Backstory

Ellen Sussman's Backstory

Sometimes story ideas walk into your life. They knock on the door, sit down and share a beer with you. You might foolishly think -- oh, that was an interesting person I met. Days later you realize: oh, that was an interesting story I met.

My novel, ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS, started with a visit from a once-close high school buddy of my new husband. Neal got a phone call from him after five years of no contact. "I'm passing through town," he said. "Give me your address. I'll be there in an hour."

He pulled up in his truck a couple of hours later. He was bad-boy charming and cowboy handsome. He hung around for a few hours and a few beers. He told us a little about his life: he had already left one marriage, a couple of kids, and probably dozens of girlfriends along the way. (We later learned that his kids hadn't seen their dad in years.) He moved from job to job, town to town -- he was now living in a trailer somewhere.

And then he told us this story. He met an old classmate at their twentieth high school reunion. She was dying of AIDS. He fell in love with the woman. She had a four-year old child.

"What happened?" I asked, entranced.

He shrugged. "We spent about a year together. When she died I bathed her body, then brought her daughter in to say goodbye to her."

"What happened to the girl?" I asked.

Another shrug. "Dunno. Lost touch," he said.

When he left our house, his story stayed. It lodged somewhere in my imagination and wouldn't let go. There was something terribly wrong about his story -- something I wanted to fix. This story -- about a down-and-out guy, falling in love with a dying woman -- needed a different ending. In my ending, the guy had to be saved.

A few months later I sat down to write that story.

Neal's friend became Luke -- by Chapter Two my own character pushed him out of the way. The four-year-old became a sixteen year old. And the dying woman -- now dying of cancer rather than AIDS -- so powerfully touched Luke's life that both of them were transformed by their relationship.

I'm sure lots of stories walked into my life that year. There's a reason one story stays behind when the storyteller leaves. Other stories get forgotten soon after the lunch dishes are washed and put away. In my own life I had just tumbled -- wildly, dazzlingly -- into love. Love transformed my life. I wanted to write about it every day. And I'm raising teenage daughters. How could I write a book without using all that raw material?

None of this is a conscious act for a writer. We write our stories because the stories won't let go. It's only after the story's written that we can even begin to consider: hmm, I wonder why I chose to tell that story.

I haven't seen Neal's friend since I wrote ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS. I wouldn't be surprised if he read the book and didn't even recognize his own story. It's my story now.

Ellen Sussman is an author and teaches creative writing.

Cara Black's Backstory

Cara Black's Backstory for MURDER IN CLICHY

I never planned to write a crime novel set in Paris. Yet the shiver and breath of history hits me each time I go to Paris. Every arrondissement carries a distinct flavor, and I want the cobblestones to speak, tell me the story of the people who’ve trod them. But if I’m lucky, a snatch of overheard conversation on the Metro, visiting a policewoman at the Commissariat or the Museum Cernuschi with it’s jade collection, as I did in Murder in Clichy, get my mind spinning. Like discovered gems that only get revealed in Paris. Soon the ‘what ifs?’ entered my mind. What if the theft of Chinese jade opened a secret in the past that impacted present French foreign policy...what if ex-colonials from Indochina were involved, what if Aimée Leduc, my half-American, half-French computer security detective decided to live healthy, meditate with her partner at the Cao Dai temple and did a nun a favor...a favor resulting in murder and the search for lost jade?

This fascination with finding the dark side of the City of Light began in 1984 when my friend, a Parisian, took me to "her" Paris. We walked all afternoon and then suddenly, tired and footsore, we were surrounded by 17th century buildings in crumbling decay. I felt like we’d stepped into another era. But we stood in the Marais amid hôtel particuliers, mansions in semi-ruin. The trickle of once-royal fountains in the Place des Vosges reaching our ears. My friend explained that the Marais, meaning marsh and long ago filled in, was where nobility had built their mansions to be near the king at the Louvre.

She also told me of her mother, a Parisian Jew who’d lived here with her family during World War II. Her family had been one of many Jewish families who’d shared twenty foot-high ceilinged rooms, carved in these mansions in the then ghetto-like Marais. They’d lived here when the French police, under Gestapo orders, had rounded up her family and deported them. My friend’s mother, 14 years old, had come home from school, to find an empty apartment. She stayed there, going to school. Waiting. But her parents never returned from Auschwitz. This story haunted me for years and I never forgot it.

Ten years later, again in Paris, this time with my young son. We stayed in the Marais. I noticed changes. Malraux, the former culture minister, had saved the Marais from demolition but at a price. Rents had skyrocketed, gentrification was the order of the day but still, here and there, the old Marais could be found. I fell under its spell again. The layers of history of Paris were revealed on every corner. Below a 17th century arch built by François the First would be a plaque commemorating a young French Resistance member shot by the Germans in the Occupation. Around the corner stood a park filled with Roman-era statuary remnants across from a computer shop. The old and new. Yet, the contrast showed a certain continuity and comfort with the past. Thus my detective, Aimée Leduc, half-American, half-French, a computer security specialist, was born. A thoroughly modern Parisian who must untangle the past to discover a modern-day killer.

