The Question Writers Hate by Clare O'Donohue

JENN McKINLAY: A million years ago when dinosaurs roamed -- okay, more like seven years (in 2011) it just feels like a million -- I was fortunate enough to be paired up to sign books with this sharp cookie, Clare O'Donohue. I remember because my best friend Annette flew all the way in from Connecticut to go to the signing and afterwards she said, "I am buying all of that woman's books. She's amazing." I totally agreed and we did. So, here is Clare, breaking down the inner working's of the writer's mind for us while we celebrate the release of her new book Beyond the Pale, which is out TODAY!!!

I FINALLY HAVE AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION WRITERS HATE:

Clare O'Donohue

Every writer has been asked this. At every conference, on every panel, at every book signing. “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s probably the most asked question novelists hear.

The most hated question? “Where do you get your ideas?”

It’s not that writers are curmudgeons (okay, yeah, maybe) it’s just an impossible question to answer. Mostly ideas are not there, and then they are. Like the name of the person who sat next to you in sophomore English. One minute your brain can’t come up with a thing, then BOOM. There it is.

            At the risk of annoying all my fellow writers, the next time this question gets asked though, I’m going to raise my hand high, yelling, “Call on me!! Call on me!!” like the perfect student I never was. Because I know exactly where I got my idea for Beyond the Pale.

            Since I was a little one I’ve dreamed of traveling the world and having a passport filled to the brim with stamps from far-off places. But, you know, work, family, life, excuses. I have traveled a lot, seeing all but three states in the US (Alaska, N. Dakota and Idaho, just hang in there I’m coming). And when my idea was forming, I’d already been to what others might see as an impressive amount of foreign shores – twenty countries. But, ever greedy, I wanted to see more.

So, before you could say book research, I came up with a plan – create a mystery series with each novel set in a different country. Travel, writing – two birds, one tax-deductible stone.

The original plan was to have my main character be a single woman in her early 30s who inherited (Won? Found?) a large amount of money and decided to travel. At her first country she’d happen across a murder, meet quirky, possibly dangerous people, see the sites, and solve the crime. Book #2 would be similar, except different country. Genius!

I thought about my main character potentially meeting a love interest in book one. Would he follow her to country #2? Would there be a new beau in #2? If I wrote twenty books in the series would she end up with an admirer in every port? Plus, who would she talk to, who would she trust? Yeah scratch that. I’d already done the beginning of a relationship in my Someday Quilts series, and the end of a relationship in my Kate Conway series. I decided instead on featuring a couple, long married, and focus on the middle bit of a relationship, where you love, understand, and slightly annoy each other. That bit. Genius!

But would they just trip over bodies in every country? I’d already done that too – and nothing wrong with it, I’m here to say. Agatha Christie built a nice career out of body-tripping mysteries and I’m not fit to shine her shoes, so nothing against it. But maybe, I thought, I could mix it up. Give them a professional reason for all the bodies that will inevitably pile up across a long series. Spies. I felt particularly good about myself with that one. Genius wasn’t big enough. I’d write a Thin Man meets James Bond spy novel. That way there’d be a reason for all the travel and all the danger. It opened up a world of possibilities of bad guys, and crimes, and international intrigue.

But who would my husband and wife be? That took some time. I wanted smart people, capable of taking care of themselves but not so capable that they wouldn’t really be in danger. Accidental spies. College professors (he’s a World Literature professor with a reputation for sniffing out forgeries, she’s an International Politics professor who once trained to be in the CIA). They would know a lot about each country so the location would become a kind of character in the novel, they would bring special skills, and they would – of course – have each other to rely on even when they couldn’t rely on anyone else. And, I’d get to sneak in stuff I know from having an International Politics degree (Double genius because I’m finally using my college degree!)

My idea, in spits and spurts, was formed. A long-married pair of college professors sucked into helping Interpol but finding that instead of a straight-forward assist, they’ve gotten themselves caught between an international crime ring and a dangerously off-the-book subgroup of the famous international police organization.

I patted myself on the back coming up with all that. I did sort of feel genius-y. But then that’s what ideas are like. They’re promises mixed with ego and dash of optimism. That’s why writers are so loath to hear people talk about how special their ideas are. We want the real thing – the thousands of words on paper – thing. And now I have it. It may not be genius, but it feels good to see my idea become an actual book. And it doesn’t hurt that it took several stamps in my passport to do it.

Clare O’Donohue is the author of Beyond the Pale, the first in the World of Spies Mysteries. It’s set in Ireland. She visited Argentina, her thirty-third country, earlier this year, which will be the setting for book #2.

Okay, Reds, what about you? Answer the hated question -- where do you get your ideas?