Each writer has a different way of getting started on the next book. Some prepare a story board, others keep pages of notes, some make an outline. I see a group of people moving around doing whatever it is they’re doing, which isn’t always clear in the beginning but I know it will be soon enough. Because location is especially important to me, I pull out photographs I’ve taken of the general location I’m focusing on. They aren’t usually of a specific place I have in mind for the plot, though they can be, but more of a way to get my brain thinking about what I’ve seen there, how people move through the space. Right now, that means India.
My current work in progress is an Anita Ray story, most of which usually takes place in the coastal resort of Kovalam, just south of the state capital Trivandrum. Even though such a story might begin in Hotel Delite, Auntie Meena’s business where Anita lives and helps out, the plot may take Anita away from the water and into a nearby city or inland village. She might go to Chalai, the main bazaar in the city, or to Connemara Market, where I often went to take pictures of fish or vegetables. (I love markets.)
In this mystery novel, Anita travels into the hills with a group of tourists staying at the hotel. They’ve heard about a particularly interesting chapel and want to visit. So, off they go. This gave me a chance to pull out images of the twisting roads rising up the Western Ghats, with homes built right along the verge and bougainvillea or other vines tumbling over trellises and brushed by a passing lorry.
While I was sorting through images I came across one of groves of rubber trees. The hills can be a surprise to some foreigners who expect all of South India to be a jungle, huge climbing vines, thick bush, and bright flowers the size of basketballs. They don’t expect a small forest of deciduous trees.
Mature rubber trees look like saplings but they’re mature enough to produce the sap that is the basis for rubber, and farmers capture it the same way we capture sap for maple syrup. I lay the photograph out on my desk alongside two or three others, and let my thoughts drift. I needed a murder scene the reader could grasp in hindsight but nothing obvious, and this needed to be away from Hotel Delite and Kovalam. The rubber tree grove gave me plenty to work with.
With important scenes taking shape near the rubber plantation and a tea shop, I had some important questions resolved and now needed only a Catholic chapel, so I rummaged around and found a photograph of one set among the trees. It was the right size for what I had in mind, and its location gave me plenty of scope for the specific activities I was toying with.
It’s exciting at this point to look at the photographs arrayed in front of me and see more fully the progress of the story. The characters are there, they’re spreading out among the trees and the buildings, and their voices punctuate the sound of feet shuffling through leaves and forest debris. I can see them and follow them, and when I do their behavior begins to fill the plot. My story idea, initially vague, takes shape.
Ladies of Mystery 