JoAnna Carl | The Most Common Question

The most common question a writer is asked, of course, is, “Where do you get your ideas?”

I always answer, “They’re lying around on the ground everywhere. I just pick them up.” Because the hard thing about getting ideas isn’t finding them. It’s forcing them to make some sort of sense.

The second most common question is, “Are your characters based on real people?”

No! No! A thousand times no!

Even if they were, I’ll never admit it. But sometimes they’re inspired by real people.

For instance, my detective-heroine Lee McKinney Woodyard is nearly six feet tall, a natural blond former beauty queen, half Dutch and half Texan, and a whiz at figures with a degree in accounting.

If anybody asks, I always say she’s based on me.

That’s because I’m five-foot-two, fat, with dark hair, remarkably ugly, have trouble balancing my checkbook, and am old enough to be Lee’s grandmother. In other words, Lee is based on everything I’m not.

But I’m not lying when I say Lee is based on me. When I’m writing about Lee, when I’m seeing the world from her viewpoint, I do look like Lee. In my imagination.

Unlike real life, in that moment I’m a person who can balance her checkbook on the first try. I can play the guitar and carry a tune. In my imagination I’m so gorgeous that my fictional first husband thought he’d bought a trophy wife. I’m so thin – well, you get it.

But when I say Lee is based on me, I don’t mean she looks like me or has my talents. But she does have many of my attitudes and beliefs.

Lee’s Aunt Nettie, proprietor of TenHuis Chocolade, is another example of a character inspired by a real person, or in her case by two people.

I was lucky enough to be reared in frequent proximity to my grandmother and her sister, known as Gran and Aunt Sula. I deliberately made the character of Aunt Nettie like a combination of the two of them. They were known as “the ladies” in our family.

My grandmother’s name was Nettie, and Aunt Sula’s was officially Ursula. They were kind, calm, loving but not sentimental, great listeners, fabulous cooks, and full of common sense. They were also two generations older than the Aunt Nettie in the Chocoholic Mystery books, since both were born before 1900. So their attitudes and experiences were quite different from hers.

Naturally, book characters have various functions. They may be comic – like Aunt Nettie’s assistant Dolly Jolly, who can’t speak in a normal tone of voice. She shouts.

Dolly is really a joke on myself. This is because I despise the use of an explanation point to indicate that something is a joke. “He swore he wouldn’t forget this time!” Sorry, fellow writers, an explanation point isn’t shorthand for “this is funny!”

So in the days when I was editor of the Sisters in Crime newsletter, I forbade that usage. Then I created a fictional character, Dolly, who ends every sentence that way. “There’s someone at the door!” “The UPS man came!” “A friend of Jeff’s is here!”

Okay, okay, it’s not funny. I’m just kidding myself by writing a character who speaks in a way I once-upon-a time forbade other writers to use.

But what’s the use of being a writer if you can’t kid your own foibles? And those of others.

About JoAnna Carl

JoAnna Carl is the author of the fifteen books of the Chocoholic Mystery Series, and has also written books under her real name, Eve K. Sandstrom. She is a fifth-generation Oklahoman, but writes about a resort on the shore of Lake Michigan. Go figure.

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About THE CHOCOLATE FALCON FRAUD

From the bestselling author of THE CHOCOLATE CLOWN CORPSE, it’s murder, my sweet, for a chocolatier whose love of old crime films plunges her into a real-life murder where the motives aren’t so black and white…

The Warner Pier tourism board is kicking off its Tough Guys and Private Eyes film festival with The Maltese Falcon, and Lee Woodyard and her Aunt Nettie are preparing a delicious chocolate noir tie-in at TenHuis Chocolade. What Lee isn’t prepared for is a face from the past: Jeff Godfrey, her former stepson. The last time Jeff showed up in town, he wound up being accused of murder. Now he says he’s only in Warner Pier to see Bogart on the big screen. Honest.

Jeff may now be a college grad, but that doesn’t mean he’s any less naïve than the kid Lee had to bail out of trouble earlier. There are all those strange phone calls, a girlfriend who’s secretly on Jeff’s tail, and a pack of suspicious- sounding acquaintances right out of Dashiell Hammett. Then Jeff goes missing, the Falcon theme is haunting everyone, and a body falls at Lee’s feet when she opens the front door – just like in the movie.

Now Lee is under deadline to rewrite the ending of a cunning killer’s increasingly convincing murder plot…

Includes Tasty Chocolate Trivia!