April 21, 2012
Editrix: In what ways is writing a sequel different than writing an original? What particular challenges are there in telling a new story with familiar characters?
LC Tyler: Writing a series sometimes feels like traveling with an ever increasing number of suitcases. You start the first book completely unburdened. As you go on, each character brings a little more personal baggage from the earlier books. Stretching this little analogy to (or a little beyond) breaking point, the reader becomes some sort of customs official with the right to open all of those suitcases, and to point out to you any discrepancy between what you claimed your characters were like in book 1 and what you were saying about them in book 3 or 4. So, each new book in the series sends you scurrying back to re-read the earlier ones and check your facts. And you are stuck with whatever dumb decisions you made before. Of course, by that stage the characters are old friends, so you don’t mind too much carrying their stuff around. (Elsie’s case is massive though – what does she keep in it? Chocolate?)
Ed: The most distinctive style decision you made is setting off the opening sentences of several chapters as stand-alone paragraphs. How did you settle on that choice? What did you hope to accomplish with it?
LC: I’ve given this a lot of thought and the best I can say is: “As affectations go, it seems harmless enough”.
Ed: The first book is written mainly from Ethelred’s perspective. At least, he’s the opening narrator of The Herring Seller’s Apprentice. In Ten Little Herrings, it feels like the opposite is happening. What motivated that switch?
LC: I hadn’t originally planned to have Elsie as a narrator at all. It just happened roughly a third of the way through the book. Elsie sort of demanded to be allowed to speak. In the second book, I wanted to start with an opening chapter that was, in a way, the mirror image of the opening chapter of Herring Seller – this time Elsie is in the flat and receives a mysterious phone call. After that she hogs the narrative for a while until Ethelred can get a word in edgeways. In the later books, I’d say the division was more or less 50:50. I try to be fair.
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April 20, 2012
When it’s going well, it’s like this. You sit down at the keyboard and write for twenty minutes. When you look up, six hours have passed and somebody has kindly added three thousand words to your novel. When it’s going well, the real world fades into the background and the book writes itself.
When it’s going badly, it’s like this. You can find 252 references to yourself on Google. Your Amazon ranking is 25,473. England are 225-4 against Australia. Rain is forecast for Tuesday. This is your fifth cup of coffee and it’s only 9.30. When it’s going badly there is nothing on the internet less interesting than the next chapter of your novel. You will make coffee for anyone. If you’d like one, I’ll bring it round to you. You’re reading this in Wisconsin? No problem. I got a Thermos.
When I write, I write in concentrated bursts. Like most authors I used to have a day job and in those days the people who paid me expected me to show up at the office from time to time. I wrote at the weekend when I could, but most of all I wrote on holiday. While the family were on the beach, I was back in the hotel room typing away. The maids would look at me pityingly when they come to do the room. When the family met up again in the evening I would be monosyllabic over dinner because I had just realised that if Mrs Maggs knew about the secret passage then Annabelle would not have risked lying to the police, which blew a massive hole in my plot. “The book’s fine,” I would say in answer to their questions. “Just fine.”
Now writing is the day job, but old habits die hard. I still tend to write in bursts between book signings and conferences and doing all the other things that my publishers ask me to do – and checking my Amazon ranking and the cricket score.
I write large chunks in my head in advance and dump it onto the computer when I can. Long car journeys are a good chance to think through plots. People sometimes ask me why my characters seem to spend so much time on the road.
When I start writing the first chapter I always know how the book will end, but I rarely make detailed written plans in advance. I have a notebook in which I record names of characters, the chronology of events, bits of dialogue and so on, but most of it I just remember. About 20,000 words into the first draft, I usually write the final chapter and then work towards the middle of the book from each end, like two teams of tunnellers, until the two halves meet. Well, it works for me.
My first drafts are usually very short – little more than novella length. Each successive draft adds ten to fifteen thousand words. To begin with, it worried me that the natural length of my stories appeared to be around 45,000 words. But after a while you develop the confidence that it will come right in the end.
