by Katy Munger, 2016 Piedmont Laureate
One of the most frequent questions I get at readings and workshops is “Where do you get your ideas?” Although, as a crime fiction writer, I suspect what this question really means is, “You seem like such a nice person—how is it you are capable of coming up with so much murder and mayhem?” Alas, I suspect the answer to that question is much scarier than any plot I could come up with: it’s just the way my brain works. All the time. And I am not alone.
All mystery writers are secret criminal masterminds whose imaginations are constantly on the prowl for two things: 1) how to break the rules and get away with it, and 2) how to catch and punish those who do break the rules. Perhaps you may wonder which of these impulses drives us the most. Are mystery writers, at heart, megalomaniacs who enjoy breaking the polite rules of society through our characters? Or are we simply obedient members of society, superheroes with pens, who are always on the lookout for the bad guys and keen to bring them to justice?
Well, don’t waste too much time pondering the possibilities, because I’m here to tell you: all mystery writers are, at heart, rule breakers chafing under the yoke of societal expectations, even the plump, kindly-looking writers with white hair and apple cheeks. In fact, they’re the worst. Which is why our minds race about and land on the darnedest ideas whenever we get invited anywhere. Put us in a group of people and we will immediately default to amateur psychologist status, analyzing everyone we meet, soon followed by diabolical plotting in our heads.
To prove my point—and at the risk of never being invited anywhere ever again—I thought it might be fun to give you an example of what I mean, with deepest apologies to those who were there with me at the time and thought I was normal… I recently attended my high school reunion. As I entered the room, I immediately saw a friend I not had seen in years, followed by another, and still another. Soon, I was deep in conversations, laughter, wonderful memories and yet… all the while, my mind was imagining scenarios to connect the dots between the teens I had known so many years ago and the adults now standing before me. The actual life stories of my classmates were interesting enough, but the imagined lives I ascribed to them? Even better. And then I discovered the memorial table. This was a simple table holding photos of classmates who had passed on. Depending on the photo, they were forever frozen in our memories at a single age, most of them while still in high school. As I circled the table, mourning their absence at the reunion, I tried to cope with the sheer number of photos on that table, unwilling to accept that I was getting older and death a more frequent visitor to my life. So where did my mystery writer mind go in defense? To the thought that the memorial table was not simply a reminder that life was passing, and passing quite quickly, but that it had all been planned.
“What if,” I thought, “We had a classmate, someone who had been quirky and an outcast in school, someone obsessed with mathematics and patterns, someone who would have been labeled as autistic or on the spectrum today? What if he had showed up at the reunion and, like me, circled the table, peering at photos, trying to make sense of it all? And what if he had suddenly started mumbling letters, softly chanting “A, C, D, F….” then looked up in alarm, scanning the room, having discovered a pattern in the names of those whose photos appeared on the table? What if he, and he alone, had discovered that there was a killer among us—and knew who was likely to be the next victim?”
With that thought, the game was afoot. Everyone I looked at became an imagined hero or villain in this mental tale of mine. The mild-mannered girl whose name no one could quite remember? She was Carrie incarnate, out for revenge. The aging football player who had gone through four wives? He mourned his lost glory and was systematically taking out old classmates for the sheer thrill of the game again. And that former cheerleader who had spent a lifetime being a wife and a mom? She had witnessed something that told her the football player, her former high school boyfriend, was a killer and she was now secretly tracking his movements, biding her time, ready to dispatch of him quietly when no one else was looking. Maybe even tonight….
It’s insanity really. But a most enjoyable kind. Social gatherings are way more fun when you’ve got two versions of them going at the same time. Eventually I came back to reality, and to real life, and had a great night talking, dancing, and laughing. Nonetheless, sleeping somewhere in my mystery writer imagination, now lies the bones of a new plot and a cast of characters I might one day awake and command to do my bidding. In the meantime? I’m just trying to stay off the memorial table.
So the next time you find yourself at a cocktail party with a mystery writer and you catch them peering at you with an inscrutable expression—hey, don’t worry about it. They’re either killing you off, making you into a nefarious villain, or assessing you for possible hero status. No big deal, really. We do it all the time. And you know why? Because we can.