For background information, I researched in the Police Archives in Paris, the Jewish library in the Marais and in San Francisco discovering small details of existence in Occupied Paris making Murder in the Marais, my first novel, in the Aimée Leduc series, so much richer.

Now it’s five books later, each book exploring the different arrondissements and issues facing Parisians today. Murder in Clichy, again deals with shadows from the past impacting the present, I know Aimée my detective more. In fact I hope to meet her, and find out what she’s doing next. And maybe I will, on the Ile Saint Louis quay walking her dog, late at night as the fingers of fog curl under the bridge, police sirens wail in the distance, her cell phone rings and...

Cara Black is the author of several novels.

Jane Guill's Backstory for NECTAR FROM A STONE

I wrote stories about confused, misplaced women and drew large pictures of disoriented people in forests. Literary and artistic progress barely limped forward, but years tore by. When my first marriage ended in a bloodless coup, I wondered what to do with the rest of my life. It seemed like a reasonable time to temporarily succumb to emotional malaise. I could pop mood elevators as if they were Pez and swill sour apple martinis from sundown until bedtime. If I lost myself thoroughly enough, then maybe, somehow, I could figure out where I’d gone.

But nighttime banshees in my head suddenly and relentlessly hectored me to FIND MY ROOTS. Roots? Like Alex Haley? I’d never given them a thought. What did they even matter? But the chorus wouldn’t be still. So I gave in. Why not? So far I’d just been killing time, murdering time deader than a mackerel, and I was even considering a chemical self-lobotomy. Maybe the banshees knew more than I did about what I needed. It was unlikely they knew less.

Guill--pronounced Gwill--is a bastardized Welsh name and my family roots are undoubtedly Welsh. So I told the banshees thanks very much but hush now because you’ve won--and I made my way to Wales. Before leaving Illinois I was lucky enough to arrange temporary lodging and a job at a medieval manor house--complete with two ghosts--in North Wales at the edge of the Snowdonian Mountains. The owner, an archaeologist and historian, wanted an illustrated record of her home’s important features.

On the day of my flight to Britain, I sat at the gate at O’Hare Airport, clutching my ticket, eager to board. A tall, stylish woman took a seat beside me and began a conversation. She wore an amber necklace, double-stranded.

"You’re vacationing in England?" Her accent suggested Eastern Europe, maybe Russia.

"A working vacation, in Wales."

She turned to me more fully and studied my face for so long that I became embarrassed.

"Is anything wrong?" I finally asked.

"Not now. But long ago there was."

Long ago there was? What did that mean? Sheesh, life’s too short, I thought, reaching for my carry-on, hoping this odd duck wouldn’t be my neighbor for the transatlantic flight.

"You think I’m a fool, or"--she searched for a word--"peculiar."

"No. I just remembered I wanted some mints."

She raised her hand to stop me. "Long ago you died of the plague."

"Pardon?"

"A sad death, but you learned from it."

I stood. "Then I guess that was nice for me, at least."

"I’m not saying it for a joke. Sometimes I see things from the past."

"Then that’s nice for you." I made a quick getaway.

Later, I saw her in the plane’s first-class section as I shuffled back to steerage. She raised her champagne flute.

I forgot all about that encounter until I’d been in Wales for nearly two weeks. That’s when my hostess, my employer, told me she believed I was her sister from another life.

Yikes. I asked her why.

"A psychic told me you’d come someday. She said I’d recognize you, and I did. I knew you as soon as you walked in."

"Was this psychic Russian, by chance?" Naturally, I had to ask.

"No. Welsh."

Curiouser and curiouser. In subtle ways I did often feel, in Wales, as if I’d come home. But I’ve never been a disciple of Shirley Maclaine-ish notions, so dismissed the matter from my mind. Almost entirely.
On my next day off, my new-old ‘sister’ took me sightseeing to a nearby limestone headland, The Great Orme. On a narrow cliff-side lane we stopped beside a parked car that had a rope tied around it, like a birthday present. Visible below us on the cliff’s face, suspended from that rope, a man rappelled to some unseen destination.

My amused hostess knew him by his car and his antics. "Mad," she said. "He’s always been rather mad."
The following afternoon we met the madman, a geologist, face-to-face, at the 4,000-year-old copper mine he and two partners run as an educational site. And there I fell in love. Stupid love--heaven help me. Not cream puff love, pink-candy-heart love. Not like Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming. This was the hard stuff, hundred proof, the kind of love that could--if it went wrong--rip a heart through a ribcage and destroy pathetic dream-worlds for ever and ever amen.

But fools rush in. The madman raised one eyebrow and invited me to go walking in the Welsh hills. Recklessly, I accepted his invitation.

Weeks later I was home in the States, keeping my wrecked heart in a shoebox under my bed. I spent time listening to clocks tick and tried to watch old comedies. Some nights I’d wake in a panic. Maybe my next life would be better, I told myself. I didn’t really believe that, and I didn’t really care.
But at least some good came out of my fool’s journey, because I finally knew what to write about. I knew absolutely. All the odd things, good and bad, that had happened to me that year went into the blender inside my head and morphed into a tale about a medieval Welshwoman from a plague-ravaged family. She has visions of the past and sometimes of the future, and she is very lonely.
NECTAR FROM A STONE was born.

