Author Barbara Shoup, wears many hats, and upon ocassion paints them, too, as she did last summer in Assisi, Italy. She is working on another edition of Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors share the Creative Process (co-author Margaret Love Denman).
The following interview of award-winning mystery and crime writer, S.J. Rozan, to be included in the next edition (you saw it here first!) follows. S.J. Rozan will be teaching for Art Workshop International August 7 – August 20 this year, and Barbara Shoup will be in her class! For more information, see www.artworkshopintl.com/creative_writing.aspx. Also, S.J. Rozan has a blog - www.sjrozan.com -Chris Spencer, director
S.J. Rozan
Let’s start with the fundamental question, Why mysteries?
I was always interested in the mystery and crime form. When I was a kid, I read Nancy Drew obsessively. I couldn’t wait for the next ones to come out. There was also a science fiction series called Lucky Star, Space Ranger—Robert Heinlein writing under the name of Paul French. It was about this Kid named Lucky Star, who was a young teenager who was a space ranger, but what he really did was go around solving crimes—about robots and aliens and evil scientists. That was one of the jobs he did for the Council of Science, the good guys who ran the world. He had good guys and bad guys to deal with. He had a sidekick who was weird and outrageous. It was this classic mystery series, except it was set in the future. But my all-time favorite was Bill Bergson Lives Dangerously, by Astrid Lindgrom. It was about these three kids, Bill Bergson and his buddies. Somebody was doing something evil in their little town and they had to thwart him. It was all very thrilling. I checked that book out from the library over and over. That was what I wanted to do—not be him, but write those books.
And when they finally let you into the adult section of the library?
I was a huge Agatha Christie fan, and still am. I think she gets a bad rap for being cozy and for having cardboard characters. Her characters are archetypes; she really understood human motivation and the human heart. Some of her motives are breathtaking, specifically the motive in The Mirror Cracked. She’s also the paragon of fair play. She gives you every piece of information that her detective had, and when you don’t figure it out, it’s your fault. From Agatha Christie, I learned both how to deal with real human beings and how to be fair to the reader and hoodwink them at the same time.
Did you study writing in college?
I grew up thinking I was going to be a writer. Then when I got into college I got this idea that writing isn’t something you can just do. So I went to architecture school. I was always interested in how things work—what makes a building stand up, what makes a wall bulge in that place, what’s behind all that plaster. I did field work and specification writing. I had this really great job. My office was great, my bosses were great, my work was great. There was nothing about my job that wasn’t your architecture dream job—and I wasn’t happy. That was kind of lucky. If the job hadn’t been so great, I would have thought I was unhappy because I had a lousy job. But there was nothing I could ask for that I wasn’t being given. Obviously, architecture itself was the problem.
As soon as I came to that conclusion, this little voice in my head said, “Weren’t we going to write a book?” And I thought, well, all right, let me try that. If that doesn’t work, I can cross that off the list. I knew the book I wanted to write was a private eye novel, so I started creating these characters—and I was never so happy in my life. I went to classes, I got some writing chops. Then I started writing the book. It took me fifteen years between the time I started the first book and the time I finally quit my job. By then, I was so clearly not an architect who wrote but a writer with a day job.
Hemingway said, “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” Does that seem right to you, based on your training as an architect?
I think it’s absolutely true. Architecture is the thing itself. We used to complain in the office that the only thing the client sees is the paint job. All the work you put into a building doesn’t show. Every now and then, it’s not true, though—my best example of this is in Annie Proulx’s, Shipping News. There’s a scene where two characters leave town before dawn and drive east into the sunrise. She takes a paragraph to describe the sunrise, the way the light comes into the car. It’s astounding. You read it and you think, she only did this because she could. She wanted to see if she had the chops to make this happen—and she did. The book didn’t need it—that’s the paint job. But the rest of the book is the thing itself. You don’t get distracted by the prose. At the end you think, nothing really happened. This guy and his kids and his aunt moved to a new place and he got a job and he met somebody and fell in love. But you’re riveted the whole time. You don’t remember any particular sentence—except that paragraph about the sunrise. That’s the difference between architecture and interior decoration.
Would you agree that, fundamentally, every story is a mystery—regardless of whether there’s a body involved.
