Laurie Cass | Where I Get My Ideas

To tell you the truth, I have no idea where the plots of my books originate. Not
really. Not even when I’m writing them. For me, a book comes together in chunks.
These chunks are of different sizes, ranging from huge (the identity of the
killer, say) to very small (the name of a new restaurant in town).

The other thing that keeps me from remembering where I get my ideas is my
incredibly poor memory. Case in point: a couple of months ago I was talking to
some nice ladies who knew I also wrote the PTA Mysteries under the name Laura
Alden. They asked about the motive of the killer in that book and—please believe
me when I say I am not making this up—I had no idea who killed the victim, let
alone why.

It was not a proud moment in my life, and I’m sure those nice ladies think I’m a
nutcase (“You wrote the book and you don’t remember?”) but I truly could not
summon up the killer’s name. And I never remembered to go back and look so I
still don’t know.

Anyway, CAT WITH A CLUE started with the following idea: What if, one morning, Minnie found a murder victim in the library? Okay, that would work. Now what? Well, then I had to figure out why anyone would be killed in a library in the middle of the night. So it most likely had something about books, right? What on earth could that be?

That’s pretty much how it went for the entire outline. (Yes, I outline my books.
I didn’t always, but in the interest of less time spent rewriting, I moved to
detailed outlines a number of books ago.) I figure out one thing, which leads to
another thing that needs to be figured out, which leads to another thing and
umpteen hours of hair-pulling later, the outline of a book is complete. Ta-dah!

I do, however, remember the origins of a couple things in CAT WITH A CLUE. One particular character came out of an information-gathering spurt I’d undergone while working on a book proposal. The main character of this particular novel featured a female conservation officer who had Asperger’s Syndrome. She was on the functional end of the autism spectrum and had never been diagnosed, but developed a friendship with a teenage boy who also had Asperger’s.

To develop those characters, I read up on Asperger’s, talked to a number of
people, etc., and learned a tremendous amount. Then I wrote character studies of
the main character and her young friend, incorporated their personalities into a
detailed synopsis, wrote fifty pages of the book, and sent it off to my agent,
who was excited about the whole concept.

Sadly, no publishing house agreed, and the novel was never completed. But no research is ever wasted, right? When CAT WITH A CLUE needed a secondary character who happened to have a bizarre amount of knowledge about a particular thing, I knew exactly what kind of character to create. Hooray! The other thing I know for sure about CAT WITH A CLUE is where I got the idea for the layout of the historical museum. Though it isn’t exactly the same as the museum in the small northwest lower Michigan town in which I work, there are a tremendous number of similarities.

Bottom line, as I said at the beginning, I basically have no idea where I get
the ideas for my books. I spend a lot of time staring at the computer and
thinking and, with any luck, something that isn’t complete crap will transfer
itself from my head to the laptop.

In many ways, the act of writing is itself an adventure. Every single time you
sit down to write you never know exactly what’s going to happen, not for sure,
and that’s a big part of the fun.