(Hi! This is Rick here, deputized by John Corrigan to introduce his guest.) We are honored to welcome our guest blogger this weekend, the inimitable SJ Rozan. She’s a native New Yorker who is the author of 16 novels and 70+ short stories. SJ has won Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity Awards, as well as the Japanese Maltese Falcon. Paper Son is her latest book, just out. So grab a copy now! We guarantee you will not be disappointed.
What I Learned Writing Paper Son
I learned you can’t set foot in Mississippi without gaining five pounds.While that may not be the most important lesson, it’s absolutely true. Cheese grits, pulled pork, blackened redfish with rice — damn, these people can eat. And drink: bourbon, beer, and moonshine. And sweet tea. Which is where I draw the line.
Southern hospitality is a real thing. The Deep South’s disastrous history of race relations — in many ways the actual subject of Paper Son — means that local folks aren't always welcome in one another’s homes. But a stranger, once introduced and vouched for, gets the red carpet rolled out, in many and varied communities. All of whom, I repeat, eat like crazy.
As anywhere, local manners and customs are unseen by the locals but must be carefully observed and parsed by outsiders. An example: In the South, when you pass people on the street, you meet their eyes and ask, “How’re you doing?” People you know, total strangers, doesn't matter. A reply's not expected if you don’t know one another — you just ask and get asked and walk on — but it’s considered rude not to ask. If you do know one another, you’re expected to actually answer, to stop and exchange a few words. We don’t do that up north. Here, looking a stranger in the eye as you pass is, while not quite a challenge, is odd enough to provoke a “Do I know you?” or What’s she looking at? Do I have scrambled eggs on my chin again?
And this is the point, the challenge, and the joy of setting a book in a place I don’t know well. It’s true up north, too — the local manners and customs of New York City are different from those of Boston (and Staten Island’s from those of Greenwich Village) but the differences in the US are broadest, I think, from south to north. Just as they're broad from New York to Hong Kong, as I found researching Reflecting the Sky, and from present to past with The Shanghai Moon. (The past is, after all, a different country.)
The joy is in getting out of my comfort zone, where I pretty much know what to expect in terms of people's attitudes, behaviors, and speech patterns, to a place where I have to consciously study those things to make my characters real. A lot of this kind of research involves just plain talking to people, or listening while they talk to each other. It’s watching them walk down the street (French women have a particular walk) or discuss something (Italians sound, half the time, as though they’re having a fight). It’s taking note of what time they eat dinner, go to bed, open their stores in the morning. This, along with the smells and quality of light, the kinds of birds that chirp at dawn in the different kinds of trees, the kinds of cars people drive and where they park them, are the small, critical details that, for me, make a place and the people in it come to life. Which is what I love about writing.