Yes. In every story, the reader wants to find out some answer. Why are these people behaving like this, how is it going to turn out for the person you’ve come to care about. If there’s no question, there’s no drama.
So why does the literary world discount mysteries as formulaic?
What’s interesting is that the writers of so-called literary fiction don’t tend to discount it. The readers do. There’s a tremendous amount of garbage published as genre writing, and if that’s all you’re reading, you’re right. It is a formula. Romance has this, science fiction has this—as does the literary novel. The road novel, for example. It can be Cormac McCarthy or it can be pure crapola—but it’s a road book, nonetheless.
There is a need to separate high culture from low culture, especially in this country. If art—high culture, literature—is difficult to comprehend, then only the trained and sensitive and worthy can comprehend it. So the more difficult something is, the more you can congratulate yourself if you get it. Conversely, if everybody gets it and loves it, it cannot, by definition, be art. It’s that kind of thinking that puts genre writing, which is beloved by a vast number of people, in the category of not-art. Every now and then, a book rises. I’m thinking of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, which is a fabulous novel, beautifully written. People said “Turow transcends the genre.” Every time you get a book with a crime element that gets a tremendous amount of critical attention, they say that. They take all the cream off the top and then complain that the milk is skim. But that’s hardly fair!
Your award-winning crime series that features private detectives Bill Smith and Lydia Chin is a popular one among mystery affictionados. Would you talk about how you developed it?
The original character was Bill Smith. At the time I was creating him, there seemed to be this competition going on to name characters the most outrageous thing possible. Elvis Cole, for example. Every now and then you know there’s a competition that you can’t win, so I thought I’m going the other way. So he was Bill Smith. He was created to be that classic world-weary American private eye. It’s a white male character—it has to be, that particular archetype. Philip Marlowe defines this best. He’s been to college, but just two years, which means it didn’t work for him. But he had the ability to get there. He was a cop, kicked off the force for insubordination. He had everything going for him to become a part of the power structure, but in the end he couldn’t do it because the price was too high: conforming, knocking all the edges off, losing part of his soul. He narrates from that vantage point, from outside a corrupt structure he refused. His heroism is in refusing to be a part of it, but continuing to go back to it to rescue people it’s sucked under..
The male private eye who refuses to be part of the corrupt power structure, is the recent addition, as it were, to a heroic figure who goes back to the Greeks and comes up through the knight-errant, whose job it was to go around the countryside saving people. Heroism never really cost the knight-errant anything. He had to be very, very brave to go up against the dragon, but once he mustered up the courage he was always able to slay it. World War I created a sea-change in the consciousness of what a hero was. It was the first war where the carnage on the battlefield could not be ignored. It was photographed. It was also more enormous than in other wars. The cost of heroism began to show. Now a hero was someone able to go into this evil world and rescue people, but who was changed by going there and became unredeemable himself. That’s where the hard-drinking hard-smoking, lonely private eye that first appeared in the thirties and forties comes from. Bill Smith character is that character.
Lydia Chin, on the other hand, is a very late twentieth century character. She’s an Asian American woman. She might have fought her way into the power structure, but it was not her birthright, so she would never have had the chance to reject it the way Bill Smith did. Her heroism consists of rejecting everybody else’s goal for her and being what she wants to be, even though half the time she doesn’t know what that is. It’s a different brand of heroism and the great thing about the two of them, I like to think, is that they support each other in this fight.
How, exactly, did the two of them end up together in your mind?
Having created Bill, I wanted a foil for him, a sidekick. Everybody had sidekicks in those days—a lot of them were psychotic. They’re devoted to the hero, but they will kill without compunction. As far as I was concerned, the psychotic sidekick eliminated a major point in the private eye novel, which to me is about moral ambiguity and the need of the detective to make decisions when there is no good choice. I wanted Bill Smith to have to deal with the ambiguity and then have to live with the consequences. So I wanted him to have a sidekick who wouldn’t shoot someone just because she knew he wanted them dead. He’d have to say, “I want you to go shoot that person.” Then they’d have to talk about it, admit that they were actually doing it.
