Juliet Blackwell | On writing, and the Winchester Mystery House

Writing a novel is a little like building the Winchester Mystery House.

Are you familiar with this place? Located in San Jose, about an hour south of San
Francisco, the house is a Queen Anne Victorian-style warren consisting of 10,000
windows, 160 rooms, 40 staircases, and 6 kitchens. I grew up nearby, and while I
appreciate that it has been painted and repaired, it was particularly spooky back when
it was semi-abandoned, gray and run-down. (It won’t come as a shock to any of my
readers that, as a child, I lobbied the adults in my life to take me there every
chance I got! Ah, haunted houses…)

Here’s the short version of the Winchester Mystery House origins: Sarah Winchester,
widow of the man who amassed a fortune rich manufacturing the famous Winchester Rifle,
sat for a reading with a psychic (or a charlatan, depending on whom you believe). The
psychic told her that the anguished souls of all those killed by the Winchester rifles
–a lot of souls-- were plaguing her.

The psychic told Sarah that she needed to build a beautiful house, and to keep
building --forever, if need be-- in order to provide a place that would attract
positive spirits while repelling the negative. Sarah, reeling from the deaths of her
infant daughter and her husband, was eager to appease the spirits. She moved to San
Jose and began remodeling a small farmhouse. She never stopped.

So…how is writing like building the Winchester Mystery House? I start with something
simple, a concept like: There’s an out-of-control botanica --a spiritual supply
store common to the Latino community—and a woman jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge
under mysterious circumstances. The two are somehow linked, and Lily and Oscar have
to figure out how. Sounds simple enough, right?

But then I think: I need more XXX (fill in the blank: action, romance, intrigue,
magic… ) and that storyline takes me in another direction. And so on and so on, until
the deadline for the manuscript begins to loom and my editor is drumming her fingers
and sending me Looks (which is all in my mind, of course, since my editor is a
sweetheart and the soul of patience who lives 3000 miles away in New York) and then I
think: I really need to shut down the construction on this baby, slap some paint on
‘er and call it good.

And then I write another scene, and another. This is when I start feeling like I’m
channeling poor Sarah Winchester. Her house features stairways that lead right into
the ceiling, and doors that open onto brick walls or to the third-story exterior, with
no stair. There are blocked passages and doors to nowhere; superfluous decorations and
mismatched moldings…and far too many chimneys and skylights.

It’s so hard to stop!!!

Unlike the Winchester widow, however, I force myself (with the assistance of the
aforementioned ever-so-patient editor) to remove a few stained glass panels and extra
rooms; perhaps a tower or two need to tumble for the sake of the storyline.

The spirits have already been invited in, however, and no matter how many alterations
I make…they still wander the halls of my story, climbing staircases to nowhere and
keeping things interesting.

Or so I hope!

About Juliet Blackwell

Juliet Blackwell is the New York Times bestselling author of the Witchcraft Mystery
series, featuring a powerful witch with a vintage clothes store in San Francisco’s
Haight-Ashbury. She also writes the Haunted Home Renovation Mystery series, about a
failed anthropologist who reluctantly takes over her father’s high-end construction
company…and finds ghosts behind the walls. As Hailey Lind, Blackwell wrote the Agatha-
nominated Art Lover’s Mystery series, in which an ex-art forger attempts to go
straight as a faux finisher. She is currently working on a novel about a woman who
takes over her uncle’s locksmith shop in Paris, entitled The Paris Key. A former
anthropologist and social worker, Juliet has worked in Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Italy, the
Philippines, and France.

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