I just came across the most wonderful “Rules for Writing” series at the guardian.co.uk site, thanks to a mention of it in yesterday’s NYTBR’s “Inside the List”. On the site, many truly extraordinary writers of all sorts list their “10 Rules for Writers.” I haven’t had a chance to peruse them all yet, but some early contenders for my favorites:

“6 Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark.” – Margaret Atwood (who has a number of marvelously funny ones – no surprise!)

“1 The first 12 years are the worst.” – Anne Enright

and

“7 Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.” – Joyce Carol Oates

So I’m heading out to write now with a light, hopeful heart – and very low expectations. Which is a pretty nice, unintimidating way to approach the blank page. – Meg

I’m delighted to welcome back Cara Black. Her new novel, Murder in the Palais Royal – which Booklist calls “a delightfully unbuttoned Audrey Hepburn for the twenty-first century…” (how can you resist that?!) – is just out! – Meg

A big thanks to Meg for inviting me again. My tenth book in the Aimée Leduc Investigation series, Murder in the Palais Royal, has just come out. But when I began writing I never thought I’d finish a book much less set it in Paris or write a series.

I wasn’t a doctor, a policewoman, a sketch artist or with the FBI. I was a mom, a preschool teacher and had old friends in Paris. The total sum of my qualifications apart from reading and loving mysteries.

I did grow up in a Francophile family in the SF Bay Area and attended a French Catholic school. My father was a Francophile and loved good food and wine. In the 50’s my uncle went to France and studied with artist George Braques, so talk at our dinner table was a lot about France. I lived in Europe when I was college age.

It was the story of my friend’s mother, a hidden Jewish girl in Paris during the German Occupation, that drove me to write. I’d heard this story when I visited the Marais with my friend and just felt somehow, someway I had to write this. As I mentioned here on Meg’s blog previously, this led to three and a half years of writing in what became Murder in the Marais.

During the process I’d discovered I couldn’t write as a French woman, I can’t even tie my scarf the right way. But I began spending more time in Paris in the mid-1990’s to develop Aimée Leduc, my PI turned computer security sleuth. I interviewed three female detectives in Paris who ran their own detective agency and took qualities from each. It became important to me that my character Aimée be half-American, half-French be a young, contemporary woman like the Parisian women I know, have a strong fashion sense and be fierce in her pursuit of justice. The justice that eludes people sometimes in daily life. And that she know much more about computers than I do.

But when my editor accepted the first manuscript (Marais) she asked… “Where’s Aimée going next?”

I hesitated. “What do you mean?”

“Well, where’s she going to discover crime next. Which part of Paris?” Long pause. “You are writing the next aren’t you…a series?”

“Of course,” I lied.

“You’ve started I assume?”

“Matter of fact, the story takes up right after the Marais.” I said the first thing that came into my head while running to my computer.

“Good a continuation, her next case, the next part of her life…that man she met..what about him?”

My editor was feeding me ideas and I wasn’t going to ignore them. “Yves the journalist, yes, the relationship will go somewhere and she’s going to Belleville.”

My bright idea since I’d just stayed in that district with my friend, a single Mom who’s daughter was the same age as my son. I slept on her couch, took her daughter to school, paid her gas bills and saw another side of Paris in doing so.

“Belleville…where’s that?”

Ok this was before the movie Triplets of Belleville.

“But that’s where Edith Piaf lived, she sang on the streets.”

“Fine,” my editor said.

And there I was powering up my computer, searching for my notes, napkins from the Belleville bistro, my photos and I had a goal. Aimée was going to Belleville, murder somehow would be involved, a problematic relationship with Yves would ensue and I was off.

And that’s how it’s been with each other book. Aimée’s got office rent to pay, a business to run, upkeep on a crumbling 17th century townhouse flat with archaic plumbing, a bichon frise to walk on Seine quai and a penchant for bad boys. In part Aimée’s journey; progression in her life and investigations mirroring what I discover in Paris, the society, immigration issues, in this book corruption in the government and it’s a flow streaming from that time. We meet Aimée in November 1993 and ten books later it’s October 1997 – only four fictional years have passed. But the background setting she experiences are the seasons, the current scandal, the Princess Diana carcrash. Each book is a long snapshot of the time, this era in the 90’s that’s her life. And the Paris I rediscovered visiting often for research.

But to get the details, the stories, the insight from the ‘experts’ I needed and still need help.

Friends have friends, and their introductions in Paris open doors. In my case doors to private detectives, police, and local cafe owners. Over the years I’ve built up these connections, nourished them with bottles of wine over dinner and running possible scenarios by these experts, some of whom have become friends.

“I want you to get it right,” a retired Commissaire once told me, “if you’re writing a book set in Paris, a real city, you need to get the police system and all the details correct.” I appreciate that and the time he takes meeting with me and talking. He was in charge of the Princess Diana investigation and has provided a wealth of details.