I also wanted the sidekick to be as opposite to him as possible. Obviously, it had to be a she because he was a he. She had to be small because he was big, young because he was middle-aged. And if she was someone from a completely different culture, then everything would be called into question. I know a lot of Chinese Americans. I’ve studied the culture, I’ve studied the art. I thought, if there’s any chance I can get inside the head of someone who is not me, it would be a Chinese American woman. So that was where Lydia Chin came from. She started as a sidekick to Bill, but three chapters into that first book she’s going, like, “Don’t you want to know what I think?” I stopped about a third of the way through the book and wrote a short story with her in it—just Lydia, not Bill— just to see if I could handle her voice, and we got along pretty well, she and I. So when I finished his book I decided to do a book in her voice, with Bill as the sidekick. I thought I was going to write two different series, and then an editor at St. Martins wanted them both as continuing narrative series.
How know recognize that an idea is for one or the other?
It’s always clear. The stories come out of their worlds, which are really different. His are darker and with more ambiguous endings. You find out who did it and what went on but it doesn’t necessarily work out well. Hers work out better. They have the heavy Chinese content, and that comes first. I think, I’m going to do a Chinese restaurant book, not I’m going to do a book about immigrants, so how about restaurant workers? The order in which I write them is the contract. If I have a Lydia in mind and Bill’s up, Lydia just has to wait.
Most aspiring mystery writers assume that you have to have the plot of a book worked out in your mind before you can begin it. Is that true?
I never have a plot. When I started Stone Quarry, I had an incident at the end that I could see, but I didn’t know what it meant. I had the idea of unconditional love, which is usually found in families and is only interesting if the person you love that way doesn’t deserve it. Otherwise it’s never tested. And loyalty—which outside of family works the same way. That’s what that book was about. When I started Reflecting the Sky, I knew I was going to set it in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong to me has always been about duality. Everything in Hong Kong is reflected in something else, big and small. The buildings are reflected in the water; Hong Kong is an island and part of the mainland. I knew that’s what the book had to be about. There had to be two of everything, either thematically or in fact. That’s where the brothers came from, that’s where the guy having two families came from. But I didn’t have a plot.
What I do is start with an idea—an emotional or thematic center for the book and a world that it’s set in. China Trade was about the world of export porcelains and small museums because that’s a fascinating world to me. Mandarin Plaid was about fashion, because I so don’t get it. I read the magazines and think, why are people wearing this? What are they thinking? Then I read some really interesting books on fashion and semiotics and the meaning of display, and one of them pointed out that in the world we live in we don’t need clothing at all. We could live our lives naked because we’re so climate-controlled. Therefore, everything we wear is to communicate to everyone around us. This stuff fascinated me. Again, I didn’t have a plot.
Is there always a particular question fueling each book idea?
I’m not sure there’s a specific question. There’s a curiosity; clearly there’s something I want to explore. I got really interested in school shootings for a while. Every time there was one, I would research it. Always skinny white boys! Columbine was what sparked Winter and Night. I saw one of the teachers being interviewed, saying, “How could this happen here? This is a perfect place.” And I’m thinking, clearly, this is not a perfect place if this happens here. And it’s not a perfect place, schmuck, because out of this place came “South Park.” The guy that writes it came from that school, and he said everybody knows the jocks ruled that school. Everybody knows the jocks lock the non-jocks in the lockers and beat up on them and pee on them. It’s a perfect place if you’re them. When Columbine happened, everybody blamed the parents—and they are clearly at fault. Their kids were building arsenals in the garage and they didn’t know it. But the parents of the jocks have to bear half the blame because these kids would not have cracked up in the hostile way they did if they hadn’t been pushed around all their lives. So Winter and Nigh was about entering that world to write the story about what really happens in it.
I tend to write books about things about things I don’t get, like the guy in China Trade who shaped his whole life around a single obsession, collecting porcelain. He was based on a real person, a professor who had been stealing for years. He said he felt sorry for the porcelain because they were locked up in dark closets and museums. He was a real nut. I thought, boy, here’s a character. A collector told me he thought it was a way of ordering the world. There’s no order in the world, but there’s order in the world where his collection is. He feels alive when he’s hunting. He feels the way I feel when I’m writing a book. He has purpose.
Once you move from general curiosity to the idea of a book, how does the book evolve?