When I first started out as a writer, I was a Southern transplant living in the teeming, foreign world of New York City. I was fascinated by how vibrant the city was and even more intrigued by its brash, relentlessly honest citizens. It was a whole new world, so far as I was concerned, and I had to write about it. The result was 
Fast forward a decade and I had started to long for the South, even though I was living and writing in a great apartment overlooking gardens on the Upper Westside. I missed the South and its people, not to mention its more gentle ways. I was willing to settle for a veneer of politeness, if not the real thing. I needed grass and trees and ocean waters without hypodermic needles and toilet paper floating in it. I needed a lot more personal space. My writing shifted with me. A hardboiled Southern belle named Casey Jones popped up in one of my Hubbert & Lil books and, before I knew it, I was writing a whole new series around her, one set in the South that featured a tough female P.I. whose sense of humor was strong enough to get her through any situation. 
But everyone ages, at least if we are lucky. I began to realize that my fabled good nature had its limits. That some things in life were just plain sad and that it was okay to feel that sadness. I began to notice how some people I loved had never quite found their footing in life and had fallen by the wayside. I became fascinated by the idea of redemption, karma and second chances. Enter yet another series: 
In fact, as I reflect back on my three series, I realize that every single one of my major protagonists was built on a real person. T.S. Hubbert and Auntie Lil were both real-life New Yorkers whom I met early on in my life in the Big Apple and they embodied the best of the New York spirit to me. T.S. was a cultured, Broadway-loving, upper Eastsider who was a meticulous, lovely man as well as my first boss on Wall Street and my mentor. He became T.S. Hubbert in my Hubbert & Lil series and while I invented 95% of his character, he once said to me, “Katy — your ability to guess at the secret corners of other people’s lives, and get it right, is downright scary.” (I try to use this super power for good….) Meanwhile, his real-life aunt Lil was a little old lady with such grit and directness that I often stared open-mouthed at her in astonishment. She, of course, became my fictional Auntie Lil Hubbert and I learned so much from her, both in real life and in writing about her across four books. I treasure the time I last saw her, sadly at her nephew’s funeral. She came tottering over to me and gripped my arm with a steellike vise and announced that she knew I had put her into a book. “That’s all fine and good,” she said in her trademark gravelly voice. “But just don’t push it.” !!! I still want to be her when I grow up. They are both gone now, and I love that they live on in my fictional characters.
One of the duties of the Piedmont Laureate is to conduct workshops for other writers in the area. I’ll be doing just that in the months ahead as there are few things I love better than working with other writers and talking about writing. But with the world of writing in flux, and career trajectories no longer predictable, much less known, it’s time to look at exactly what these workshops should entail.
This past week, socked under by a killer virus that would not abate, I sought refuge in reading true crime in front of the fire. I do not read just any true crime book that hits the racks, mind you, and you should not either. A large percentage of them consist of breathless prose highlighting the more lurid aspects of a crime, much like the detective magazines of (not-so-) old. But I do read good true crime because of the amazing psychological insights into human behavior that thoughtful reporting on a case can provide. This means I primarily read (or re-read) Ann Rule, who, until her death last year, stood head and shoulders above all other true crime writers. I know of no one else who has even come close to Rule’s ability to illuminate the cause and effects of aberrant behavior, in part because times have changed. The need to rush a manuscript to market—and be the first to offer a book on a major crime already well-publicized by other media outlets—means that few publishers are willing to wait until the case has wound its way through the courts. Tracking a non-fiction story over years is also exhausting and life-consuming, which may have been why Rule switched to short-form crime reporting toward the end of her life. But at her best, Ann Rule had an amazing capacity to let the psychological themes of a case emerge as she examined a real life tragedy, traced its inception by backtracking to motive, then detailed what happened during the trial. She always made sure to report what happened to the victim’s families, gave investigators and prosecutors their due, and followed up in the years after the verdict to see whether the punishment imposed had changed the perpetrator (answer: rarely, if ever). Each of her in-depth books on a case represented a microcosm of human behavior, invariably showcasing the best and the worst in people.
These opening lines from T.S. Eliot’s iconic poem, 
Piedmont Laureate 