Clea Simon writes:
Maybe it would have happened anyway; maybe it was time. But I suspect I'd been waiting for permission. I'd been a journalist and nonfiction writer for close to 20 years before I even thought about writing a novel, much less a mystery. Sure, I read them voraciously: My husband, who now works as an editor, regularly brings home review copies for me based on their size. ("This should hold you for a few days," he told me, handing over Hilary Mantel's utterly wonderful 748 page A Place of Greater Safety.) But it wasn't until I was told to change my focus that my new career began.
When the word came, it seemed quite anticlimactic. "You should write a mystery," said Kate, the proprietor of a local mystery bookstore. The occasion was her annual holiday party. My third nonfiction book had been about women and cats, and she'd ordered a stack for the store, inviting me to come and sign, along with her whodunit authors, telling me about the huge crossover between mystery readers and cat lovers. And so we were standing and chatting between the stacks, me with pen in one hand, plastic glass of cheap white wine the other, when she gave me my marching orders.
Now, Kate is a formidable figure. Large, deep-voiced, and not prone to softening her opinions, when she makes a statement it carries weight. I didn't know her well at that point, but I knew well enough that she held nothing back whether in condemning the entire oeuvre of a particularly slick or lazy writer or in praising an underappreciated talent. Still, what she said could have sounded like the kind of offhand comment that gets dropped at parties, along with "you should call my cousin; you'd get along" and "you really should go to Florence while the rates are low." But between her words, the heft of her voice, and that cheap chardonnay something alchemical happened. The next morning, I started to write.
What got me at first was how much fun it was. After two decades in and out of newsrooms and magazine cubicles, a newspaper setting seemed natural. I could finally use all those ridiculous moments -- some originally quite humiliating -- and play them for their humor. I could revive some of the characters who've entertained or enraged me over the years. I could drop 10 years and 20 pounds and relive my single years vicariously in the person of my intrepid heroine. And I could finally make people say what they ought to be saying, what they naturally would say, instead of being bound to the plodding, literal, often unwieldy truth of their quotes and actions. I was liberated!
"Hey, this is great," I told my husband. Before sidling into journalism, he'd lived the fiction life, writing short stories and teaching. Why had he never told me? "I get to make shit up!"
"Yeah," he responded slowly, the editor look coming over his face. "But you have to make shit up."
Those were early days, however, and I hadn't yet hit any blocks or had any recalcitrant characters refuse to do my bidding. I would draft my first mystery in roughly six weeks. But then would follow two years of rewriting -- and a complete second novel drafted -- before Mew is for Murder would find a home with Poisoned Pen, a small, reputable publisher. With publication on the way, I'm now trying to forget those intervening years and recall that first, joyous rush, when a near stranger gave me permission and I found my fiction voice.
Clea Simon is the author of three nonfiction books and one mystery. You can read excerpts of her books (and journalism) and reach her through her website.