First the book is just sort of swimming around in my head. For example, the new Lydia book, Shanghai Moon, started with the idea that it would have to do with jewelry, something else I’m interested in. The characters started coming in and developing. But I didn’t have a plot.
I knew there was a Jewish ghetto in Shanghai during World War II. The Germans were taking over Europe, trying to get rid of the Jews by expulsion. But you couldn’t leave unless you could prove you had someplace to go, and nobody would let them in. Shanghai, because of a series of bizarre historical accidents, was an open port. In theory, you needed papers, you needed a visa; but, in fact, it was always the British who had checked them. The Japanese had invaded china in ‘37 and were ruling Shanghai, and the British, as a matter of policy, stopped checking papers. They decided if they insisted on their right to do that the Japanese would say, wait a minute, you are not the boss of this anymore. We are going to do it. And then the British wouldn’t be able to come and go. There was no war in Europe yet, and they were making a lot of money. So they thought, never mind. And twenty thousand Jews took advantage of that.
So I’m sitting around thinking, okay, this Lydia book—it has to do with jewelry. But that’s all I know—and it’s not a plot. It’s not a story. But I wasn’t panicking yet. And into my mind floated the Shanghai ghetto. I thought, there is an interesting situation— something that could connect jewelry and Jews, which I had sort of wanted to get into a little bit, and China, too. So I started reading memoirs. The more I looked into the more astounding it got.
Eventually, I came up a plot that was a variation of The Maltese Falcon, where everybody chases around for years and years after this thing they’ve never seen. In this case, a piece of jewelry—the Shanghai Moon. Then I got into the practical logistics. How does Lydia get involved and what does it mean?
Lydia and Bill aren’t talking to each other at the end of Winter and Night, and she’s conveniently on her own. I thought, suppose a Yiddish private eye she knows, a Jewish guy from New Yorl calls her up and says, “A client has come to me because there was jewelry dug up in the old Jewish ghetto in Shanghai in the excavation for a skyscraper and stolen almost immediately.” The theory is that the thief has come to New York to sell it. Where would you do that? Well, you’d do it on 47th Street where everybody’s Orthodox Jewish, and that’s why the client’s come to Yiddish private eye. But the other jewelry center in New York is Canal Street, where the Chinese jewelers are. It’s a newer jewelry center, but it is for real and it is big and this guy is Chinese. So maybe he would take it there even though it’s all new stuff down there and they don’t deal much in antiques. But what is he going to do? He may not even speak English and he certainly doesn’t speak Yiddish. So the client hires this Jewish private eye and asks, does he know a Chinese private eye? That’s how Lydia gets involved. I still didn’t know who these people were, but it sounded like it would work.
When you felt it was time to write, how did you begin?
Rather than having what my friend Keith Snyder calls the expository info dump, at the beginning, I thought let’s have the client hand these two private eyes a letter that an eighteen year old girl who was on her way to Shanghai from Salzburg in 1937 had written to her mother. She was traveling with her fourteen-year old brother, carrying eight pieces of jewelry she’d smuggled out so she could sell them if they couldn’t find a way of making a living before their mother came. The mother had train tickets to come in a few months, but she never got out.
Later the girl meets a young Chinese guy and they fall in love. They have this gem, the Shanghai Moon, made out of a piece of jade that’s been in his family for a thousand years and diamonds from one of the pieces of jewelry she smuggled into China. She wears it on their wedding day. But it vanishes at the end of the Chinese civil war and is never seen again. People have been hunting for it all these years. It becomes probable or possible that, though the recorded find from the skyscraper site doesn’t include it, it’s what’s been stolen and brought to New York.
From the time the Shanghai Moon came to me, I knew it had been created to celebrate the eternalness of love, which is one of the things the war was trying to destroy. I knew at the beginning of the book where piece of jewelry had been and why. This is one of the first books where the end was clear to me.
In the Maltese Falcon, the thing they’re chasing after is what Hitchcock called a Macguffin. The point was not to find it—and to go off chasing after it more. I knew I couldn’t end that way. But I also knew that that the chase was what was critical, not the thing. Why people wanted it, that was the issue—and who they are and what they want to do with it. The “why” is the reason for where it’s been for all these years.
I toyed with the idea of it being found with the other jewelry, but that would have raised the stakes too soon. To start with, they’re just looking for this stuff, but nobody has much of an emotional involvement with it. Then someone gets killed and it isn’t clear why—and there are these old men who turn out to have been there.
