Loreth Anne White | Plotting Who-Dun-It

My newest book, THE DARK BONES, is about a cop who learns that her father—a retired police officer—has killed himself. My heroine, Detective Rebecca North, cannot believe it. But in order to prove it Rebecca must return to her small and rural home town where she will be forced to face a lot of dark things she’s been running from, including Ash Haugen, the man she left behind long ago, and a cold case everyone thought long buried. At the heart, THE DARK BONES is about second chances, about being forced to revisit mistakes from the past, and then digging deep in an effort to set things right, and heal. It’s about the cold case wounds I suspect we all have buried in our subconscious somewhere, in one way or another, those unhappy events that have helped shape everything we do, and everything we have become. In Rebecca and Ash’s case, it’s also about being able to love again once they’ve addressed the reasons underpinning their old mistakes and lies.

I’m a plotter for the most part. I go into a new story knowing who my protagonists are. I know
what their big ‘wounds’ are, and I know what they want with all their hearts, and how far they
might go to get it. Then I come up with ideas to thwart them, to keep them from achieving
their big goals, which are often not what they at first thought them to be. And I have an idea of
the ending and the major turning points. But often things change and evolve in the actual
writing.

As for the bad guys—often it’s more a case of good people getting mixed up in terribly bad things. The villains have dreams, desires, like everyone else. They had childhoods, mothers, fathers, siblings, made mistakes, or got a raw deal in life. So yes, I try to get into those mindsets. I often try to approach it from the following angle: most little boys and little girls, when asked what they want to be when they grow up do not dream of becoming murderers or thieves. But something happens along the way. As for the really sick and twisted and ‘evil’ serial killer types? I try to understand the pathologies around having no empathy, and the behaviors that grow around being driven by addictions—be it to chemicals, or power, or greed/acquisitions, or sex, or an addiction to a pleasure derived from controlling others, and in killing them.