a work in progress, let me know what you think
These are my rough, rough notes so far, for a talk I’m doing at a community centre breakfast next weekend. What do you think?
When I was a student minister in rural Manitoba in the mid 1980’s I was friends with an Anglican priest named Paul and his wife Mary, who along with the expectations and duties as a clergy spouse, was a nurse working in the local hospital. (I changed their names for this story!)
I once told Mary I liked to read murder mysteries. She confided that she secretly, and only for herself, wrote stories in which members of her husband’s parish died suddenly, and sometimes violently.
Mary said she wrote as a form of therapy, that allowed her to keep smiling and nodding her head at people who she knew were sometimes, consciously or unconsciously, very unkind to each other, and to her husband, their priest.
Mary could create and manage a fictional world in which things came out different. She could live out her revenge fantasies without anyone getting hurt, and without anyone worrying about the murderous nurse, who might have put an unexpected something in the fancy silver pot from which she was obliged to pour at the church ladies tea.
The image of Mary secretly writing her stories stayed with me over the years, without me really doing anything with it.
Every once in a while, while I was lost in a mystery novel, I would wonder if I could write one.
I noticed the books I liked most were not really about the murder, but about an interesting investigator. I like characters that actually have character. They have a moral code, and have developed ideas about how to live their lives, and how to be with other people.
I also like the hero to have serious flaws, problems, issues in their life. I prefer stories in which the lead character is changed by what happens.
They learn something, or solve a personal problem, or make a big shift in their lives. If nothing actually happens to the protagonist while they are dealing with something as traumatic and major as the death of another human, it’s probably not a story I am going to keep reading.
I also like stories in which there are heroes, sort of, and villains, sort of. Every major character in my stories is complicated. They may do incredibly dumb or cruel things. They may be brave. They may be brilliant about some things and dense about others.
When I create a character who’s going to be a perpetrator- commit a crime, hurt or even kill someone, I make sure that they have a reason for doing it. The reason has to make sense to them, even if we would look at it and say, nope, I’d never do that. It’s not enough to make all the villains purely evil.
I actually think purely evil people are pretty rare, and from a fiction writing point of view, they’re boring, because they have no dimension, no nuance, and most of us can’t really connect with them, or relate to them, because we aren’t purely evil.
I was a minister for over 20 years before I started to cook up a story about a church where murder happens.
What got me going on plotting out a novel, and starting to write it, was a course I took at Sheridan College. It was taught by a woman who’s written 18 crime novels, but who teaches writers of all different genres: westerns, young adult, science fiction, fantasy, romance, historical, erotic, horror, thriller, mysteries, and a lot of combinations of all those categories. It was a 12 week spring and summer class called “The Art of the Novel.”
My kids were away from home for summer jobs, and my wife was on sabbatical from her church, and living in Kingston while she did some further training. I had a lot of free time on my hands.
I had some ingredients for a story that I’d been stocking in my author’s kitchen.
One ingredient was an idea about a church that had a body buried behind a basement wall, in a room that no one ever wanted to use, because it felt weird, and kind of smelled. That was based on a true story- the room, not the body in the wall, as far as I know.
I had a small portion about a church that was haunted by the ghost of a former caretaker. This was also based on a true story.
I had some spice. I’d heard about a minister who disappeared overnight and was never seen again, and left behind their spouse. This also actually happened, but not in the way I imagined and told it.
I needed a pot in which to mix all these ingredients. I figured I needed to borrow a church to kill people in, because if I wrote about one that was too similiar to the ones I’ve worked in, people would wonder if I wanted to kill them, or if I was writing about them. (I also knew I was going to include fictional versions of some people I’d met over the years, in highly altered and exaggerated forms.)
I visited a colleague at a neighbouring church, and told him what I had in mind. He was enthusiastic, and hospitable. He loaned me a book about the congregation and its building, and during a tour, told me some stories that did not make it into the official history. One of the best ones was about the church ghost- lots of churches have them!
Another flavour he gave me was a story about the guy who secretly, and without permission, lived in the church belfry for a while, and used to come out at night and pilfer snacks from the supplies of the daycare that rented space in the building.
I took all this rich, juicy food for thought and imagination, ground it all up, spiced it, turned on the heat. Then I cranked, and cranked and out came the story sausages.
Darrow Woods: Writer of Things 