So characters appear as a story complicates itself.
Exactly. When they come in they’re often surprising. In Concourse I had a guy who looked like a good guy and a good guy who looked like a bad guy—and the good guy just would not cooperate. He was doing bad things, but he had really good reasons. So I thought, okay, be like that! I was talking to another writer who works in exactly the opposite way. He says he never makes a character physically, including his race, his age, until he knows what his role is in the book. I find that completely backwards. I let them come in and act. They have their voice, and eventually they take on their roles. Sometimes I say, “Okay, here’s what you’re going to do.” And they say, “Oh, I don’t think so.” And then I say, “Well, somebody has to do that,” and they say, “Get somebody else.”
When you finish a book, do you usually have a lot of revision to do?
I revise as I go along. As I realize that “this” is actually “that,” it can mean a character has to be different in the beginning. So I have to go back and change the whole thing. I’ve taken characters out. I could populate a whole book with the people I’ve taken out of the books I already have! It’s a very anxiety-provoking way of working. You say, “Maybe this. Oh, God, no. All right, but if he…no. I can’t get to an end that way.” So there’s not much revision in terms of story when I finish. I don’t do first drafts, second drafts, third drafts. I constantly revise.
You interrupted your successful to write a “stand-alone novel,” Absent Friends. Why did you do that?
I was set to do the next Lydia, after Winter and Night, and then 9/11 happened. For the first couple of months afterwards, I thought, fiction, are you kidding? In a world like this, why would anyone want to do that anymore? I was thinking on an intimate level about the smoke and bodies and the whole thing for months and months and months after everybody else was putting it out of their minds. I knew I had to write my way out of 9/11, but it was too massive, too all over the place. I was whining to every writer I knew—most of whom were also not writing. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to write.” Then a friend of mine, who was disabled a degenerative disease, told me that he was using a cane. He said, “It’s not that I can’t walk, because I can. But sometimes I can’t find the floor.”
I told my friend, Jim Grady, “That’s how I feel. Emotionally. I feel like I can’t find the floor.” He said, “So write about someone like that. The character’s right in front of you: someone who can’t find the floor.” I said, “Holy Toledo!” So I started with Laura, the reporter, who couldn’t find the floor because her lover had just died, 9/11 had just happened—and it went from there.
The anecdote about finding the floor appears among a whole collection of seemingly random things in the epilogue of the book that’s called “Explanation.” The titles you’ve given some of anecdotes, quotations and poems, are the titles for various sections of the book—like, “How to Find the Floor.” Were all these things a part of the genesis of the book?
They were. The story was the story, but the book was to me a huge metaphor for all these other things. They collected as I went along, but they were mostly there by the time the book was a third of the way done. They were all experiences that I’d had or friends had had or that I had heard about.
They weren’t all directly related to 9/11. There’s a story about saving a pig and how a witness incorrectly assumes it was an altruistic act.
I love that story! Years ago, I was in a class with a woman, a poet, who’d been hospitalized for depression and self-mutilation a couple of times. I don’t know what became of her. but she wrote a poem about that story. I love it because it has always seemed to me so true that no matter how altruistic you think you are, there’s something in it for you—and Lincoln knew that. But most people don’t.
As you said, you started writing Laura’s story first. But the book ended up with three points of view in the “now.” Laura, Phil, and Marian. There’s also the story happening in the past. How did you manage working with four different stories?
God only knows. With the story in the present, I changed the point of view depending on whose story seemed important to tell next. The story in the past originally had only two chapters; one told a little about the boys as kids and the other told a little about the girls. But they kept expanding. I gave each kid an anecdote, and the chapters got long. So I split them up.
It took me along time to realize that what I was writing in those chapters was the book that Jimmy had written that Harry had found. That was another “duh.” Then I realized that that Jimmy’s book needed to be interspersed so that you could follow the story in the present and the story at the past at the same time. I was about a third of the way through the book before I really found that rhythm. But I still had to keep going back. This needs to come before that and this has to come out and so-and-so can’t know this yet so I have to put it here. It was just mind-boggling.