A note to hopeless romantics: You might like to know that the geologist finally telephoned me, after I’d been back home for several months.

"It’s midnight and I’ve been drinking ale," he said, to begin.

We were married in Wales in 1996. It’s true that I’m afraid of heights and he only reads non-fiction, but things are going well. It’s almost like we’ve known each other all our lives.

Jane Guill is the author of NECTAR FROM A STONE and a three time nominee for the Pushcart Prize.

Roberta Isleib’s Backstory for FAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

Around the time I was groping for the story of my fourth golf lover’s mystery, FAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, I attended a meeting in Pinehurst, North Carolina. I was whining, as writers sometimes do, about finding the right topic and setting for my next book. My ever-practical husband suggested that I jot down some notes about Pinehurst. It is, after all, the golf capital of America, site of many historic tournaments, and elegant beyond our usual vacation dreams.

In 1892, architect Frederick Law Omstead (of Central Park fame) was commissioned to design Pinehurst. The commissioner, James Tufts, had determined the area to be a "health-improving climate." The climate is still marvelous and the town is too, if you can find it. We circled the roundabout outside the community until we were dizzy, finally veering onto the road that leads to town.

As we drove, I scribbled descriptors: quaint, charming, stately—just the kind of perfection that could provide a wonderful foil for murder. You will not find K-mart, WalMart, Jiffy Lube, Seven-Eleven, even a grocery store, on the main streets of Pinehurst. (All that is tucked away backstage and out of town, accessible to the natives and subject to strict zoning regulations.)

You will find red brick buildings with green shutters, pine trees, live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, white rocking chairs on porches, elegant gift shops, and the best chocolate milkshake in the world. Aside from those charms, the town’s prominent features are historic buildings: the Carolina Inn, the Holly Inn, the village chapel, the Sandhill Women’s Exchange—and a brand new spa. And just up the road lies Pinehurst No.2, the finest and most storied golf course in America—finer even than Pebble Beach, its proponents argue. For who wouldn’t prefer lawn bowlers dressed in all white (Pinehurst) to the gaudy crashing of the Pacific on the rocks below the fairways (Pebble Beach)? At any rate, I was in North Carolina and not California, unlikely to be making a cross-country voyage soon.

We decided to splurge on a tee time at the number two course—these fairways hosted Payne Stewart’s glorious 1999 US Open win before his death in a mysterious and tragic plane crash several months later. If I did set FAIRWAY TO HEAVEN in Pinehurst, my characters, including LPGA golfer Cassie Burdette, would be playing this golf course—obviously I needed to be familiar with the facilities. But the health-improving weather turned foul: temperatures in the fifties and sheets of rain. So in the flexible manner of any decent mystery writer, I scheduled appointments at the spa. Surely as the maid of honor at a Pinehurst society wedding—the scenario that was beginning to take shape in my imagination—Cassie would be sampling the spa treatments.

Once home in front of the computer, I realized I needed more details to capture the flavor of the town. My husband discouraged a second trip. So I subscribed to the local paper, The Pilot, for half a year while I pounded out the first draft. The special features of the village grew sharper in my mind—instead of kudos for achievements, the editors award golf scores: birdies are offered for noteworthy community service, bogeys and double bogeys for poor zoning decisions or no-shows by public figures. Entire pages are dedicated to the interests of the village—bridge, golf, and equestrian activities, including steeplechase horse races and the popular steeplechase tailgate party and hat contest. Wedding announcements are taken very seriously, peppered with detailed descriptions of the bridal parties’ clothing, family lineage, and "courtesies"—otherwise know in the north as bridal showers.

As reported in The Pilot, some residents believe the unspoiled beauty of Pinehurst is falling victim to a press for development, spawned by retiring baby boomers. This conflict was conveniently mirrored in the news—the most controversial developer was cast as another Saddam Hussein, the wooded parcel leading into town was defended as Pinehurst’s "Seventeen-Mile Drive." (For those of you unfamiliar with Pebble Beach in Monterey, you access the famous seaside golf course by a winding highway lined with stunning coastal views.) Excellent fodder for a mystery writer…

I shaped these bits and pieces into FAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, in which Cassie Burdette is playing in a three-tour tournament with her estranged father and her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Her friend’s wedding preparations weave in and out of the rounds of golf, and Pinehurst poses, stately and perfect, behind it all. As Cassie observes in the lobby of the Holly Inn, the Pinehurst resort feels like another world—one that will remain long after we are gone: "I sprawled in an upholstered wing chair by the fire. The flames crackled higher, warming the dark paneling from molasses to honey and illuminating the quotation inscribed over the fireplace: ‘Time goes you say? Ah no! Time stays, we go.’ Harry Austin Dobson."

Clinical psychologist Roberta Isleib is the author of four Cassie Burdette mysteries.