A Conversation With Sara Paretsky on the Writing Process (Killer Writers)

Sara Paretsky is indisputably a legend, not only as a writer but also as a significant force in the publishing industry. With a writing work life that spans over 40 years at the time of this interview and an influence for change within the industry for just as long, Sara not only has a passion but is a passion, which comes through in my conversation with her. 

(Find more Killer Writers conversations here.)

Humble, intensely focused, and giving, I always wait for the next Paretsky volume. Reading her work is seeing the evolution of her well-known character, female private investigator V.I. Warshawski (a fictional legend unto herself), and the evolution of Paretsky, who has no qualms with her transparency. After reading her latest, Pay Dirt, I emailed her to see if we could talk. We Zoomed from her home in Chicago and mine in Nashville.

“Sara, for this current book, which I enjoyed greatly, you said you discarded seven drafts before hitting the book's story. What is your writing process?”

“It's always embarrassing to talk about it because it's like a dog wrestling with a sprinkler, and the sprinkler is always winning. I'm the dog. I wish I were someone who thought like a chess player, with all these different moves ahead, but I don't. I was lucky to be friends with P.D. James, who told me she outlined in so much detail that she would write the chapter she wanted to work on a given day. I wish I could do that. I would write so much faster and have so many more books out. I'd be like the Stephen King of private eye novels. But I have an idea for a crime and characters who can set the story in motion. Then, the story ends up going down a dead-end alley, so I have to back up. Sometimes, the characters change roles. They become more or less prominent or even change whether they're good or bad. I try a different storyline—the trouble with Pay Dirt. There was something I was passionate about with this book, and that was the history of Kansans in the post-Civil War era. I grew up in Kansas, and we celebrated the Centennial of Kansas coming into the Union. We girls dressed up in Civil War costumes, and we were smuggling bullets past the slaveholders who were controlling access into Kansas territory. Then, I got to late adulthood, and I found that after the Civil War, Kansas was abominable towards not just African Americans but also Indigenous peoples and forcibly took them from their homes. There were lynchings, there were all these things, and it was heartbreaking to me because it was like uprooting my childhood. That's like learning that your father was a terrible criminal. I wanted to tell that story but needed to tell it in the present because it's about V.I. Warshawski, a girl detective. Putting the backstory and a contemporary crime together took me forever to come up with the right front story. This right current-day story would let me unravel the history story.”

“Don't you think it's interesting, as you alluded, growing up in an environment, and to some degree having scales on your eyes and not seeing? Because I grew up in the South here and identified with what you said about that. Isn't it odd to grow up in that situation and then be surprised to discover, ‘Oh, this is not normal?’ It does make you want to write about it.”

“Right? I can still remember learning to read. You know, you're five years old, and we go into a diner with my mother for lunch…”

“And your mom was a librarian.”

“Yeah. And there's a sign saying, ‘We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.’ And I said, ‘What does that mean?’ I remember it because my mother was so uncomfortable. She did not want to say, ‘This is because we are a bunch of racist creeps,’ so she said, ‘It means that you children have to behave yourselves, or they will throw you out of the restaurant.’”

“Same way with a discussion of bad words with my children. You don't want to say what it means, but at the same time, you want to give an honest answer to some degree. You referenced P.D. James's writing in a different style. How should other writers apply your writing process to their work? Are there things about that that can give them a leg up from you and how you write?”

“I think the hardest thing for any writer is having confidence in your voice and storytelling. Maybe my process being as—I don't know what the right word is—contentious for me will give other writers some freedom to think, ‘Oh, this is how I work, and it's okay.’ I think the only right way to write is how you write. That doesn't mean that writing workshops can't be enormously helpful, but I back away from ‘These are five steps to writing a finished novel’ because you must follow your voice, your vision. At the same time, you must remember you're an entertainer, and people want to read a story. They don't want to read your philosophy, however profound it may be. I was thinking about this the other day: We talk a lot at my age about death, dying, disease, and illness. I thought, ‘I can't die. All my clever little ideas will disappear, and no one else will have them.’ But your clever little ideas may not be interesting to many other people, so you have to keep your eye on the fact that you're writing for yourself, but you're speaking to a reader who needs to be respected too.”

“Saying that, there are multiple ways to get to Chicago from Nashville. Running Killer Nashville, I see a lot of writers who want the secret, the formula, the way to do it. What is your recommended advice for how writers should write a book?”

“I think Anne Lamott is the go-to advisor for writers on how to handle uncertainties. The hardest part, maybe, of getting started every day is the fear of the blank page. I try at the end of my workday to have a sentence—even if it's a nonsense sentence—that's there to greet me when I next log into my book, and I got that, in a way, from Anne Lamott. She says if you're stuck, you take a piece of paper the size of your Word document, and you cut a hole in it that's as big as one sentence, and you put that over the screen, and then you write something to fill that hole, and that gets you started. So, at one point, I thought I would do a book about composing an opera. I put so much effort into that. That was even harder than Pay Dirt because that book ended up dying. I never finished it. I wrote 250 pages, and I still had no idea what I was doing, but I went to Virginia, where a composer named Thea Musgrave was. Norfolk, Virginia. She was the composer in residence for the Norfolk Opera and was starting to compose a new opera for them. And to me, musicians and poets are like beings on a higher level. They hear something in their head, like Mozart going around with their eyes shut, and then suddenly, [hums music passages]. I had this interview with her, and she let me sit in on rehearsals. It was interesting. But anyway, the first day, I asked, ‘So are you hearing these melodies, and are they just compelling you to compose?’ And she said, ‘I start every day with a blank music score on my screen, terrified that I can't write a single note,’ I was like, ‘Oh, you're human! That's so disappointing!’”