I used index cards. I had a different color card for each of the characters, and I wrote down the scene number (not same as the chapter number), the day and time it happened (day one, early afternoon), and the central action in the scene—who finds out what, who does what, where it is…that kind of thing. I broke them down as small as I could. That way I could look and say, there’s four whites in a row here, so something has to be done about that. I kept rearranging the order. Sometimes I’d put a scene in a different chapter.
So the book’s architecture was dictated by evolution of the story.
This comes from being an architect. We don’t start with I’m going to make a four story square building. We start with, okay, it needs to be a bank and it needs to have this many rooms in proximity to each other on this site which has this kind of sun. From that process comes the building. What the process of architecture gave me is the idea that that’s okay.
At the end of Absent Friends we’re left with the knowledge of how the secrets the characters knew as adults kept them from maintaining trust and closeness they enjoyed throughout their childhood. It’s heartbreaking when the last thing Jimmy does when he realizes he’s going to die is to take the photo of Marian from his wallet and look at it, as he’s done every day of his life since their break-up—especially knowing that this is something Marian will never find out.
None of them trusted each other enough. He would rather go away and spend his life with her picture than to tell her the truth. They all did that, in a way. These people’s whole lives were based on hiding a truth that they thought they were the only ones who had—and which wasn’t even true. After 9/11 it seemed to me really important to talk about all the things we don’t know, all the assumptions we make based on what we think we know.
Ultimately, the characters’ lack of trust resulted in the death of Marian’s son, Kevin. Did you see that one coming?
I had no idea. When I did see it coming, I tried my best to not let it happen. I tried to get out of it. But I finally thought, I can’t. What Kevin represents is hope and innocence, and that’s what we lost. I’d’ have been cheating this book, there’d have been no point in writing it if I let that not happen.
Eventually, Laura tracks down the cop to whom Jimmy entrusted the true story he wrote about what really happened the night Jack died. But the book ends without revealing whether what the reader knows is going to come out in a news story.
I assume it isn’t. What would be the point? Harry had let himself believe what Laura wanted to believe, that the truth always has to come out. But he knew that was wrong, and the fact that he had let himself believe that and screwed something up so badly as a result was too much for him. He couldn’t deal. That’s why he killed himself.
You said you felt you had to write the book to write yourself out of 9/11. Did that work?
Absolutely. Isaac Dineson once said, “Any sorrow can be borne if you put it in a story.” Writing gives you both distance and intimacy at the same time.
Would you talk a little bit about the logistics of your writing life?
I have a schedule. I worked as an architect for so many years that I found that I couldn’t just wake up and roll over to my writing desk. I take a shower, I get dressed, I go buy a cup of tea. I sit by the river and watch the boats go by. I watch the birds. Then I go back and work till about two in the afternoon. That’s about as long as I can do. In the afternoon, I deal with e-mail and other projects I’m working on that are not my book.
Does research qualify as writing the book?
Research qualifies until I start writing. The first couple of months, if the weather’s good, I’ll sit by the river and read. Or I’ll go meet people. Once I start the book, the research happens in the afternoons. I read or google or whatever. If there’s something I absolutely need to know before I go on, I’ll find that out. But usually there isn’t. So I write four hours a day, seven days a week—except Sundays. I play basketball Sunday morning, so I don’t start until 11.
Do you set a goal in terms of how many words you write in a day?
I shoot for a thousand words. If I don’t get it, I don’t have a cow. But if I get fewer than five hundred, I’m very disappointed. You need a certain momentum. Seven-fifty is good, but if I’m up to, say, eight-ninety-nine, I push myself to see if I can make a thousand.
I tell people, if you can’t find a way to put in an hour a day, it’s not going to get done. And maybe that’s okay. God knows the world is not lacking in books—and even if your book is the greatest novel never written, we’ll never know we missed it. So if you can’t do it except under a certain set of circumstances, move on.
I have a twenty-pound cat, the best mouser I’ve ever had because he has the feeling he was put on this earth to catch mice. After he got his first mouse, he went right back to the mouse hole. I said, “Look, this isn’t going to happen again. You’ve got your face right there. What mouse is going to come out?” And he’s looking at me like that cartoon— what the cat hears: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Of course the mouse came out again. That’s what mice do. And he was there. That’s what writing is like: you need to be there.
