Rosemary
McCracken
Interview
Questions
Rosemary McCracken is a Canadian journalist and fiction writer.
Born and raised in Montreal, she has worked on newspapers across Canada as a
reporter, arts reviewer, editorial writer and editor.
She is now a freelance journalist who specializes in personal
finance and the financial services industry. She advocates greater investor
protection, and improved financial services industry regulation and enforcement
Rosemary’s short fiction has been published by Carrick Publishing,
Nefarious North, Sisters in Crime Canada, Room of One’s Own Press and
Kaleidoscope Books. Her Pat Tierney story, "The Sweetheart Scamster,"
published in Thirteen in 2013, was a finalist for a 2014 Derringer
Award.
Safe Harbor, the first book in the Pat Tierney mystery
series, was her first published novel. It was shortlisted for Britain’s Crime
Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger in 2010 and published by Imajin Books in
2012. Its sequel, Black Water, was released in 2012.
Rosemary lives in Toronto with her husband,
and makes frequent retreats to her stone cottage in Ontario’s Haliburton
Highlands.
First, let me say I really enjoyed Black
Water. Your characters were nuanced. Your writing drew me in immediately
and took me along quickly through the entire book. There was no sag in the
middle. As you told me, I was able to read your book without reading any other
books in the Pat Tierney series. And I was happy to see there were no scenes
where the heroine arrives home after barely escaping from the villain’s
clutches, notices the lights in her apartment are strangely out but blithely
walks in anyway.
How do you keep each book interesting in
itself, yet not boring to readers who started the series with the first book?
A writer of a series needs to ensure that each
book stands on its own. Some readers will not have read the books that came
before it in the series, and those who have will not want to be given a
detailed re-introduction to the main characters and setting. You can satisfy
both groups by dropping in on the central character’s regular life in the
opening pages—and weaving in details later. “I was chilled to the bone when I
got home that evening,” is how I introduce Pat in Chapter One of Black Water,
the second book in the Pat Tierney series. She tells us how she feels on a
Friday evening in winter after a long week of work. At this point, we don’t
need to know what line of work she’s in, only that she’s cold and tired and
discouraged. We’ve all felt that way.
Because I write the Pat Tierney books in the
first person, from Pat’s point of view, I’m able to set up an immediate
intimacy between the reader and this character. Pat is sharing another episode
in her life with the reader.
I write mysteries, and a key element of the
mystery formula is raising the stakes for the central character. How can things
possibly get worse for Pat when we meet her in Black Water? At home, she
finds a voice-mail message from the police, who are trying to reach her
24-year-old daughter, Tracy. They want to speak to Tracy as soon as possible.
Pat instantly goes into high alert. “Is Tracy in trouble? I took a deep breath
and tried to stay calm.” Then she tells us that she hasn’t seen Tracy for
several weeks. They had a misunderstanding and Pat reveals a little about what
that misunderstanding was. Readers who read Safe Harbor will already
have met Tracy and know something about her relationship with her mother. Those
who haven’t read Safe Harbor will instantly grasp that mother and
daughter haven’t seen eye to eye, and that Pat is upset about it. She feels she
hasn’t been a good mother. And now she is worried that Tracy is in trouble with
the police.
A sure-fire way to slow down a novel—both
mystery and mainstream—is to load its opening pages with backstory, and this is
especially deadly in the second and subsequent books in a series. Readers who
read Safe Harbor know that Pat is a widow in her late forties, a
financial advisor who cares for her clients, the mother of two girls and has
recently adopted a seven-year-old boy. Readers who start the series with Black
Water don’t need to know all of this in the first chapter—or the second or
the third. It will come out bit by bit once the main plot has been developed
and the characters are launched on their trajectories. And they don’t need to
know too much about what happened in the first book in the series—or they won’t
want to read it.
How do you avoid the infamous mid-book sag?
I’m not a big fan of plotting out a novel in
advance. I’m a character-driven writer, and my first concern is to develop a
strong, sympathetic central character with whom readers can identify. I come up
with my central character, then I start writing the story that I want to tell
about this man or woman. And I usually come to a point—sometimes at chapter
four or five, sometimes right in the middle of the novel—where I can’t go any
further. That’s because I haven’t given much thought to the major plot
milestones that should combine to form a satisfying cause-and-effect
relationship between the events in a story. I have to go back and map out the
major milestones of my story arc.
In the fairy tale, Cinderella, the plot
milestones look like this:
Set-up. Poor, beautiful Cinderella slaves away her
days cooking and cleaning for her wicked stepmother and stepsisters. When the
King of the realm throws a royal ball to find a wife for the Prince, Cinderella
has neither the clothes nor the transportation to attend it.
First plot point. Cinderella’s fairy
godmother appears and creates a stunning outfit for her, complete with glass
slippers, and turns a pumpkin into a coach that takes her to the castle.
Everything has changed for our heroine. She dances with the Prince, and the
Prince is smitten.
Mid-point. The clock strikes midnight and the magic runs
out. Cinderella races out of the ballroom, losing one glass slipper, which the
Prince picks up. Cinderella returns to her life of drudgery. All seems to be
lost.
