Where do I get my ideas? The stories choose me

I just read somewhere that the question, where do you get your ideas?—is boring. Don’t ask writers that. It’s a no no. Because nobody cares. I guess I’m hopelessly out of the loop because I always ask and I always care. I find the question fascinating because the answers are as different as the books themselves. I’ve concluded that a hundred writers could get the same idea, and the books would all be different. Why? Because the ideas were all slightly different.

The novel that I have just plunged into writing started with the tiniest idea, a wispy, flimsy thing that dropped into my head one night while I was surfing the tv. Here’s the idea: A girl, madly in love with a guy. Planning to marry him. Then the guy ends up murdered. (Did I mention that I write mysteries? Not romances?) Oh, there is a tiny, tiny extra that I can’t mention because if I do, I will give away the whole cotton-picking plot. And that is a real no no.

What’s strange and wonderful about ideas is that, once they grab onto you—drop into your head, I mean, out of nowhere--they don’t let go. Until you write the novel. The idea of this girl grabbed me like pincers. I kept asking, Is that all? Is that all? Not even Faulkner could make a novel out of that. Then I began to see that that was not all. Other pieces started to fill in. Different people arrived to populate the novel, all related to this little idea—which was starting to grow and grow and grow.

I was recently asked in a radio interview how I knew if an idea had the energy to carry me through a whole novel. Good question. I’m not so sure I had a very good answer. I said, I just know, that’s all. So here is this wisp of an idea—a girl in love with a guy, the oldest story idea in the world-- and I just know that it has all the energy in the world to become a novel.

The Arapahos say that there are only so many stories in the universe, and from time to time, the stories allow themselves to be told. And when they do, they choose the story teller.

I second that. The idea for a story drops into your head because—you know what?—you have been chosen to tell that story. And the girl chose me. I don’t know why, but I’m not complaining.

Posted by Margaret

Old Hollywood and the Shoraps (Shoshones & Arapahoes)

I know, I promised to write about my now-in-progress novel, and I will. But I just got the cover for the new Wind River mystery that will be out September 1. And it is fabulous, which I can say because I had nothing to do with it. But here it is—The Silent Spirit.

Father John, after a sabbatical in Rome where I sent him (actually, the Provincial sent him) at the end of The Girl with Braided Hair, is back on the rez, and he and Vicky are back solving another mystery. This one moves between the present and 1920s Hollywood when the Arapahos and Shoshones appeared in several silent Westerns. The plot revolves around the murder of an Arapaho in Hollywood in 1923—totally fictitious, the murder, that is—and the connection to the murder of young Arapaho on the rez in the present—also fictitious.

But the rest is based on history. The first movie that the Shoraps (the two tribes on the rez call themselves that) appeared in was The Covered Wagon. Filmed in the Nevada desert in 1922, the movie was the first Western epic with distant and panoramic scenes and literally a cast of thousands. After the movie was finished, thirty Shoraps went to Hollywood in the spring of 1923 to promote the film by putting on an “Indian show” every night at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater before the film itself was shown. They camped in their tipis on Cahuenga Pass and rode their ponies down into Hollywood about a mile away to go to work.

Researching the novel was the best fun I’ve had in years. I bought and read so many books on old Hollywood that I now have dedicated Hollywood shelves in my bookcases, and Amazon keeps sending me e-mails about the latest Hollywood offerings. They think that’s all I read. Even more fun was going to all the places where the Arapahos were — Cahuenga Pass and imagining them riding their ponies down what is now a freeway; Hollywood Boulevard and Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, and Chinese Theater, too, and placing my hands in the very small prints of old movie stars in the concrete slabs outside the theater (those old stars were tiny people), and lunching at Musso and Frank’s Grill with Charlie Chaplin’s private booth by the door. When Vicky goes to lunch there, she gets to sit in that special booth.

That’s the background for The Silent Spirit. More about the book itself later.

Posted by Margaret