Crime novelist Laura Lippman never stood a fair chance of becoming anything but a writer. Her mother was a librarian. Her dad was a newspaper editorial writer. Her sister worked in bookstores. How could she possibly do anything else?
But then there was that editor at the Baltimore Sun who told the young reporter after she’d worked at the newspaper for some time, she “just wasn’t a good writer.” Lippman’s older now, he’s dead and she’s taught writing at Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College and Eckerd College’s “Writer’s in Paradise” annual conference.
Couldn’t write, huh?
Yep. She never stood a chance to do anything but. And you must wonder about her crotchety editor. Yet, what do editors know anyway, especially from a writer’s POV?
Lippman’s inevitability started early. She published her first book at age five using the only word she could spell, “pig.” Short. One syllable. Efficient. Repeated on every page.
She was both author and publisher. And at that tender age, no one had ever told her she couldn’t write. She even illustrated her debut novel. “I typed it up and drew pictures,” she says. “I said it was written in caveman language…I was really eager to join the secret society of readers.”
“I was an eccentric little kid who wanted to make up stories for my Barbies. I love reading and I love the way books make me feel. It was this constant desire to evoke in others what I felt when reading and feeling transported.”
One book that especially elicited that feeling was Larry McMurtry’s All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers. Lippman was in her early twenties, living in Texas and writing for the Waco Tribune Herald.
Her car had been in an accident, so she had time to read McMurtry’s novel during a Greyhound Bus trip to see her boyfriend in San Antonio. She was moved. “Fiction is dealing with an audience whose guard is down.”
“I always wanted to be a novelist before I went to journalism school at Northwestern,” she says. Yet even though she was surrounded by reading and writing throughout her life, “I didn’t know how anyone became a novelist.”
So, she came out of college and followed in her father’s footsteps, becoming a newspaper reporter. After nearly three years in Waco, she landed a position at the San Antonio Light.
At 30, she applied for a reporter’s job at the Baltimore Sun. During her interview she was told, “you’re just not a good enough writer to work here.” She was hired anyway.
“I wasn’t going to be defeated. Not a good writer? What do you say to that? I realized my editor had nothing constructive to offer me.”
She knew she couldn’t change his attitude, but if she wrote a book, “I wouldn’t be limited to this person’s point of view.” So, she began looking elsewhere for inspiration.
Lippman experienced what most women have in the male-dominated workplace: putdowns, dismissal, sexism. She’s clawed through seeking greater autonomy over her life and career. “I never really fell in love with journalism. I liked it, but the love was never really there. I never found the joy I have as a novelist.”
Today, she wants to control her own narrative. Cooperative, funny, witty, smart—she’s all that. And she seems to be constantly on the move, an energy that’s apparent during a phone interview for this story, with the clinking of pots and pans always in the background.
Lippman does not suffer from false modesty. Instead, she is proud to not only acknowledge but to state forthrightly she’s ambitious. Our culture, she says, has turned ambition into a dirty word. Nobody ever uses ambition as a compliment for a woman.
“I’ve gone from being a timid writer who was just trying to hit the lowest common denominator…to being an immensely ambitious writer and a pretty confident one too.
I love to say I’m confident because it annoys people. Our culture is really uncomfortable with women being ambitious…I still know so many women telling you they’re not as good as they think they are. I’m never going to be that person.”
“I’m pretty factual about my ambition. I aspire to write the best things I can write.” And that goes back to her first novel, Baltimore Blues, published in 1997. “It’s sweet, well-meaning, and pretty well-constructed. I think the idea behind it is pretty sound.”
It began in 1991 with a glancing experience with a former boyfriend. What if, she wondered, someone killed her boyfriend’s boss, and she would be the hero of the story? The two talked about her idea and let it simmer.
“This is the seed of my first book. I had no interest in villains…I didn’t want to write about people who are bigger than life…I wanted to write about real people. This is where fiction does something journalism could never do.”
During this period Lippman met Michele Slung, former editor of the Washington Post’s weekly Book World section, who asked her to contribute some erotic short stories to an anthology. This experience convinced Lippman she needed to write her book “so I can prove I’m a writer.” She decided on a mystery for her first attempt “because that wasn’t serious writing.”
