The Golden One - Elizabeth Peters [225]
Can you recommend others’ books to your agent?
I’d like to help aspiring writers; I’d like to help everyone in this suffering world. But I can’t recommend a manuscript I haven’t read, by a person I don’t know, to my long-suffering and very busy agent. I am very fond of him and want to stay in his good graces.
Where do you get your ideas?
I am sorry to say that this question has become something of a bad joke among writers. The only possible answer is: “Everywhere.” You don’t get ideas; you see them, recognize them, greet them familiarly when they amble up to you. A few examples from my own experience: Reading Arthurian legends and articles about the Cadbury excavations inspired The Camelot Caper [by Elizabeth Peters]. An oddly shaped bag of trash some lout had tossed onto the shoulder of a country road make me think about bodies in trash bags and led eventually to the skeleton on the road, in Be Buried in the Rain [by Barbara Michaels]. Like all skills, this one can be honed with practice, but if you have to ask the question you probably shouldn’t try to write a novel or short story. And if you ask a writer who has heard that same question dozens of times, she may come back with some snappy answer like, “There’s a drugstore in North Dakota where I order mine.”
How long does it take you to write a book?
One is tempted to reply, “As long as it takes.” The actual writing process is only the final step. You ought to have some idea of what you are going to write about before you put your fingers on the keyboard or clutch the pen, and that part of the process can take weeks or months or even years, as you mull over an elusive idea and try to develop it into a workable plot.
Sometimes I start writing with only a vague outline in mind, and have to go back to insert useful clues, develop characters, or even change the identity of the murderer! Naturally, it takes longer to write this kind of book. On rare and blissful occasions the book just flows along, without the necessity of major revisions. That happened to me with The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog [by Elizabeth Peters]. I wrote it in a little over two months — day and night, weekdays and weekends. However, I had already done most of the research, I had a very clear idea as to what would happen and when it would happen — the sequence, in other words — and I was intimately acquainted with most of the characters.
I know Amelia and Emerson so well by now that all I have to do is set up a situation and describe how they will inevitably react. It takes much longer for me to write a book about people I don’t know. I learn to know them as I write, and they have a nasty habit of developing in ways I didn’t anticipate. That’s when I have to go back and rewrite. I was halfway through Vanish with the Rose [by Barbara Michaels] before I realized that the person I had picked to be the murderer was obdurately refusing to kill anybody.
Are any of the characters in the Amelia Peabody mysteries based on real people?
The main characters inspired by real people are Amelia Peabody (based on Victorian amateur Egyptologist Amelia B. Edwards) and Emerson (whose methodology has been attributed to William Flinders Petrie).
Do you have a schedule?
No. I am not an organized person. However, when a deadline looms I can work like a demon, eight hours a day, seven days a week. Set schedules work for some people, not for others; but any writer who waits for “inspiration” to strike will never finish a book. Inspiration is all very well, but it will never replace sheer dogged determination.
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The Amelia Peabody Mysteries
Crocodile on the Sandbank
When strong-willed Amelia Peabody’s studious father dies, Amelia decides to use her ample inheritance to travel. After rescuing a gentlewoman (Evelyn Barton-Forbes) in considerable distress, the two become friends and Amelia hires Evelyn to be her companion on the next leg of her trip, which takes them to Egypt. There Amelia encounters mysteries, missing mummies, and Radcliffe Emerson, an opinionated archaeologist