Dana's Notebook, January 25, 2005: My Road to Wonderland
The way I got started writing was as simple as taking off my jeans.
I'm not sure which housemate it was, but someone once asked why there
were all these thunking noises coming from my room whenever I returned
from working in the field. Boot one, boot two, and then.my jeans. It's
not that they were that dirty (okay, they really were), but it was the
crap in the pockets: trowels, pens, mechanical pencils, tape measures,
nails, rolls of flagging. In my field gear, I would need no cement
shoes to go straight to the bottom of the ocean, and while bulging
pockets ("chipmunk hips") is not a flattering look, it is handy for
an
archaeologist. It never occurred to me before that anything was
unusual: that's what it sounds like when a girl gets undressed chez
moi.
That thought stuck in my head for a dozen years or so. I never planned
to do anything with it, it just stayed around. Waiting. Lurking,
perhaps.
The way I got started writing was as simple as someone holding a gun on
me.
About ten years ago, a pothunter came onto a site and started to dig
where a friend and I were working. After being confronted, the guy
pulled out a handgun and pointed it at us. Even as I tried to memorize
everything about the guy, I was left wondering: What will happen if I
run for help? If I don't run for help? My friend outfaced him, and
eventually the guy left. That event inspired fear and uncertainty I'd
never known before. It changed my life in many ways, some sooner, some
later.
The way I got started writing was as simple as someone telling me I
should.
Months later, strolling around a park, I was telling another friend (an
aspiring writer) about the thing with the pothunter. Telling her
stories about falling off cliffs, about cement mixers careening off the
road and to land where we had been eating lunch just moments before.
She said, these things don't happen to people. I said, they happen to
me and my friends all the time. She said, no, they don't happen to
normal people. You should write this down.
As soon as she said it, I knew she was right. In my case, that moment
of satori (a sudden flash of insight), also brought compulsion. It had
been twenty years or so since creative writing class in middle-school,
and suddenly, I had to write.
I had a first line, I had a scene with a pothunter. That's when the
adventure began with what would become Site Unseen, my first Emma
Fielding book. That was the book where I learned that reporting isn't
the same as writing fiction, where I learned that I could make up stuff
wholesale while still flavoring things with my own professional and
emotional experiences (my life is too quiet to fill up a book, after
all).
By the time I was done with that book, I had started another. If I'd
wanted to, I couldn't stop. Writing was a drug. The challenges that I
could present Emma (and myself as a writer) drove me on: What does Emma
do when she's an outsider, but the only one who can put all the pieces
together to solve a crime (Grave Consequences)? What does she do when
she's at home, in the midst of friends and family, and has to ask
herself what she will sacrifice to get the truth (Past Malice)? Can I
use Emma to show that library research is every bit as exciting-and
dangerous-as an archaeological dig (A Fugitive Truth)? Could I cast a
snowed-in archaeology conference as a traditional "manor house
murder"
(More Bitter Than Death)?
Even the need to edit and rewrite didn't diminish the craving. Trying
out different points of view, tinkering with different scenes, adding
and removing
characters- Site Unseen went through about a dozen drafts before it
became a published book-just made it all the more of a challenge. When
I realized that I wanted-needed-more and better forms of criticism,
well, that's when I knew I had it bad.
Like many an addict, I confessed to my husband, and with his support, I
got the help I needed. I found my way to a writing class, a writers
group, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference. There I found an agent. Who
found a publisher.
The way I got started writing was simple, but by no means direct. It
was series of chance happening, nudges, really, over several decades,
combined with a love of mysteries and a desire I didn't know was
present. I stumbled into Wonderland, not via the direct route down the
rabbit hole, but through the back door, applying skills I'd developed as
an archaeologist-like observation and description-to writing, spinning
mundane experiences into mystery novels. Far from hoping to find myself
awakening from a dream, just in time for tea, I'm working just as hard
as I can to stay lost in Wonderland.
For more essays on writing, reading, and popular culture, check out
Dana's Notebook at
www.danacameron.com
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