Inspired by Elizabeth George’s Mastering the Process
The dock on Nicolet College’s campus. A good place to find a body?
I can never get enough of reading about how other writers write, so when I recently stumbled onto Elizabeth George’s Mastering the Process: From Idea to Novel (Viking, 2020), I eagerly dug in.
George is best known for her British crime novels about Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. The series was turned into a TV program that aired on PBS in the U.S. in the early 2000s, which is how I first came across her work.
But you don’t need to be a reader of mysteries to appreciate George’s explanation of her process. She uses extensive examples from one of her Lynley novels, Careless in Red. This includes not only excerpts from the published novel, but also from her planning documents, such as character analyses and her step outline.
George starts her process with research. She travels to the location she’s decided will be the setting for a novel and she arranges interviews with people who live and work there.
She writes, “[T]he research comprises not only the background information I need in order to write with some degree of authority about various subjects that may or may not come up in my novel but also an experience and an understanding of the place in which the novel is going to be set so that locations can be rendered with accuracy” (pg 10).
She includes several photos of places in Cornwall, where her novel Careless in Red is set, and explains how these different places helped inspire both character and plot. At the time, she didn’t yet know exactly who her victim would be or how the person would be killed.
That information arose out of both her location research and her interviewing people about surfing in the UK.
Having done similar research for my middle grade zoo mystery, I can attest to the value of location research and interviewing experts.
George’s description of and photos from her location research inspired me to visit the campus of Nicolet College in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. I know the place well because I taught there for a few years, but I’d never considered where to murder someone or where to have a dead body be found.
So I wandered around and took photos, all while looking for a good place for a murder to happen or a body to be found. I ran into a security guy twice but didn’t think to ask him where a good place would be to hide a body.
I know who the victim is, who the murderer is, and why the murder happens. I don’t know yet either how or where it will occur. The murder doesn’t need to happen on campus, but I think I want the body discovered there.
Two things I was hoping to learn from Elizabeth George were how she created her series detective characters and how she decides whose point of view to use in a given scene.
She has several chapters about characters and how she develops them. Choosing a character’s name is an important step for her. She also does freewriting, using a prompt sheet to learn things like a character’s ambition in life, who their enemies are, their political leaning, etc. (see pages 40-41 of her book for the full list).
George doesn’t talk about how she crafted the ongoing characters, which makes sense since they were created for the first novel in the series, A Great Deliverance, published in 1988.
In terms of deciding the point of view for a particular scene, George asks herself two questions:
“Among the characters that I’ve created, who can tell the story best?
“Whose individual story—as revealed in the character analysis—appears to be compelling enough to sustain a POV through the entire novel?” (pg 171).
I’m currently reading the second book in George’s series, Payment in Blood (Bantam, 1989), and paying close attention to the shifts in POV. George uses several POV characters for each book, including her two detectives.
I’m thinking of having at least two points of view in my adult mystery, maybe more. We’ll see.
Reading and analyzing other writers’ work is fun and instructive. What books have you been learning from?