This weekend's guest blogger: Lisa Black

Type M would like to welcome back novelist Lisa Black for a second visit!

Lisa Black has spent over 20 years in forensic science, first at the coroner’s office in Cleveland Ohio and now as a certified latent print examiner and CSI at a Florida police dept. Her books have been translated into 6 languages, one reached the NYT Bestseller’s List and one has been optioned for film and a possible TV series. Visit her website: www.lisa-black.com and follow her on Twitter: @LisaBlackAuthor

OOPS!

by Lisa Black

Research is a wonderful thing, except when a pesky fact gets in the way of something you’ve already written. Ever set a heartbreaking scene among the weeping willows at the city park and then, just to gather added atmosphere for some last finishing touches you decide to actually visit the park only to find that the trees have been cleared out for a children’s wading pool? And they had been birch trees anyway? And the park is right next to an off-ramp so the hero’s fervent proposal would have been drowned out by engine noises?

Sometimes reality sucks.

Yes, you’re writing fiction, so you could erase this picture of the real park and recolor it in your preferred images. But we write mysteries, hard gritty things in which gunshots don’t smell like cordite and heroines aren’t stupid enough to wander around dark basements unarmed and DNA results aren’t back in an hour. We want the details to be right.

I’ve run into this more than once.

In Takeover I had planned a bank robbery to set up the rest of the plot, then on a whim decided to set it at the gorgeous Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Cleveland. However, Federal Reserves don’t function like your corner S&L and besides, the ground floor of the Fed had been turned into a tourist attraction. I kept it at the Federal Reserve and used all my erroneous preconceptions in the story.

I had planned to end Takeover with the criminals faking their own death by driving a car off the end of East 9th street into the cold waters of Lake Erie. I lived there, right? I knew the street came to an end at the pier that used to have the fabulous seafood restaurant at the end of it. I dragged my always-supportive mother along and we did a little photo shoot at the Cleveland Public Library and the Fed, checked out their lobby displays, and as an afterthought drove to the end of East 9th. Which now terminates in a pretty park area rimmed with large, concrete—you couldn’t even call them posts. More like rotund bollards. Any car trying to reach the water would end up with a badly crumpled front end and quite dry.

In Unpunished, my last murder would have been dramatic and quite bloody, a body hacked to pieces in the printing press of the Cleveland daily paper. I envisioned huge blades clamping down to cut through several reams of paper, and what that would do to a body—eek. But when kindly staff members gave me a tour of the Fort Myers News-Press building, I discovered that newspaper are cut, a sheet at a time, by a round blade smaller than what Domino’s uses to slice its pies. A person tossed into that machinery would get no more than a boo-boo. Oh, if the rollers caught an arm he might have a few crushed bones, but still nothing that would kill him. I stood among the clacking mechanisms and stared in horror and the completely unhorrible tableau.

But, the printing supervisor comforted me, there’s this method…different means, but able to produce an equally grisly corpse. I looked. I listened. And I rewrote the end of the book.

Things usually work out.

Weekend Guest -- Lisa Black

I'm delighted to welcome Lisa Black to Type M as our weekend guest.

Lisa has spent over 20 years in forensic science, first at the coroner’s office in Cleveland Ohio and now as a certified latent print examiner and CSI at a Florida police dept. Her books have been translated into 6 languages, one reached the NYT Bestseller’s List and one has been optioned for film and a possible TV series.

Lisa's latest book came out in April.

In her post, she shares a behind-the-scene look at her writing process.

Take it away, Lisa.

WRITING ON A WHIM…

…has always sounded like a bad idea to me, sure to leave you written into a corner at some future point just as hitching a ride on a lonely stretch of road with a shaggy looking stranger in a panel van is a foolproof way to wind up dead in a ditch somewhere. I’m a plotter. I’m not at the extreme end of the plotter/pantser spectrum but I am definitely along that half of the line. I have to know how the story begins, how it ends, who the killer is, why they kill, and just about every other major incident that will take place, and I need to know all this before I begin writing.

And so that was how I began to write Close to the Bone, I had my setting and my characters and in the second chapter my forensic scientist character is creeping around her workplace (a morgue) in the wee, dark hours of the morning looking for a killer who has left her coworker in a puddle of his own blood on the first floor.

My agent didn’t like it. She didn’t think it was suspenseful enough. I pointed out: Dark. Empty. Building. Killer on the loose. Personally known victim. Lots of blood. If that’s not suspense then what the heck is?

In a burst of sullenness I sat down and churned out a few pages of a scene that had been rattling around in my head for years, in which a man decides that the worst of the worst criminals should be put down like rabid dogs, but humanely, compassionately. After all, they can’t help what the circumstances of their lives have brought them to. So he wines and dines them, and in the midst of a pleasant conversation he puts three bullets into their skull.

She liked it.

So of course I had to have a female forensic investigator who notices similarities among outwardly different crimes. But I had no idea what to do beyond that, except that, at some point, these two would have to come in to contact with each other. To which I’m sure you’d all say, well duh.

Somehow I managed to get through the book without a plan. Then it was time to write the sequel. I had an idea about this wealthy, sprawling family that turns out to have disproportionate amount of sudden death twining about its tree. I started it on New Year’s Day; I thought that gave the process a nice air of orderliness. By January 6th I realized it wasn’t going to work—too much backstory, too much plodding through individual histories. So I sat in a lawn chair and told myself that I needed a better setting—something alive with tension and immediacy and real danger.

A newspaper, I decided. If people turn up dead at a newspaper, is it because of a story they wrote? Or didn’t write? Or were going to write? Or is it for another reason, some personal conflict that has nothing to do with a story at all? I dove in and loved studying up on the changes in the news industry over the past twenty or so years, and I love the result, but the fact remains that I decided that course on an impulse—something I hate with the same passion gardeners reserve for aphids.

But sometimes you just have to go wherever the whim takes you.