Or, at least, I have that confidence up to a point. Writers, like actors, can be quite superstitious, quite insecure. If you don’t know where a gift has come from, you can never be quite sure that it won’t suddenly desert you. Above all therefore I write in gratitude that I am still writing.
(Written in my head on the A40 between London and Oxford. Dumped onto computer one Saturday afternoon.)
February 17, 2012
I was taught as a child that it’s tacky to brag, so somewhere my mother is looking down at me with her lips pursed, because I’m about to brag something serious. Felony & Mayhem Press has been nominated for its fourth consecutive Edgar award.
This is a big deal on several fronts. First, the Edgars—named, of course, for Mr. Poe—are essentially the Oscars of the mystery world; it actually is an honor just to be nominated. And did I mention that we’ve been honored four times in a row? We’re the first small press in the history of the awards to be honored like that. That’s just….buckets of honor.
Then there are the odds. One of my favorite lines in theater history comes from the Tennessee Williams play Sweet Bird of Youth. We’re in a crummy Florida hotel room, where the Princess Kosmonopolis, an aging movie star, is sleeping off a night of excess. She wakes to find Chance Wayne, a young gigolo, preening at the dressing table. Her arm over her eyes, the Princess asks who the hell he is, and Chance replies “Well, M’am, I used to be the best-looking boy in this town.”
The Princess considers this. And then she asks, “How big is the town?”
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January 10, 2012
I am fortunate enough to spend my Christmases with some friends who live in a small town in Pennsylvania. Their location is so rural that deer occasionally wander up to stare at me as I sit on the deck with my morning coffee, and that snow actually stays on the ground, deep and crisp and even, rather than turning in minutes to citified slush. A lifelong New Yorker, I am charmed to the bone.
I’m also a passionate cat-lover, but I am delighted to spend time with my friends’ big, boisterous dogs. My Jewish soul is thrilled by the decorated tree, piled with presents wrapped cack-handedly in Walmart’s shiniest. (And my Jewish soul was profoundly ticked off this year, when the tree proved “too much of a bother,” and was replaced with a listing jade plant hung with a handful of ornaments. BRING BACK THE DAMN TREE!) All in all, my few days in Pennsylvania offer, every year, the most wonderful vacation from my life.
This year, though, it wasn’t the tree or the dogs that provided the most profound reminder that I was not in Kansas anymore: It was my friends’ twenty-three-year-old son. Or, more specifically, his unrelentingly sunny disposish. (“He’s always been like that,” says his mother. “When he was little, he’d come running into the kitchen and say ‘I had THE BEST DAY!!!’ I’d ask what had happened and the answer was always something like he had found a pretty pebble.”) New Yorkers, we’re not like that. We regard cynicism as our birthright, and tend to think of happy people as being too dumb to have discovered self-loathing.
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November 7, 2011
I am what you might call very attuned to names, because my own surname is weird and almost always spelled wrong. (The worst version I got was a result of registering at a Welsh bed-and-breakfast over the phone; when I got there they had me listed as Maggie Hopeless.) I “collect” peculiar names, often from the “society” pages of the New York Times (my longstanding favorite is a couple named Boykin and Celerie; I’m not allowed to make a lot of fun of them because they donate heavily to political causes of which I approve). And many years ago, for reasons I’ve long forgotten, I wrote the beginning of a gothic parody, several paragraphs of deeply purple prose about beautiful Felony Mayhem and her younger sister, Dyptheria. They lived in a crumbling mansion on the moors, attended by a maid named Larceny. Felony was being courted by the cousins Arson and Ague, one of whom was evil but I can’t remember which. And that, aside from much smug snickering on my part, was as far as it went.
Flash forward to 2004, when I was setting up this odd little publishing…well, custom would call it a publishing house, but I tend to think of it more as a publishing shack. I wanted a name for it that would echo some of the great, double-barreled English firms (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, for example) only…bent. I wanted something that would sound a bit flowery, but with (as the great S.J. Perelman would put it) somewhere a roscoe. Felony & Mayhem was born.
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