Common wisdom encourages writers to
“write what you know.” My sister, the romance writer, adds: “Write what you want
to read.”
I’d say a successful author does both. I
enjoy reading cozy mysteries, in which the protagonist is an amateur sleuth who
has a business or hobby that is important to the story. I’ve read all kinds of
cozies, including those about quilting, music, herbs, booksellers and even
paranormal. I particularly enjoy cozies with a yoga theme but have found only a
few series. In keeping with my sister’s suggestion, I decided to write what I
wanted to read. In keeping with common wisdom, I wanted to write what I knew.
It’s not as easy as it sounds. First, I
worried that I wasn’t a yoga “expert.” When I started writing Book 1, I had been
teaching yoga less than a year. Surely, I needed more experience to be able to
write a mystery about yoga, right? I was nervous that hard-core yoginis would
take issue with the poses or cues I had selected. I envisioned angry emails
from readers, saying I was a hack who didn’t know the proper way to move into
Goddess pose.
I
pressed on anyway, and this is what I discovered: You don’t have to be an expert.
The way I see it, mystery stories,
particularly cozies, are entertainment and escapism. No one (I hope) expects to
learn everything there is to know about the topic from my cozy mystery. My
readers don’t want a tome about which muscles flex during Plank or which ones
abduct during Goddess pose. They want a good story with a little yoga woven
into the fabric.
Secondly, I learned not to overwhelm my
readers with information about the theme. A nonfiction editor once told me that
if a reader gleaned one gem from an article, then the article was a success.
I’ve taken that philosophy into my cozy mystery books. If readers enjoy the
story and pick up a bit of yoga theory or history or even a pose that they
didn’t know before, then that’s good enough. As a reader, I like to learn a
little bit about the theme. For instance, in a coffee cozy, I was glad to learn
coffee beans don’t belong in the freezer. I was also glad not to learn the
inner workings of an espresso machine.
In my series, I didn’t want to include
too much yoga, or people who weren’t deep into yoga wouldn’t be interested in
it. On the other hand, I wanted to include enough to add to the theme and
setting.
Finally, I learned that if you’re not an
expert, you need to do your research. Don’t skimp and don’t spread
misinformation. Even though I was a certified 200-hour yoga instructor with several
years as a yoga practitioner, I researched cueing in yoga poses as well as yoga
philosophy, among other things.
Writing a mystery that involves a hobby
or business requires striking a balance between story and theme. How do you
strike that balance in your mystery novel?
Jacqueline M. Green is a certified yoga
teacher and the author of The Yoga Mat Cozy Mystery Series, which includes Corpse
Pose, Indeed. A former newspaper
editor and writer, she teaches second grade by day and yoga in the evening. She
lives with her teenager, two cats and two dogs in Reno, Nev.
