Keeping Up with Your Characters

The hardest part of writing crime fiction has turned out to be something I didn’t expect, and something I’ve only now, after nine novels, started to think about. Working out some of the clues in the third Anita Ray novel, For the Love of Parvati, taught me some important lessons about keeping up with my characters. 

In graduate school I read through all of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels without ever being troubled by the woman’s age, or her failure to age along with the world around her. The elderly woman of the 1930s accepting invitations to weekend parties in the country was the elderly woman of the 1950s exploring the new housing developments on the edge of the village. In contrast I also read Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series, and enjoyed the subplot of the inspector’s personal life, including the challenges of dealing with his growing children.

When I started writing the Mellingham series with Chief of Police Joe Silva, I hadn’t considered how his life would change. He was a man in his fifties when he walked onto the page, and I thought I would find enough murderous business while he was in that decade to not worry about anything else. I was wrong. He fell in love at the end of the third book in the series, Family Album, and his beloved came with a ready-made family.

Things have evolved differently for Anita Ray. I hadn’t given much thought to her getting married and starting a family, but I assumed that would happen, and was waiting for the right setting to develop. But again, I was wrong. Instead of the traditional passage, Anita becomes more deeply involved in photography. She appeared as a photographer in the first line of the first story, and in every adventure she’s using her camera to solve crimes.

Anita uses a Pentax because I use one. I have my eye on another camera but that will have to wait. Meanwhile I find myself trying to keep up with Anita. She’s curious, so she has opened her camera to see if there’s anything wrong inside. Professional guidebooks always warn against this, but Anita doesn’t take advice. And apart from the advice for beginners, professional photographers like to know their equipment intimately. This was a challenge for me, but I rose to it and opened my camera and took a look inside.

Anita looks at everyone and everything as though she were looking through a lens. This gives her distance and a sense of the narrative of what she’s looking at. To her everything is an image, and everyone is telling a story.

For a while Anita has had a gentleman friend, someone her aunt doesn’t approve of. This has provided me with numerous opportunities to play with Auntie Meena’s prejudices and frustrated dreams as a mother and marriage broker. But the man in question is leaving Anita in Book 4, and will not return as her beloved.

Anita runs a photography gallery, which brings her a modest income and gets her out of her aunt’s Hotel Delite, with its attendant duties and mini crises. I have mounted two photography exhibits for a local library gallery, so I know how much work it takes. I’ve also submitted to juried shows (and been accepted for a few).

I’m keeping up with Anita, but just barely. For each story I have to learn about and do more with my camera. Usually when writers talk about characters getting away from them, they mean the characters say unexpected things. With Anita, she veers off in directions as a photographer that make me scramble to keep up. She forces me to learn, and perhaps in the end I’ll be as good a photographer as I think she is.

For more about Susan and the Anita Ray series, including links to her books, go to http://www.susanoleksiw.com

Reading with a Purpose

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of reading for research. Most of the books are on technical matters, to help me recall terms I used to know but have mostly forgotten. Some of the more commonly used ones came back right away, but others still look a bit funny. This got me thinking about other purposes for reading.

When I began writing fiction I had to unlearn writing like an academic. I had written a novel and short fiction in college, and been published in student literary and humor magazines. I turned to scholarly work in graduate school, and focused on academic work for years. Returning to fiction meant unlearning one style of composing and recovering other ways of thinking on paper.

Of course I read a lot of crime fiction over the years and that certainly prepared me. I thought in terms of clues and characters, and laying things out in a pattern. But I found that I was terse in narrative passages. To overcome this I turned to writers who were almost prolix. I read classic mysteries such as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, and A. Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. I also read Anne Perry’s mysteries for the leisurely way she sets a scene or builds up a location and setting.

For capturing character and the sinister feeling of a stranger I can think of no better writer to study than Edgar Allan Poe. He goes so deeply into his characters’ feelings and attitudes that I sometimes wonder if he was slowly driving himself mad. Ruth Rendell achieves much the same effect with her many novels. One of the best in my opinion is Judgment in Stone, which follows the inevitable path to murder of an illiterate housekeeper.

Other writers have taught me other skills. Some writers are strong in dialogue, and others can explain the technical working of anything. The latter is a skill no writer should fail to learn. Once I learned the sequence of steps in making a particular machine work, I could see other processes more clearly even if I wasn’t writing about them. I think of this as understanding the bone structure in a face while you are sculpting or painting a portrait.

Setting a story in a location not well known to all readers requires a judicious use of details, knowing what to include and what to omit. James Lee Burke is well known and admired for his rich depiction of Louisiana, and Dana Stabenow has made Alaska her own as well as a vivid location accessible to readers. Nevada Barr explores the natural world in various parks, and Agatha Christie has set novels in ancient Egypt and then contemporary Middle East. I have learned from all these writers how to make a location come alive and ground the mystery. I use India as the setting for the Anita Ray series, a country I for the first time visited in the 1970s.

All books teach us something but not the same thing. Writers have to read as widely as possible, especially in areas that don’t normally appeal to them, if they want to ensure that their work is as strong as it can be. I try to read against my interests to broaden myself. At present I’m reading about a certain sport. I’m not a sports enthusiast but I want to be sure that my descriptions are accurate and that my character’s behaviors are plausible.

Reading with a purpose, as a writer, is far more than reading good literature to expose ourselves to the best the written word has to offer. Reading with a purpose is a way to absorb the skills and abilities of other writers we do not ourselves possess.

Susan Oleksiw is the author of the Anita Ray Mystery series, featuring Indian American photographer Anita Ray, as well as the Melingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva. www.susanoleksiw.com