Where Did I Put That Plot?

I had the good fortune to be a guest blogger for Ladies of Mystery. When developing a plot, don't come to me for help.

Plots don’t come easily to me. When I first started writing the Trisha Carson amateur

sleuth mysteries about ten years ago, I sat down and blithely typed away following any idea

wherever it took me. I aimlessly spent time chasing after dead ends …nicely written, to be sure, but instead of moving the plot along, it stopped it cold. I wasted so much time. I realized that I needed more control over what happened and when. I’m not a plotter, as you can tell. I enjoy the freedom of following whims. So, this hasn’t been an easy step for me. But I’m trying.

Take Better Off Dead (BOD), the latest book in the mystery series. Like all the

mysteries before it, I knew the catalyst for the plot. It’s always based loosely on something true. In the series, each book swirls with an undercurrent of open water swimming. That’s usually the true part.

Almost fourteen years ago, a solo swimmer in the Maui Channel Swim, a 10-mile relay

race between the islands of Lanai and Maui, was sucked under a powerboat by the propeller

wash near the finish line. He suffered catastrophic injuries to one arm which had to be amputated and one hand that was reattached although it had two finders missing. I wasn’t there, but I read about it. Things like that stay in the back of my mind, especially when I’m swimming in open water like the San Francisco Bay in Spring and Summer and Fall. It came to the surface when I began to think about BOD. I knew I wanted to use the idea of a horrible boating accident. But I needed a victim, some potential murderers and a realistic answer to the question, “why?”

I lingered over the concept of a premeditated horrific accident, but could go no further. At

the time, I was also tutoring first-generation, low-income high school students in English. One sophomore was reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet and wasn’t thrilled about the language. He didn’t understand Elizabethan English and no amount of my prompting and wheedling made the play on par with a Marvel comic book. That is, until I told him the story of Hamlet, his dead father, his uncle and his mother in everyday language. It went something like this: Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is at university when he learns of his father’s death. While returning to the family castle, he runs into the ghost of his dad who tells him that his brother, Hamlet’s uncle, poisoned him and that he wants revenge. The revenge part sparked his interest.

I lingered on how Shakespeare killed his actors: drowning, poisoning, stabbing with a

sword, stabbing with a poisoned sword. I compared it to the violence running through video

games or a superhero movie. What if Hamlet were the Hulk? That caught his attention. I

convinced him to come up with a modern-day plot based on Hamlet. He bought into the idea.

So, we read the play, both the contemporary translation and the Elizabethan language version and he jotted down notes to help him with his graphic novel. That’s when the light bulb went off. If my student could update Hamlet, so could I. Later that evening, following Shakespeare’s plot, I started writing … modernizing the famous revenge tragedy. The moody Hamlet became Harrison. His dead father and the very much alive brother turned into Andy and Marty Barlow, wealthy Marin County financiers. That’s all the kick I needed. The story began to fall into place.

I can’t say the rest was easy, but I could see a path ahead of me. As part of the

Acknowledgement in Better Off Dead, I thanked Will Shakespeare. Without him and Hamlet, there would not have been a Book 4 in the Trisha Carson series.

I’ve started Book 5, and it revolves around a skull found on a Marin County beach

covered in eel grass. (Almost a true story. The skull was found on an East Bay beach.) Do you think I learned anything from my experience with Better Off Dead? Unfortunately, no. Plot ideas have disappeared. I have no idea what to write next.