Check out Sara Paretsky's Pay Dirt here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

“Pay Dirt ended up on the proverbial editing floor. Explain to our readers editing and how editing benefits the book itself.”

“I think you have to look at your work with a ruthless eye. It is so hard to get your words down on the page. I'm constantly editing and rewriting. Even writers I know and admire lay it out and then go back and start cutting. I can't work like that. You need to do two kinds of editing. One helps make things meaningful, and the other ensures the story is told in the book, right?”

“How do you go about writing a series? Is it simply one book at a time? And I know for you, it's not creating a story bible of the life of a project because you're still just working on one novel at a time, plundering through that. So, how does one start to write a series?”

“I had not planned on writing a series when I started. Starting in my teens, I was a lifelong detective fiction reader. It's always been my favorite form of reading, even today, and I have a stack of important, difficult books that I'm sure I will read. I wasn't planning to write a series. I wanted to create a woman detective who would turn the tables on how women were traditionally treated in the genre. When I was coming up as a reader, we were victims. We were vamps. We used our bodies to get good boys to do bad things. We weren’t primarily problem solvers. I wanted a woman who reflected my experience and all the women I knew who had to struggle and solve problems. Prince Charming very rarely came along to save you. V.I. came out of that wish. I also grew up in a time and a family and a place, Kansas, in the '50s, very conservative, very patriarchal. I didn't have a lot of support or confidence in what I might do. I have written from my earliest childhood, but very privately. I never imagined writing for publication, so it took me a long time to think I could tell a story someone else might want to read. And V.I. came out of all these different places in my experience and wishes. But I thought one and done, and also, there's a way in which I was insecure and had grandiose fantasies. It's like, okay, I've created this woman. Problem solved. From now on, there are no demeaning depictions of women in crime fiction because I've created this strong woman who will overturn all. That is like, God. You are so ignorant. It took a year, but Dial Press bought it. In those days, there were many publishers—unlike today, when there are four behemoths—and they all rejected this. My favorite rejection letter came from Simon and Schuster. All my rejection letters are at the Newberry Library, but they said there was insufficient interest in a character set in the Midwest. They said, ‘Not enough people in the Midwest read to make it worth publishing a book set there.’ Flyover country, right? But finally, Dial Press, which no longer exists, bought the book and sold 3,500 copies, which today is nothing. But then, it was enough that they made a little money on it, and they asked for another book, and my agent said, ‘You need to write at least three books in this series to establish yourself before you try something else.’ And so that was how it turned into a series. Sue Grafton and I published our first books the same year, but she had this plan that she executed brilliantly and skillfully. But that was never my plan. Maybe it's typical. In my whole life, I had no plans. I was bumbling along.”

“‘Bumbling’ That’s a word I often use. Donald Bain of Murder, She Wrote fame was a very good friend of mine‚ and is now gone, but once told me that we live in such a wonderful profession that we can keep working as long as our brains hold out. How do you feel about that?”

“I agree. I have younger brothers who've retired, and I'm like, ‘What are you doing retiring?’ I know I'm lucky I'm doing something that pleases me and brings other people pleasure, and as long as I can, I will.”

“You talked about the concept of the detective novel set in Chicago that doesn't have enough readers. What about people today who live in demographics that are not New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, or Chicago? Should they write what they know and the community they know and not worry about the publication of that?”

“Oh, totally. I think publishing has changed. Some changes have been terrifying and, for the worse, in access to markets, bookstores, and so on in the way that consolidation in the industry has affected writers. But at the same time, there are so many more avenues for publication. It took New York a very long time to understand that they were not the only location on the map. But now, many wonderful series have been set in the South, particularly considering Margaret Maron with her North Carolina setting and Joan Hess. What we call regional stories now have wide-ranging readerships all over the world. Also, we're seeing series set in India and South Africa. There’s a Ukrainian writer who's doing books that deal with what it's like to try to be a policeman solving a crime while you're living in the middle of a war. I think that our minds have expanded. What we want to see and read has expanded so much that people should write out of settings that they know and love.”

“In this age where people are so focused on age, age is a big discussion right now in the U.S. How do you think the industry feels about us as older writers?”

“What publishers want is a sellable book.”

“So, no matter the location, your age, or the character's age, let’s give them what they want. Write what you know.”

___________________________________

Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world with her gritty detective V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only, followed by twenty V.I. novels, her memoir, two stand-alone novels, and short stories. She created Sisters in Crime, earning Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year. She received the British Crime Writers’ Cartier Diamond Dagger and Gold Dagger. https://saraparetsky.com/