Originality Begins with You by Paula Munier

 “What is originality? It is being oneself, and reporting accurately what we see and are.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

LUCY BURDETTE: A few weeks ago I took a Sisters in Crime workshop online from Paula Munier on the subject of plotting. (I'm always looking for help on that subject!) I enjoyed it so much that I persuaded Paula to share some of her 'secrets' with you!

PAULA MUNIER: Be yourself. Advice we hear from the day we’re born from everyone from our mothers and teachers to our ancient philosophers and present-day Ted Talk pundits. It’s good advice for artists, too—and now that getting paid for making art is more difficult than ever and AI and other forms of copyright infringement abound, being ourselves might be the only thing that can save us. 

Whether you paint or sculpt, craft or compose or choreograph, design or dance, or write, as I do, originality is now our best weapon in the war against human creativity. As someone once said (maybe Oscar Wilde, maybe Thomas Merton, maybe someone else altogether), “Be yourself; everyone else is taken.” I was reminded of this by the one and only Matt Weiner, writer and producer and creator of Mad Men. I recently took a class from him on ideas and the imagination through the Los Angeles Review of Books, and in that class, he encouraged us to note the things what we liked, and to write them down in a notebook. 

Of course, I’m doing it—I’m doing everything Matt told us to do—and was reassured by his advice because I do something similar every time I need to jump-start my imagination. When I don’t know what to write, I remember My Writing Rule of Three: 

1) Write what you know.

2) Write what you love.

3) Write what you’d love to know.

Taking that rule further, I use a bubble chart I created while writing Plot Perfect. It’s a list-making exercise, basically, a brainstorming strategy for artists regardless of medium. Here it is:

 

When you don’t know what to write or paint or sculpt or craft or compose or choreograph, do the bubble chart. The lists serve as a kind of X-ray of your likes and dislikes, your beliefs and your values, your past, present, and future selves. In short: What makes you, you.

From Bubble Chart Lists to the Bestseller Lists

I have the bubble chart to thank for my Mercy Carr mysteries. I’d always wanted to write mysteries, ever since reading the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes as a kid. I had several unfinished manuscripts in the proverbial drawer. Meanwhile, I’d published a lot of nonfiction, and acquired a lot of nonfiction and fiction projects as an acquisitions editor and as an agent. But my dream of writing a mystery series eluded me.

Then Phil Sexton asked me to write a book called The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings for Writer’s Digest Books. I needed a first chapter that I could use to illustrate certain fictional techniques and revision strategies. I couldn’t use anyone else’s first chapter for that purpose, so I wrote an opening chapter of a mystery—and I threw in everything I knew and loved and would love to know, working straight from my bubble chart’s lists. I grew up in a military family, so I made my heroine, Mercy Carr, a former MP who’d served in Afghanistan. I love dogs, so I gave her a canine companion named Elvis. I love the woods of northern New England, so I set the story in Vermont’s Green Mountains. I love stories about foundlings—from the Bible’s Moses to Anita Shreve’s Light on Snow to Julia Spencer-Fleming’s In the Bleak Midwinter—so I opened the story with Mercy and Elvis finding a baby abandoned in the forest. I even threw in a little Shakespeare because the bard is, well, The Bard.

Long story short: My agent read The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings, and said: “That’s a good opening chapter. You should write that mystery and I’ll sell it.” Armed with my bubble chart lists, I finished A Borrowing of Bones, the first book in my Mercy Carr series—and it made the USA TODAY Bestseller List. The first chapter of that novel is the first chapter that appeared in the writing book, with very few changes. The seventh book, The Snow Lies Deep, comes out in December. I’m working on Book #8 as we speak.

It’s All About You

As human beings, we can’t help but admire and appreciate originality, especially in our artists. Look upon a Matisse, and we admire and appreciate his unique mastery of color. Listen to Bob Dylan, and we admire and appreciate his personal yet profound lyrics. Read Alice Hoffman, and we admire and appreciate her particular illumination of the mystical and magical and mysterious aspects of life. These individual qualities inform these artists’ work and make their work special. 

The good news is: We are all originals. We owe it to ourselves and our art and the world at large to make the most of that originality. So, go ahead: Be yourself.

LUCY: Thanks Paula! And now it's your turn Reds, what would be on your bubble chart?

PAULA MUNIER is the Senior Agent and Director of Storytelling for Talcott Notch Literary and the  USA TODAY bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mysteries. A Borrowing of Bones, the first in the series, was nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and named the Dogwise Book of the Year. Blind Search also won a Dogwise Award. The Hiding Place and The Wedding Plot both appeared on several “Best Of” lists. Home at Night was named Library Journal’s Mystery Pick of the Month. The Night Woods, the sixth book in the series, debuted in October 2024, earning a starred Library Journal review among other acclaim. THE SNOW LIES DEEP debuts in December. Along with her love of nature, Paula credits the hero dogs of Mission K9 Rescue, her own rescue dogs, and a deep affection for New England as her series’ major influences. She’s also written three popular books on writing: Plot Perfect, The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings, and Writing with Quiet Hands, as well as Happier Every Day and the memoir Fixing Freddie: The True Story of a Boy, a Mom, and a Very, Very Bad Beagle. She lives in New England with her family and four rescue dogs and Ursula The Cat, a rescue torbie tabby who does not think much of the dogs. For more, check out www.paulamunier.com.