Ok so many crime writers kill people on the page for a living but in my case it pays for my habit. Going to Paris and doing research. There’s so much I don’t know, I tell my husband, so I have to visit the archives, libraries, interview computer hackers etc. he just nods. “I know.” In Paris on the cobblestones, in the metro I get a spark of a story, a detail, overhear a conversation I’d never hear otherwise. My novels aren’t set in the beret and baguette Paris, or the tourist areas, but off the beaten track, the backstreets and courtyards of quartiers not often seen. More like a sociological slice of life in the darker side of the city of light. The areas Aimée explores from the sewers to the Morgue to her decaying elegant 17th century apartment on the Ile Saint Louis. It’s a trip to Paris without the airfare to an area you probably haven’t seen before.

Over the course of the books Aimée’s developed, I’ve gotten to know her more. It’s been an organic process certainly not one I expected. So in beginning a book, I think back to my editors words, start with a particular part of Paris that intrigues me, of a story that could only happen there and feel driven to tell it. This district of Paris is a character. The murder, while important and propels the plot, isn’t the focus, it’s how the murder impacts Aimée and why she would investigate, the family and friends surrounding the victim, the community and this little part of Paris. A way to explore moral ambiguities and the grey areas when murder isn’t black and white. – Cara Black

This video, though a couple years old, came to me today: J.K. Rowling giving a commencement speech at Harvard, on having “failed on an epic scale” within 7 years of graduating from University. It is funny, touching, and inspiring. It will almost make you feel good about those rejection slips to hear her say, “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I built my life.”

Or “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all.”

One of the things I loved about this is that she closes with the importance of friendships:

“The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister. So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships.”

Thanks to my dear friend Harriet Scott Chessman for sharing the link. Sadly, I have no incriminating photographs of Harriet, having not met her until we were older and I, at least, was infinitely wiser. (One imagines Harriet has always been wise, and certainly remains wiser than I despite my progress.)

My friends from Michigan Law School, though … have I mentioned I’m writing a novel about four UMLaw grads (who, this being fiction, are certainly not based on anyone in running clothes on this page)? You all won’t be any more litigious than J.K.’s pals, will you? – Meg

From Mark Strand’s “On Becoming a Poet” in The Making of a Poem, an idea for what a poem may be, which I think also applies to fiction: “A poem may be … the ghost within every experience that wishes it could be seen or felt, acknowledged as a kind of meaning.”

To celebrate of the re-release of New York Times bestselling author Michelle Richmond’s lovely first novel, Dream of the Blue Room, in paperback, I’m rerunning a post she did on 1st Books some time ago. Enjoy! – Meg

I began writing the stories that would appear in my first book, a story collection entitled The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, one winter while living alone in a shabby duplex with no heat in a dodgy part of Knoxville, Tennessee. During the day I went to my job as a copywriter at an ad agency, and at night in my scruffy little apartment I bundled up in coat and scarf and typed away on my Mac duo-doc, while the couple next door fought so loudly I came to know the intimate nature of their marital troubles. I was 23 years old, and the thing I wanted more than anything in the world was to become a writer.

Two years later I went to grad school—one year in Arkansas, which I quit, another in Miami, which I finished—and during that time I continued writing stories on the duo-doc, although in much better apartments. One was a seventh-floor studio on Miami Beach. This was 1996, and the $700/month studio was hard on my budget, but I paid for it with my teaching stipend from the University of Miami and considered it my own writing retreat. Those were solitary years, and the solitude suited me. I had a feverish work ethic in those days when it came to writing, and it was in graduate school that I began publishing short stories in literary magazines. That little taste of getting my stories out in the world was all it took to keep me going.

On to New York City in 1998. More jobs, more writing of stories, publications here and there, and rejections galore. Then, in 2000, on the cusp of turning thirty, living in San Francisco with my fiancé and teaching composition at City College, a phone call from the Associated Writing Programs to say that The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress had won the AWP Award for Fiction and would be published by University of Massachusetts Press. Bliss and more bliss. That book was my most exciting publication to date, because it was my first. To this day, that collection of linked stories, which probably sold no more than a couple thousand copies, is closer to my heart than any of my subsequent books.

Yesterday, my third novel, No One You Know, hit the shelves. It’s a book about the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories others tell about us. It’s also a book about sisters, and obsession. And I didn’t realize until I was halfway into it that it’s the book I’ve been wanting to write, in many ways, for the last ten years. And in this vein a character from my very first published story makes an appearance, however brief, in the final chapter of No One You Know. In the final chapter of the book, the narrator, Ellie Enderlin, is walking through the streets of San Francisco late at night and finds herself on an unfamiliar block. “In a second-floor apartment, a girl in a yellow nightgown walked slowly past the window. A tall figure moved toward her. A slender arm reached out to turn off a lamp, and the room went dark. Everything about the moment was startlingly familiar. Had I been here before? Had someone described this very scene to me? Or maybe, I had simply read it all in a book. Sometimes it felt as if books and life formed a strange origami, the intricate folds and secret shadows so inextricably connected, it was impossible to tell one from the other.”

-Michelle Richmond

Stumbled across this Mark Twain quote as I’m going through revisions to a new novel I hope to get to my editor tomorrow: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”

Now if only I were writing nonfiction! Instead I’m trying to remember all the many things I changed between this draft and the last one, and flow them through consistently.

Which leaves me thinking what a weird life I lead, that I spend my days trying to make stories that aren’t true seem like they are. – Meg