My Writing Process

My Writing Process by Terry Ambrose

I confess. I’m a plotter. But I wasn’t always that way. In the beginning, I was happy to let the story take me where it would. And then…bam! Disaster struck in the last quarter when I put my protagonist in two places at once. And those places were 150 miles apart. That wouldn’t have been a serious problem—if I had been writing sci-fi or fantasy. But a current-day thriller? Oh yes, serious problem.

Fast-forward to today, and my current process, which is what I did for Lies, Spies, and the Baker’s Surprise. I began the same way I’ve always begun. I wrote a synopsis for each of the five storylines (or arcs) in the book. The most important of those is, of course, the actual mystery. The others include the murder backstory, the love story between the main characters, another about Alexandra “Alex” Atwood growing up, and what I call ‘the treasure story,’ which allows me to add historical elements.

Keeping your sanity while weaving five loosely connected stories together can be a challenge. For

instance, in Lies, Spies, and the Baker’s Surprise, the murder storyline begins with Alex writing in her journal. Alex is the co-protagonist (along with her dad, Rick Atwood). She’s a delight to write because she’s eleven-years-old, has a wild imagination, and loves a mystery. Via Alex’s journal entry, we learn that a young married couple, Henry and Tara Nicholas, have checked into the Seaside Cove Bed & Breakfast. We also learn that Henry has a secret—he’s married, but not to Tara.

There are four characters involved in that one event—Henry, a woman on the phone, Tara, and Alex. After Alex outs Henry to Tara, the tension ramps up. When someone murders Henry, Tara becomes the primary suspect. As the suspect list grows, the timeline becomes very complex and detailed. For Lies, Spies, and the Baker’s Surprise, there were over 200 entries in my timeline. The process can feel very laborious at times, but it helps me make sure I never put a character in two places at the same time again. Unless I decide to write a multidimensional sci-fi thriller. In that case, I’m sure the timeline would be even bigger.

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About Terry Ambrose:

Terry has written over twenty novels, several of which have been award finalists. In 2014, his thriller, “Con Game,” won the San Diego Book Awards for Best Action-Thriller. His series include the Trouble in Paradise McKenna Mysteries, the Seaside Cove Bed & Breakfast Mysteries, and the License to Lie thriller series.

Telling Stories and Storytelling

Image courtesy of Roke from Wikimedia Commons

My grandmother always told me, “Now don’t you be telling no stories.”

She meant lies and other nefarious fabrications, not flights of fancy. The word “story” could mean either in her mind, and she frowned on both. Anything that wasn’t factual was suspect because non-facts had no foundation and therefore couldn’t be trusted. Stories were like gathering clouds—dangerous in their potential.

My husband would agree with her definition if not her assessment. He’s an engineer, suspicious of the frayed edge that all stories have, the place where facts start unraveling. He says that fact and truth are the same thing. He says that if he started writing equations based on my ideas of truth, planes would fall from the sky.

It’s a point.

And yet my brain can’t make sense of all the facts around me. Information overload sets in, so my brain begins editing my reality into something I can comprehend, erasing this, focusing on that. It connects my present experience to the other experiences folded and tucked in my gray matter, and by doing so, creates a chronology, a sense of past and future, effect and consequence. The human brain is wired for stories, and it programs our consciousness accordingly.

Not facts. Stories.

Memory is useful not for what it records, but for what it erases. For the vast majority of us, it is not photographic. It takes out the extraneous—however factual—and leaves us with essence—however slanted. And our recollection is slanted; it must be. No true and perfectly accurate memory exists. Certain details, by necessity, weren’t captured in the first place, and every subsequent time your consciousness touches the memory, it further alters it, even as the flawed memory is carved deeper into your brain.

Jonah Lehrer explains it more eloquently than I can in his Seed magazine article "The Neuroscience of Proust":

“Every time we remember, the neuronal structure of the memory, no matter how constant it may feel, is delicately transformed. If you prevent the memory from changing, it ceases to exist. So the purely objective memory . . . is the one memory lost to you forever.”

