ELIZABETH GEORGE WITH E.C. MURRAY

First, thank you so much for granting this interview. I'd like to begin with a two part questions. Your first, unpublished manuscript, used an old-fashioned "who done it" detective model i.e.-get everyone in the drawing room and figure out the puzzle. That didn't work. How did you alter your writing? After receiving rejections on your first four manuscripts, your fifth, A Great Deliverance was published received brilliant accolades in London, Chicago, Denver, and Washington. How did your fifth manuscript from your first four attempts?

It was kindly suggested to me that, if I wanted to write crime novels, I might want to read a few modern ones to see how they had altered from the days of the Golden Age of Mystery when the detective did indeed take the suspects into the drawing room or the library and explained who did what to whom and why. So that's where I began. I saw that I was going to have to be a lot more knowledgeable about the process of investigations and I was going to have to touch on police procedure as well. I set about learning those things and made the decision to feature Thomas Lynley as a main character instead of using him as a secondary character as I'd done in the first novel. I also created Barbara Havers to be his partner and she apparently won the hearts and minds of the publishers.

You've said that a great writer taps into the reader on an emotional level through the characters. How do you, as a writer, create characters that readers care about?

I create them in advance of writing the novel. I do as much work on them as I can, addressing them as if I were their biographer, their counselor, their psychologist, their social worker. I give them as much depth as I can and when I'm doing this, I try to get at the core of who they are, why they behave as they do, what their central issues are, and what their agenda is for the novel. I look for their weaknesses and their strength. And above all, I try to make sure they have imperfections because no one wants to read about perfect people.

Teachers often tell aspiring writers to write every day. If a writer does that, how do they know their writing actually improves?

If a writer is balancing reading up (by that I mean always trying to read better writers than they are) with writing daily, the only way a writer can fail to improve is if he's dead. They might not be able to see the improvement at first, but it's there and when they look back on what they've written, chances are they will have no memory at all of having written it.

When you complete your first draft, what do you do with it? Send it to your agent, editor, trusted reader? Put it on a shelf for awhile?

When I finish a first draft, I sit down and do a reading of it in as few sittings as possible. From this intense reading, I can see most of the weaknesses. I generate an editorial letter for myself. And then, based on that letter, I create a second draft. That draft goes to my cold reader in California who has read the second draft of all my novels. She assesses it and answers some questions that I give her and makes her comments. From that, I write a third draft and that is the draft that goes to my editor.

What was most challenging about switching from adult to young adult books?

Keeping the young adults central to the development of the story without the use of adults to help them out. That slayed me.

How do you keep track of your characters and what happened to them in previous books?

I assume you mean my central characters. Mostly, I have this in my head. It's easier with the Lynley novels than with the YA novels because in the YA novels a lot of what is known to the reader isn't known to the other characters yet so it's a case of What Do They Know and When Do They Know It and What the Heck Did They Learn in the Previous Book.

How do you decide which scenes to include in a novel, where to put them, and when is the best time to reveal important clues?

I do a step outline. If the story stalls out on me, I know I've played my hand too soon and have to go back and reconstruct.

Do you write both a Plot outline, too? What is a Step outline?

Yes. A step outline is merely a series of scenes arranged for their causality. It's usually written on a slip of paper or an index card and it's identified by POV character and a phrase to indicate what is going to happen in the scene. A running plot outline is a lengthy description of what is actually going to be in the scene, and it tells me what kind of construction I'm going to use to put together the scene.

What are your tips for aspiring writers?

I have one tip: Suit up and show up. Books do not get written if the writer isn't willing to do that.