left the real-life story behind. In real life, the horrible, gigantic pain is that the story has no answers. My novel is quite the opposite.

I was mindful of the real family’s pain and aware that my novel would do nothing for that pain. But I wasn’t really writing about them. I ended up writing about very particular, even peculiar people that I created. The parents, an obsessed detective, this rootless woman who may or may not be one of the missing girls. Again, I don’t think any book should be easy to write, but the challenges I faced while writing What the Dead Know had everything to do with structure, and very little to do with its origins.


Q: Every Secret Thing (2003) seemed to mark a major departure for you. Can you tell us—do you remember—what the original impetus was for writing this book?

A: The Bulger case in England, where two 10-year-olds killed a toddler. But it wasn’t the initial crime that inspired me. I was in England in 2000 when a judge was asked to determine if the two killers should be sent to an adult prison when they aged out of the juvenile system. He declined and said they would have all the usual protections of young offenders, including new names. The UK also has very different laws regarding the press, so he could essentially forbid newspapers from “outing” these young men once they rejoined society. I thought, "It wouldn’t work that way in the U.S." and my imagination took off from there.

PART III OF THIS INTERVIEW WILL APPEAR TOMORROW ON INKSPOT.

(Here is a link to Part I.)

Photo by Jan Cobb

Laura Lippman Interview, Part I

By G.M. Malliet

Our guest blogger today at Inkspot is Laura Lippman, who is having quite a year. Most recently, at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore, her novel What the Dead Know won the Anthony, Barry and Macavity awards for best novel, while "Hardly Knew Her" won the Anthony for best short story.

Her work has also been awarded the Edgar®, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Nero Wolfe, and the Gumshoe awards. Nominations for numerous other awards include the Hammett and Macavity. She was the first-ever recipient of the Mayor’s Prize for Literary Excellence and the first genre writer recognized as Author of the Year by the Maryland Library Association.

Her achievements are so many, in fact, I am in danger of leaving out something important. You can see the full list of what Laura has accomplished here.

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Q: Laura – that’s a lot of achievement since Baltimore Blues was nominated for the Shamus Award for best first PI novel in 1997. In a little over ten years, it looks like a clean sweep of all the major awards. But you didn’t give up fulltime reporting for The (Baltimore) Sun until 2001. How did you manage during those four years? Late nights and early mornings, or did you just give up sleeping altogether?

A: I started writing Baltimore Blues in late 1992, so it was actually nine years of fulltime work and, from 1995 on, writing a book a year. (By the time Baltimore Blues sold, in October ’95, I was halfway through my second book.) I’m a morning person, however, which worked well for me. I got up at 6 or so, wrote for two hours, went to work. I have always compared this to the old adage about saving money: Pay yourself first. I skimmed the first two hours of the day off the top, gave them to myself and then never had to worry about whether I would work late, or be too tired to write in the evening. Whatever happened at work – and a lot can happen in a typical day at a newspaper – I had gotten my writing done.

One thing I often omit when I tell this story – for years, I had been a morning exerciser, so my writing routine really entailed moving my work-out from before-work to lunchtime, or just after work.

Q: Was there a single defining moment when you felt it was safe, financially and otherwise, to leave the day job, or did you simply feel that, come what may, you had to follow your heart?

A: I worked for the Sun for twelve years, eleven of the happiest years of my life. The final year was like the end of a marriage – sad, awful, depressing. I was looking for another gig, in fact, when my longtime publisher offered me a contract that would allow me to quit. There’s actually a formula of sorts for calculating what you need to quit your day job; the blogger/novelist John Scalzi has written about it at length. Basically, look at your day job pay and add 30 percent. That will cover the benefits you don’t have as a freelancer – if you’re very lucky.

And if you’ll permit me here a moment on my soap box: There’s often a lot of hand-wringing about how government regulation/intervention stifles entrepreneurship and creativity. But the single stifling thing I’ve seen is the lack of health insurance. I have friends who left the Sun and easily replaced their salaries via freelancing and teaching, some combination thereof. But if they didn’t have spouses with health insurance, they couldn’t do that. I was lucky – I had only myself to support and I could afford COBRA for 18 months, which meant that I could then join a private insurance company with no underwriting, no restrictions. I don’t often speak of specifics, but I will note that COBRA cost me $400 a month, more than $7,000 over 18 months. I was lucky enough to be able to afford that and then join a traditional health care plan that is a fourth of that cost. But for people with families – forget it!

PART II OF THIS INTERVIEW WILL APPEAR TOMORROW ON INKSPOT.

Photo by Jan Cobb