TV and Newspapers Get Me Started

I just finished Chapter 1 in my new book, so I thought it would be a good time to answer that quintessential reader question, where do you get your ideas? Yet unnamed, this is the second in my new Sid Chance PI series. When I started casting about for a plot, I decided to use some current problem as the background for the story. About that time I saw a segment on the TV news detailing how FBI agents in Miami tracked down Medicare scammers.

It dealt with small companies that pop up and disappear just as suddenly, their aim to collect claims for expensive items like motorized chairs, hearing aids, handicap aids used around the home, etc. Trouble is, the claims are fake. And by the time Medicare gets around to questioning if they're fraudulent, the companies have closed shop and moved on. They're usually storefront operations that have been cleaned out by the time investigators arrive. According to the story, the racket is more lucrative than drug dealing and much less likely to result in an arrest.

New policies are being put into effect to slow the growth of Medicare fraud, but it's going to take a while to get the situation under control. Idea Number One checked off.

But I needed another. My protag is a former National Park ranger and small town police chief turned private investigator. He would not be involved in chasing down Medicare fraud. I looked for a character with some other problem whose presence could propel my PI into another case that involved one of these illegitimate medical supply operations.

I found my character on the front page of the newspaper a couple of Sundays ago. He was Metro Nashville's youngest murderer. He shot a man during a late night drug deal when he was twelve years old. Released from prison after spending more than half his life behind bars, he is back home now in his mid-twenties. The young man's life was chronicled in a series of articles exploring the question is there hope for children who kill?

He is faced with the problem  of starting his life over. He insists he will not go back to prison and wants to prove a person can change. But he hasn't found anyone willing to hire him, and he struggles to find his role in the community. Siblings who were three and four when he was locked up are now grown and have kids of their own.

He seemed like an ideal character to get my story moving, and that's what he did. He gets charged with another murder. I just need to find another 70,000 words to get him to the end. I think most writers would agree that generating ideas to initiate a story is one of the easiest parts of the job. What you accomplish with those ideas is where the hard part comes in. I'll have to let you know in a few months just how hard it was.

Or, as I like to say, now the fun begins.

Chester Campbell

Mystery Mania

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

My guess is that every author has been asked that question many times. And I would suspect that most of them have more ideas than they'll ever have time to develop into a story or book.

Sometimes something that happens in life will trigger an idea for a story. That has happened to me more than once. I used a murder that actually happened in our area for three different books. The female owner of a mountain lodge was murdered in one of the cabins while asleep in bed with her Indian employee. (The handsome employee lived though he was shot too.) Her husband was in the southern part of the state tending to his automobile sales business giving him an airtight alibi. As the years passed, the man hired to do the murder decided to blackmail the husband and got killed for his trouble. That's when the husband was found out and arrested for the murder of his wife.

I used the murder of the owner of an inn, rather than a lodge, for my firs Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery, Deadly Trail. The story wasn't much like what actually happened, the murder victim was the male owner of the Inn, not female, and he wasn't killed in bed, but that real murder is what triggered the idea.

For another mystery in the Crabtree series, Intervention, I used the lodge in the real murder as the setting for a completely different story.

And once again, in a later Crabtree tale, Kindred Spirits, I lifted some aspects of that first real murder.

I like to save newspaper articles of interesting crimes and murders too. The story I write won't be exactly like the real happening, but often will give me a jumping off point for a plot of my own.

We recently had two deaths in our community that are far too coincidental. Female friends were found dead in their homes within hours of each other. No autopsies were done. One lady had no family at all and the other's family didn't acknowledge her until after her death. Of course I will work that into one of my mysteries.

And my latest book, Lingering Spirit, a romance with a touch of the supernatural, was inspired by a tragedy in my own family when my son-in-law was killed in the line of duty. I must add that it was only the inspiration, what happened after that is fiction.

You can learn more about any of these books on my website http://fictionforyou.com

What about you? Where do your ideas come from?

Marilyn