Second plot point. At this point new
information is infused into the story. The Prince announces that he will marry
the woman whose foot fits the glass slipper. He tours the kingdom with the
slipper. The stepsisters try on the slipper, but it doesn’t fit.
Climax. Cinderella holds her breath as the Prince
eases the slipper onto her foot. It fits!
Resolution. They have a huge wedding and live happily
ever after.
The set-up and first plot point always come
easily to me. Then I need to come up with the subsequent milestones, which
often means including alternative options, for my story. Rather than using them
to build the novel, I like to use them as a checklist to measure my progress.
If the novel seems to be going wrong, I’ll check to see if I’ve missed a stage
on the arc.
Do you have a story line planned for the
entire series as well as for each book?
Do you have a specific number of books planned for the series?
I wish I had stories—and plot milestones for
each story—planned for the entire series, but I don’t. I take it one book at a
time. The novels in this series will always have Pat as their central character,
but I need ideas that resonate with me. I need to be excited by the story idea
I’m writing about, and a particular idea may not excite me three years down the
road. I’m a firm believer that the first person that a writer has to think
about pleasing when writing a novel is himself or herself. Novels take a long
time to research and write—for me, at least two years—so it’s important
to have a story idea that will continue to excite me for that length of time.
As for how many books will be in the series, I
can’t say. I’m coming to the end of book three, and I’ll need a good year until
it can be submitted to Imajin Books. My creative energy is now funnelled into
wrapping up the story. When that is done and I’m doing edits, I anticipate that
another story idea will come to me. I hope it will involve Pat Tierney.
I understand the Pat Tierney books, Safe
Harbor and Black Water, have been described as “Domestic
Thrillers.” What does that
description mean?
Domestic thrillers are suspenseful stories
about family situations. They can be stories about poisonous marriages, such as
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, in which one spouse cannot trust the other.
They can also be stories about uncovering family secrets, such as who murdered
the central character’s parents 20 years ago. In my mystery, Safe Harbor,
Pat learns something about her late husband that rocks her world. And in all my
Pat Tierney novels, there is a family crisis of some kind for her to deal with.
From the outset, I wanted Pat Tierney to be a
character that readers can identify with. She’s an ordinary woman with
family responsibilities. Heroines such as Sara Peretsky’s V.I. Warshawski can
work day and night on an investigation; they can leave town at the drop of a
hat to pursue a lead. V.I. has no family ties apart from her dogs and her
fatherly neighbor. I love reading their stories, but I can’t identify with
these characters. I can’t devote all my time to work, nor can I leave town at
the drop of a hat, and I don’t think many readers can either.
Do you research as part of your writing? If
so, what areas do you research and what are your sources?
Pat Tierney is a financial advisor so some of
the crimes in the books involve money—fraud, theft, embezzlement, etc. I’m a
financial journalist, not financial professional, so I often need to call on
financial experts to see if I’ve got the details right.
I also need to research police procedures, and
I am extremely fortunate that I live in a city that has a co-operative police
department. I’ll place a request with the Toronto Police Service’s
communications department, and one of its staffers will arrange a face-to-face
interview with an officer from the appropriate department.
And I may need to talk to experts in other
fields. Writing Black Water, I needed to speak to a midwife to find out
whether home births took place in rural Ontario 40 years ago, and how infant
immunization records were kept at that time. It is so important to get the
details right. If a reader spots a mistake you’ve made, he or she may not want
to continue reading your book.
Who has influenced your writing?
Veteran
Canadian mystery writer Gail Bowen has been a wonderful mentor. In 2009, I
entered an early draft of Safe Harbor, my first Pat Tierney mystery, in
the Debut Dagger competition, a contest that is sponsored by Britain’s Crime
Writers Association and open to English-language writers around the world who
haven’t had a novel published. The CWA didn’t get back to me, which meant, in a
competition that attracts more than 1,000 entries, that mine hadn’t made the
shortlist.
A few months
later, Gail was in Toronto doing a stint as writer-in-residence at the Toronto
Reference Library. I submitted the first 20 pages of Safe Harbor for a
manuscript evaluation and I met with Gail. “This book needs to written in the
first person,” she said. “We need to know what Pat Tierney is thinking and
feeling every step of the way.”
Safe Harbor is a murder mystery, but
it is also the story of Pat’s personal journey after her husband’s death. Yet,
for some reason, I’d written the manuscript in the third person. I rewrote it
in the first person, and right from the start, I knew I’d made the right
decision. I felt energy emanating from the story that hadn’t been there before.
I entered the
rewrite in the 2010 Debut Dagger competition. Same title and same storyline as
my previous submission, but told in the first person. That year Safe Harbor
emerged as one of 11 novels—out of about 1,100 submissions—that were
shortlisted for the award. Being on that shortlist has been one of the
highlights of my writing life.
Thanks very much for sharing on WWK. I will definitely look for your books.
Thank you, Warren, for having me here today!
Your readers may want to follow my blog, Moving Target, at https://rosemarymccracken.wordpress.com/. And
check out my website at http://www.rosemarymccracken.com/
Purchase links to the Pat Tierney novels:
