Hank Phillippi Ryan
Showing posts with label Hank Phillippi Ryan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hank Phillippi Ryan. Show all posts

I Know I've Seen This Place Before

10:00 PM Add Comment
(Look above my head.)

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: This photo certainly proves it. Location definitely matters.See? My husband insisted he did not place us in the bookstore like this on purpose, but I bet he did. Isn’t it hilarious?

This is John Lescroart with me, by the way. One of the most brilliant mystery writers anywhere. I interviewed him for this 20thbook—THE KEEPER--and he’s fantastic. If you don’t know him, he writes the Dismas Hardy books, and pretty much invented the sort of—domestic legal thriller/mystery. You know? Where the sleuth has a family that he loves,  a wonderful daughter and a wife he adores, and good dear friends--and problems. Not huge ones, but the day to day little things that can make our live misera—I mean, interesting.

His characters are real people, and the situations are realistic—and his setting—San Francisco—is just as much a part of the books as the people.

We talked about that in the interview (here I am describing the moment I had a good idea in my upcoming book TRUTH BE TOLD),  and about his relationship with San Francisco—he loves it (except for the weather) and lives there part of the time. But  he’s very careful to make sure that when he writes about “real” San Francisco, that it’s accurate. He says—if he made a mistake he’d be flooded with complaints. (The “that street isn’t one way!” type of thing.   (Do you see geographical mistakes in books? What do you do when you find one?)

In my books, set in Boston, I try for the same authenticity. If I had the Red Line trains going to Newton, or the Mass Turnpike going north and south, or –well you get the picture. Real Boston has to be accurate Boston.
And it’s easy for my brain to conflate reality with the books, sadly. My husband and I will be driving down the Mass Pike and I’ll say, oooh, exit 17! Here’s where Jane was chased by the bad guys! And then I realize, no—I made that up.

John described the exact same brainwaves in almost exactly the same ways—he says he’ll walk around SF and say oh, here’s where a certain character in THE KEEPER was killed!

And that’s great, right? Because it feels real.  I’m now writing WHAT YOU SEE, which is about  murder that takes place in a little park near Boston’s famous Quincy Market. And since it’s on a public street, I’ve used the exact real place. It’s creepy, now, for me to go by the Mayor Curley statue. I think—ooh, this is where my book begins! And I almost believe it’s true. 

When you write about a real place, does the reality of the place fade away, and be replaced by what happened in your fictional world?  

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN is the on-air investigative reporter for Boston's NBC affiliate. She's won 30 EMMYs, 12 Edward R. Murrow awards and dozens of other honors for her ground-breaking journalism. A bestselling author of six mystery novels, Ryan has won multiple prestigious awards for her crime fiction: the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and for THE OTHER WOMAN, the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. National reviews have called her a "master at crafting suspenseful mysteries" and "a superb and gifted storyteller." Her newest thriller, THE WRONG GIRL, has the extraordinary honor of winning the 2013 Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel! A four-week Boston Globe bestseller, it was dubbed "Another winner" in a Booklist starred review and "Stellar" by Library Journal.  She's on the national board of Mystery Writers of America and 2013 president of national Sisters in Crime. Watch for her next novel, TRUTH BE TOLD, on October 7, 2014.
 
Visit her online at HankPhillippiRyan.com, on Twitter @hank_phillippi and Facebook at HankPhillippiRyanAuthorPage.
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Ready! Set! Procrastinate?

10:00 PM Add Comment

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:
I wish you could see my underwear drawer. It’s—pristine. All divided by color, and lined up in nice perfect rows. (I will spare you the photo, so just imagine.) I have organized the heck out of it.

You should also see my upstairs summer closet. It is fabulous. Every t-shirt and even slightly saggy or out of fashion item has been removed, cleaned and donated. There is actually room in the closet for what’s there, and even a little left over. I could close my eyes, and select something wearable and the right size. I have organized the heck out of it.

The reason I am on this organizational rampage is that I will do anything, anything to avoid starting my new book.  Girlfriends, I have actually considered changing the shelf paper in my kitchen cabinets.

 Do you realize what that would entail?

Taking out each and every canister, jar, and can, weird tubes of anchovy paste and  marginal cookies and packets of salad dressing, peeling away the tattersall-plaid paper lining, cleaning the wood underneath,  driving through the SNOW to the the hardware store, choosing the perfect new paper, making sure there’s enough in stock, driving home,  measuring, cutting, peeling, sticking, applying, and then REPLACING every canister, jar, can and tube of anchovy paste.

Do you REALIZE how long that would take, and what a PAIN that would be?

And yet, and yet, it is a walk in the park compared to sitting at my computer and starting my new book.

Now, truth be told, I do want to write it.  (And TRUTH BE TOLD  is an especially funny expression, since it it’s the title of my new book—my finished book!—the one which I had no idea how to write a exactly this time last year, and that is now about to be in galleys and is really really good if I do say so.)
 
So why am I contemplating actual housework instead of starting the new book? Why am I intimidated by myself? I have written SIX SUCCESSFUL NOVELS, (the most recent is THE WRONG GIRL)—I say to myself. Each time, (except the first time, which is an altogether different story because I had no idea) each time, I was apprehensive, and afraid, and each time I second-guessed my self.

“What if this is the time it isn’t going to work?” I wailed to my husband.
“That’s what you always say,” he replies,  “and then it always works.”
“But what if this is the time it DOESN’T work?”
"That’s what you always say, too,” he says.

And he is right right right.

I just gave a movie-book talk about To Kill A Mockingbird , one of my favorite books and movies, and learned in my research that Harper Lee tossed the manuscript of TKAM out the window and into the snow, because she was so frustrated with it. Her agent made her go out and pick it out.  You of course know Stephen King threw CARRIE into the trash—and his wife had to retrieve it.

It’s such a climb, isn’t it? Or like one hilarious and well-meaning pal of mine once described: “Like Godot pushing that boulder up the mountain. “

Yes, indeed. Or something like that.

So girlfriends, here’s the thing. I have a very good plot idea. And a title: WHAT YOU SEE. And I have—well, let’s call it faith in the universe. It has never failed me, not ever, that when it is really and truly time to start, the perfect words form in my brain, and there’s no force in the galaxy that can keep me from my desk.

Has that happened to you? It’s like some force says—okay, ready.

Peter DeVries famously say: “I write when I’m inspired, and I make sure I’m inspired very morning at 9 am.”

So today, as you are reading this, picture my house in Massachusetts. . My underwear drawer is perfect, my upstairs closet is perfect. My kitchen cabinets-- forget about that. I ‘ll do them next time. But  it’s time. Really and truly time. I will  be at my desk. 

And slowly and wonderfully, I have complete confidence, WHAT YOU SEE will come to life.

I don’t have to write a whole book today, I have to write one page, maybe two.  I’ll have great days, and I have horrible days. Ill have days when I’m in despair, and days when I secretly applaud myself.  Word by word, page by page.

And soon, well, not soon, but eventually, I’ll do what I always do. I’ll call my husband in the study and say, “Sweetheart, watch this.” And I’ll type: THE END.

And next year, about this time—I’ll be thinking Wow. I did it. And I can’t wait to start again!

I might have to alphabetize my spices first. But hey. We do it how we do it. (What have you ever done to procrastinate?)
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