You want to see a group of authors roll their eyes in unison, watch as an audience member asks panelists where they get their ideas from. It’s a question writers get all the time and we hate it. We say we hate it precisely for that reason, because it’s asked so frequently. Actually, it’s a natural and very apt question, one I’ve witnessed my colleagues struggle with. I usually answer that I get my ideas from a post office box in Schenectady. A line I borrowed (stole) from Stephen King. Or, if I’m in a more expansive mood, I say I couldn’t live long enough to write the books I have ideas for in any given week. Many authors say it’s an unanswerable question. I suspect the question is so difficult for us because the answer is so obvious and ultimately unsatisfying. We get our ideas from everywhere and everything.
For many of my novels, though, the source is a logical one: the newspaper. Yes, the newspaper. I’m old, so old I was born when the Dodgers still played in Brooklyn and before anything artificial was launched into space. Take that, Sputnik! My plots aren’t exactly ripped from the headlines. I prefer to say I borrow them. It’s not a matter of delicacy or nuance, but rather how I exploit the source material. I use incidents reported in the media as a jumping off point, not as a destination.
The best examples of this are my two most recent Jesse Stone novels, Robert B. Parker’s Colorblind and Robert B. Parker’s The Bitterest Pill. Jesse Stone, the Chief of Police in Paradise, Mass., a small seaside town north of Boston, is a man with personal demons. The form of the novels as established by their creator, Robert B. Parker, incorporates Jesse solving a crime, usually homicide, in Paradise while battling his own demons—alcohol and stable relationships with women. It’s an interesting method that, along with the TV movies starring Tom Selleck, helped elevate and keep the series a bestseller. For the thirteenth novel in the series, my first, Blind Spot, I decided to tweak the method a bit by bringing more of Jesse’s backstory into play and introducing new characters. By the seventeenth and eighteenth novels in the series, Jesse had confronted and dealt with his demons and the theme of small town murder had been played out. Enter stories in the press.
For some time I had been foreshadowing a potential change coming to Paradise. Vinnie Morris, an organized crime figure from Boston and a character in both the Spenser and Stone series, had warned Jesse that big city crime was coming his way. Something wicked this way comes. But what kind of crime? And how would Jesse, a former LAPD Robbery Homicide detective, deal with it given his small town resources? Any avid newspaper reader in recent years would have noticed the increase of both hate crimes and incidents involving the police and young African American men. If I was a lazy writer, I might simply have lifted a newspaper story about a hate crime or a story about a police shooting. I would have changed a few details here and there and called it my own. I am a lot of things, but a lazy writer isn’t one of them. What, I wondered, would happen if I wove together hate crimes and a police shooting? What if the cop was an African American woman and the shooting victim was a young white man? Writers are always asking themselves what if? It’s just that my what ifs sometimes have their origins in the morning paper. As it happened, not only did I borrow from headlines in this instance, but anticipated what was to come. Although the details of what happened in Charlottesville were different than what happens in my novel, the driving force behind the white supremacist marches in Virginia was the same motivation leading to the crimes in Robert B. Parker’s Colorblind. I turned in the final edits of the novel a month before Charlottesville.
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For the new book, Robert B. Parker’s The Bitterest Pill, I shifted to another headline I have had the misfortune of reading far too many times. Like cancer, the opioid epidemic has touched, either directly or tangentially, almost every family in the country. Two of my writing heroes and colleagues, Don Winslow and Michael Connelly have written on the subject, but I wondered how I could do it so that it reinforced the theme of big city crime coming to a small well-to-do town. How could I do it on a very personal level?
And that’s the key, really, in the Jesse Stone novels, in all good police and detective novels, making it personal. Because if a writer can’t involve the reader in the struggles of the protagonist and the other characters, even the most powerful headlines and subsequent stories are worthless. As Joseph Wambaugh, the author of The Onion Field and The New Centurions, once said, “It’s not how the detective works on the case. It’s how the case works on the detective.” By making it personal to Jesse, a town official, it necessarily creates a conflict. Jesse must weigh his actions carefully, for as much as he might care for the people involved on either side of a case, he must also act in accordance with professional standards and requirements of his office.
No matter what story I may be borrowing from, its value is found not in what I feel about it, but only in how the characters feel about it and how it affects their lives.In Robert B. Parker’s The Bitterest Pill, the victim is a popular high school girl, the daughter of a local politician who Jesse had known her whole life. The grinding between the personal and professional for Jesse is a blessing to me not only because it sets up an obvious conflict, but because it prevents me from preaching to the reader. No matter what story I may be borrowing from, its value is found not in what I feel about it, but only in how the characters feel about it and how it affects their lives.
Jesse is a character with a strong sense of right and wrong. It is one of his most appealing features to readers and to me. It is fine, even desirable, for the characters in a novel to have clear moral compasses—good, bad or somewhere in between. However, one of my writing rules is that a reader should never think about the author as he or she goes through a book. A reader should never see the author behind the curtain of words. So when readers get to the last lines of my Stone novels, I want the characters to live on in the readers’ heads.
To take Wambaugh’s quote one step further, it’s not only how the case works on the detective, but how it works on the reader. Using the dark events in the real world as a jumping off point is one of the most effective ways for me to do that. So the next time you’re tempted to ask an author where he or she gets their ideas from, put your hand down. You already have the answer.