Criminal justice research shows how problematic this process is, revealing that even though juries value eyewitness identification as gold-standard evidence, it is actually the most fallible of testimony.

I think this is why I’ve always loved reading mysteries, why I eventually became a crime fiction writer. If my own memory was suspect, malleable, shaped by my subconscious every second of the day, then why not lean into that unreliability? Why not partner with it instead of fighting it?

And so I have. I’m hard at work crafting the seventh book in my Tai Randolph series, tentatively titled Prodigal Lies. Like me, Tai isn’t afraid of a little lie (white or otherwise). She spins them out of necessity, but also for the sheer fun of it. It’s one of the pleasures of writing her.

Sorry, Grandma.

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Tina Whittle writes the Tai Randolph mysteries for Poisoned Pen Press. The sixth book in this Atlanta-based series—Necessary Ends—is available now. Tina is a proud member of Sisters in Crime and serves as both a chapter officer and national board member. Visit her website to follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter, or read additional scenes and short stories: www.tinawhittle.com.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

I was recently asked to give a speech at the very first college I attended, known then as Middle Georgia College. I love homecomings of all kinds, but this one was especially poignant because I was returning to the place where I received some of my first, and best, encouragement as a fledgling writer. I knew I’d be speaking to students, young people like I’d been thirty years previously, hungry for inspiration and wise words.

I tried to think of what good advice I could offer. And this is what I came up with: Learn to lie like a pro. Because until you can tell a good lie, you’ll never be able to tell a good truth.

Now, I’m not going to make a moral argument for or against lying here. I leave that to the parents and priests and parole officers of the world. After all, I make my living telling lies, big complicated ones. I’m working on Book Six of my most popular lie right now, an amateur sleuth mystery series, and one of the themes I explore in these books is the human taste for deception.

My narrator is a woman who used to work as a tour guide in Savannah, Georgia. Now if you think that means she traffics in facts, you don’t understand the nature of the Savannah tour industry. They recently filed a lawsuit against the city, which wanted to create an ordinance requiring that tour guides who advertised that they were giving historical tours should stick to, you know, historical facts. The tour guide association declared this proposed ordinance a violation of their employees’ First Amendment rights, and the city backed down, thereby enshrining interesting history over actual history.

So this is my narrator’s background. Just for fun, I hooked her up with an ex-SWAT agent as her partner in crime solving, a man recovering from a very specific injury to a very specific part of the right front lobe that—and this is a fact here, not a lie; I learned about it in Scientific American—renders people significantly better than average at telling when others are lying. Better even than CIA-trained operatives.

So I have her, a skilled and unrepentant liar, and I have him, a rule-obsessed straight arrow with a brain that’s a virtual lie detector. And I put them in books where people steal, blackmail, assault, connive, murder, extort, threaten, and, of course, lie about it. A lot.

This part is very much a reflection of American culture. Some studies estimate that for every ten minutes of conversation, Americans tell four lies. Look how rife our language is with words for lying, and how pretty those words are: prevaricate, exaggerate, confabulate, deceive.

Our brains are lying machines, and that is no small thing. Lying is one of those things so complicated we shouldn’t be able to do it, like driving. After all, telling the truth is a straightforward proposition. Telling a lie, however, involves not only knowing the truth, but being able to hold that knowledge in one hand, and in the other, create an equally compelling, equally plausible, fiction. Then we must be able to share that fiction in a persuasive manner, often making it up on the spot as we go along, without losing our grasp on the first story, the factual one. It’s mental gymnastics of a relatively high order.

So don’t be afraid to give your lying brain free rein every now and then. Just be sure to use your powers for good, not evil, and don’t tell your mother I said any of this.
 

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Tina Whittle writes the Tai Randolph mysteries for Poisoned Pen Press. The fifth book in this Atlanta-based series—Reckoning and Ruin—was released in April. Tina is a proud member of Sisters in Crime and serves as both a chapter officer and national board member. Visit her website to follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter, or read additional scenes and short stories: www.tinawhittle.com.