I’ve been working on the sixth Anita Ray mystery since July, and now have 44,000 words. That by itself should tell you that I haven’t been well focused on this one, but I’ve had two epiphanies this month. First, I know what the big crisis will be, and it’s coming up in the next 10,000 words. Second, and much more important, I don’t have to know a character’s motive until I get near the end.
This, the second discovery, surprised me. I’ve struggled with finding motivations for my characters’ behaviors beyond their conduct simply being the result of who they are, their past experiences and hopes for the future. That’s always been true of any character, but when it comes to murder or some other form of violence, I need to see something more in this person I’ve created, something that the reader hasn’t already divined by reading about him or her.
We stitch together our fictional creations from snippets of real life. Riding on the subway or bus or train brings us into contact briefly with the oddities of our world, the woman who wears orange sandals under a plaid lumber jacket on a sunny day, her jacket covering up fabric of such color we’re dying to get a look at it but she’s buckled up tight. Perhaps the only thing about her buckled up. We overhear snatches of conversation. I still wonder about the meaning behind the casual words of two men in a cafe. She’s always been like this; it was no secret. But he married her anyway? He did. And it isn’t medical? Nope. I really want to know what “it” is. And then there was the package that arrived at a neighbor’s, which she sniffed and shook, and apparently rejected because she left it on the front step. I don’t know what happened to it after that, only that it disappeared.
I’m curious about these people’s lives but if I put them in a story as a killer, I need to know what would make them kill. Being odd or different or cryptic isn’t enough, as every writer knows. We look to the great ones in our genre—Agatha Christie in the traditional mystery, Ray Bradbury in science fiction, or James M. Cain for noir—and think about how they developed their characters’ moves and failures. The motives for crime can be limitless, but perhaps the shortest list comes from Christie: greed, lust, envy. Those cover just about every failing in life.
I’ve been thinking about these for weeks now because even though I have a murder, another crime coming up, a diverse cast of miscreants, and a great deal of stupidity, I still don’t have a motive for the inciting incident. At least, I didn’t. That was part of the second epiphany this month. The characters can have all sorts of immediate short-term motives, but the one that’s driving everything has to be larger, tied deeply and inexorably to the character’s identity. I found it this month, and it has delighted me. It was almost obvious, but not quite.
The surprising thing to me is that I’ve written half the book without knowing why this is all happening and happening in the way it is. We watch people in life, just as in books, wondering what they’re up to. We’re waiting to cross the street when he see a man on the opposite sidewalk stop and stare in a store window; he peers, he moves closer, he looks around to see who else is nearby, and he stares even harder in the window. When he walks on, looking back once or twice, we cross the street and try to guess what he was looking at. It’s an old-fashioned tailor’s shop with the expected clutter in the undusted window—scraps of fabric, a bolt of cloth, a tape measure, a small cardboard box of pins and other notions. In the unlit interior beyond, we see nothing to catch our interest. So what was he looking at? He wasn’t wearing a fine suit, just a short jacket and slacks; and he wasn’t old enough to have known about regular tailors in this little city. But there is something in that window . . .
I stopped worrying about my characters’ motivations in this particular novel while I wrote, figuring each one would either come to me or it wouldn’t. And I have faith in my unconscious to supply the needful. But I’m also flexible, and if a better one pops into my head, I’ll go with that. This is all part of the path I decided to try with this book. I would write it without guideposts, outlines, clear (or vague) ideas of where I was going. If a character or incident popped into my head, I’d add it. I’d just keep going. It’s very liberating but also a little scary. I’m not sure what I have, if anything, but I do have a sense of things coming together. I’ll let you know in another 20,000 words or so where I am.
Ladies of Mystery 
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