She purchased a Mac computer and promised her husband she would write a novel within a year. Slung read her passages and gave blunt criticism. Lippman wasn’t done after a year, but did finish after two, and in 1993 Slung told her it was publishable.
Baltimore Blues introduced readers to Tess Monaghan, an unemployed newspaper reporter who investigates the murder of a notorious attorney. She begins snooping around in hopes of clearing a friend who has come under suspicion.
Michele offered to help Lippman find an agent. The first pick went nowhere. The second was a nightmare who refused to take her calls and held her manuscript hostage for months. After that debacle, Michele found Vicky Bijur. Bijur called and immediately began giving Lippman notes on her manuscript. Lippman was confused. “Would you consider being my agent?” she asked.
“Oh no,” Bijur clarified, “I want to be your agent.” It was now the summer of 1995—four years after Lippman began writing her novel, the whole time holding down her reporter’s job at the Sun.
Bijur circulated Lippman’s manuscript in the fall and three editors bit. Carrie Feron at Avon Books (William Morris) gave her a two-book contract.
“I was super excited,” Lippman says. A mass paperback edition of Baltimore Blues was released the following year. To celebrate, Rob Hiaasen, brother of famed Florida novelist and columnist, Carl Hiaasen, and her good friend and colleague who sat four feet away from her in the newsroom, took her out for coffee to celebrate.
Lippman’s voice shakes recalling that time. She tears up and stammers hesitantly, the memory still raw. Two decades after their celebration, Hiaasen was one of five newspaper employees gunned down in the Annapolis, Maryland Capital Gazette mass shooting. “I can’t talk about Rob without crying,” she says.
A British newspaper, trying to be catty, once labeled her novels “chic lit with guns.” She took no offense and instead owned it. “That’s what I intended it to be.”
While her book publishing career began to pick up speed, her career at the Baltimore Sun downshifted into park. Her editors were not overjoyed at their employee spending so much time working on her own time writing novels. Because she was a fast reader, she had been covering the book publishing industry for the paper long before her first novel was published. She often interviewed authors on book tours when they came through town. Still, she was careful to create a firewall between her own budding side career as a novelist and her newspaper job writing about the book business. That wasn’t good enough for her bosses. She was sent to work in a suburban bureau—journalism Siberia for someone with her experience in the newsroom in downtown Baltimore. This was despite a union rule that punitive transfers were not allowed. So, she filed a grievance with the union.
“I essentially got demoted,” she says. “I was treated so badly that I grinded my teeth until my back molars cracked.”
She was told by management, “‘It’s not possible to work at a newspaper and write a book.’ I know because I tried it. They wanted one hundred percent devotion. They had no claim on my personal time. That was an attitude they found infuriating.”
She eventually was given a package and left after signing a non-disclosure agreement. At the same time, her marriage was falling apart.
So much for publishing success.
But like when she was told she couldn’t write, she was not going to be defeated this time either. Her unambiguous drive kicked in and she continued to write and the reporter-turned-private investigator, Tess Monaghan, has now appeared in more than a dozen novels.
“I’m just a person who likes to sit around and make things up,” she says. At the newspaper, “I didn’t have that God-like control.”
She does now.
It’s been a long journey since she typed those first three letters on the page at age five, using caveman language. Despite the detour in her newspaper career, she never had any other choice but to take the turn toward what she loves best.
It was inevitable.
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Baltimore Blues
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I want to be a writer: 5 years old
Experience: Newspaper Reporter, Short Story Writer
Writing Time: 11 months
Agents Contacted: 4
Agent Responses: 4
Agent Search: 18 months
Time to Sell Novel: 4 months
First Novel Agent: Vicky Bijur
First Novel Editor: Carrie Feron
First Novel Publisher: Avon Books (William Morrow)
Inspiration: James M. Cain, Sara Paretsky, Carl Hiaasen, Walter Mosley
Advice to Writers: Read broadly and well. Find what works for you.
Website: LauraLippman.com
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