Lori Rader-Day | Running with Juliet

I’m not a sporty person but I pay attention to the bigger contests—living in Chicago, we mostly pay attention to the Stanley Cup—but only in sports I don’t mind watching. This is how I ended up watching some of the matches in the World Cup recently.

Notice I didn’t say “Women’s World Cup.” Do we have to call it the “Men’s World Cup”?

Me? I’m an out-of-shape writer whose closest brush with athletics was making a single basket on my fifth grade basketball team. OK, I also played powder puff football in high school, but I didn’t understand the rules in the slightest. I was recruited to block for the defensive line and block I did. Later in life I taught myself to run, using the deserted weekend streets of my town as my training ground, but my plan came to a quick end as soon as the weather turned cold and those streets turned slick. I don’t need much encouragement to fall down and hurt myself; ask anyone. I mean ANYONE. In high school, my sport was the yearbook staff.

In short, I was never one of these gorgeous, lithe women tearing down the soccer pitch with their ponytails flying behind them.

So how did I end up writing LITTLE PRETTY THINGS, a book about former track team rivals whose friendship dissolves over a contest neither of them wins?

Because I wanted to talk about competition between women and girls, real and imagined, actual and societal. I probably could have chosen some other sport- as-metaphor-for-life—I mean, that’s what baseball is for, in my opinion—but since I also wanted to write about a young woman stunted in her life, a high school sport fit the bill.

The fact is, I cared less about the sport than I did about the friendship between the two young women, and the decisions I needed the protagonist, Juliet Townsend, to make. The women in the story had to care about running and quality shoes and things like that. What I really wanted to talk about was being on a team.

This all sounds very organized for a writer who prides herself on writing by the seat of her pants, but I’ve found that it’s best to take a little time to figure out the most important aspects of a protagonist’s character. I don’t write biographies or list out eye color and height or anything. Nothing so rigid. But I do want to know what the character wants more than anything else, what she would do for it, how far she might go—because I’m the one who has to take her there.

In Juliet’s case, I concentrated on her past life as a runner and her present stuck in a bad job and a bad life, all of which she blames on her former best friend. Clearly, she’s immature. She’s going to make other bad decisions. She’s going to say dumb things. She’s not going to see the big picture. See how quickly a single characteristic starts to build out a character’s life?

This is all inside baseball (ha, more sports metaphors!) for writers. What I hope readers see is a woman a little young for her age, a little sheltered, a little too willing to take what she doesn’t have—a character who has the chance to grow, and will let readers run alongside her.

GIVEAWAY

Did you play sports in high school or where you on the yearbook staff? Leave a comment below and be entered for a chance to win a signed copy of LITTLE PRETTY THINGS.

About Lori Rader-Day

Lori Rader-Day is the author of the mystery, THE BLACK HOUR, published in 2014 by Seventh Street Books. They had so much fun working together, that they are doing it again: Her next mystery, LITTLE PRETTY THINGS, will be released by Seventh Street Books July 7, 2015.

Her fiction has been previously published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, TimeOut Chicago, Crab Orchard Review, Freight Stories, and in the anthology Dia de los Muertos (Elektrik Milkbath Press), and others. Bestselling author Jodi Picoult chose her story as the grand prize winner of Good Housekeeping’s first fiction contest.

Originally from central Indiana, Lori grew up frequenting the local libraries, reading all the Judy Blume and Lois Duncan she could get her hands on. Then she discovered Agatha Christie and Mary Higgins Clark. Lori may have wandered off the mystery writer path a few times, but she thinks we all knew she would get back there eventually.

She studied journalism at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, but eventually gave in to her dream and studied creative writing at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Now a decade-long resident of Chicago, she has a favorite deep dish pizza and she is active in the area’s crime writing community. She is the vice president of the Midwest Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and a member of Sisters in Crime Chicagoland, the International Thriller Writers, and the International Association of Crime Writers. Chicago is a really great town in which to be a mystery writer.

She is represented by Sharon Bowers of Miller Bowers Griffin Literary Management.

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About LITTLE PRETTY THINGS

OLD RIVALRIES NEVER DIE. BUT SOME RIVALS DO.

Juliet Townsend is used to losing. Back in high school, she lost every track team race to her best friend, Madeleine Bell. Ten years later, she’s still running behind, stuck in a dead-end job cleaning rooms at the Mid-Night Inn, a one-star motel that attracts only the cheap or the desperate. But what life won’t provide, Juliet takes.

Then one night, Maddy checks in. Well-dressed, flashing a huge diamond ring, and as beautiful as ever, Maddy has it all. By the next morning, though, Juliet is no longer jealous of Maddy—she’s the chief suspect in her murder.

To protect herself, Juliet investigates the circumstances of her friend’s death. But what she learns about Maddy’s life might cost Juliet everything she didn’t realize she had.