Spotlight Profile
July 2001
Chassie (rhymes with Tracy) West creates wonderful characters, and they come from listening, listening to stories. Growing up in North Carolina, Chassie listened and learned from a community of elderly African American women who talked about their experiences, and who loved to dish the dirt. And then there was radio, and she listened, putting her own pictures to the voices she heard. "Radio," she says, was "the wick that lit my imagination."
Chassie has had a long and varied career. Under various names, she has written everything from teen romances to adult romances to Nancy Drew mysteries, and now to mysteries featuring police officer Leigh Ann Warren.
Sunrise, the first Leigh Ann Warren mystery, was nominated for an Edgar; the second, Killing Kin has been nominated for both an Edgar and an Anthony. The third one, Killer Riches is another page turner, and will probably garner a nomination or two when the time comes.
So how does she do it, and how did she get started, and where is she going? Let's ask her! The Spotlight, please, for Chassie West!
IC
There's such variety in both your personal and professional lives. Let's start with the personal life first. Please tell us a little about the girl who grew up to become Chassie West ... and Joyce McGill ... and Tracy West ... and Carolyn Keene. Have we omitted anyone?
CW
Jeez, I hope not. It's getting crowded in here!
I was born in Plainfield, NJ and lived in the Garden State until I was almost eleven, when I moved to Greensboro, NC. The years in the south probably had the most impact on molding me into who I became. It was my first experience with rigid segregation and with living in an all-black environment. The former was enlightening,the latter enriching.
And because my mother and I were living with her sister, who was a generation older than my mom, I was exposed to a whole community of elderly African American women, fast friends of my aunt's. The tales they told of their early experiences, the dirt they dished! It was wonderful, an education unto itself.
But if I stop to think about it, I have to thank my early years during the 1940s and early '50s, listening to the radio as the wick that lit my imagination. A part of the process was drawing one's own pictures of the characters whose voices I heard, and it was almost a disappointment when I saw those characters on early television shows. They never looked like the people I'd envisioned and I almost always preferred my own.
I think radio, and my years in the south, influenced my use of language, and were the beginning of my facility for creating characters. I was good with English composition -- although when as an English minor in college I had to take grammar, I found it very difficult. Conditional this, active that, and dangling whichamajigs kicked my butt. They still do. I use correct grammar instinctively, but don't ask me to diagram a sentence!! Anyhow, those are the elements that contributed to the writer I've become.
IC
Do you remember learning to read, and what your favorite books or stories were?
CW
I don't remember not being able to read, although I can just barely recall the "See Spot Run" stage. And I remember my sixth birthday, when my mother took me to the library so I could get my very first library card.
I came across a copy of The Five Chinese Brothers about ten years ago and almost freaked. I hadn't remembered it until that moment. It was like stepping into a time warp. It all came back, that and The Little Engine That Could, and Babar the Elephant, et al. Until that moment I couldn't have named a single book I'd read during those early years.
The only other book that sticks in my memory was called The Scarlet Cloak, or Cape, I'm not sure which, a mystery set in Hawaii. This was during the seventh grade and I was a volunteer in the school library. It was the first book I'd encountered that had teenagers kissing in it. I must have checked that book out 60 times. And it engendered in me a love of Hawaii that has endured to this day.
IC
When did you begin to write stories of your own? Did some person or some event in your early life inspire you to become a writer?
CW
I was on the staff of my high school newspaper, probably to avoid phys ed. And my high school English comp teacher had us write short stories for homework, and I thoroughly enjoyed that. I wrote a short story for a Seventeen magazine short story contest about a teen-aged witch, but needless to say, it didn't win.
That was it until the early 1970s, when a creative writing teacher at the college for which I was working insisted, based on my correspondence with her over the summer, that I had the makings of a published writer. I considered the idea absolutely bizarre, but Joyce Varney Thompson is Welsh, with the tenacity of a Welsh terrier, and she kept at me until I gave in and began writing just to get some peace. The bug bit. I was hooked. Still, it was ten years before my first book was published. Shows you how mule-headed I am.
IC
Tell us about your experiences in theater, films and commercials. Was acting your first choice as a profession, or something you did for the love of it?
CW
That is so long ago it seems like another life. I have a bachelor's degree in drama and was a passable actress. After graduation from Howard University, I worked in community theater and a local professional theater, along with the occasional film for Army recruitment and the like. It was never my day job or I'd have starved to death, but it consumed every waking hour after 5 p.m., and weekends. But once I started writing, it fulfilled my creative need and then some. I left theater behind.
IC
What did acting teach you that could be applied to writing?
CW
I think my theater work rounded out my facility for creating characters. In a manner of speaking, I guess I'm still acting, since the process is pretty much the same -- taking the skeleton of a character and fleshing it out, making it your own, giving it life.
IC
Your Website mentions retirement from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. That sounds like rich material for a mystery writer. Will that background figure prominently in future books?
CW
Probably not. At least, so far, nothing has come to mind, although it's been suggested often enough. I think I enjoyed my years there too much to want to use them in a mystery, even if I fictionalized it. APL was a very special place for me -- not sacrosanct, but close to it. If an intriguing plot idea should pop up, however ... well, who knows?
IC
You've had great success with your novels. Tell us about some of the early ones, especially the Nancy Drew Files. How did you happen to take on the challenge of updating a classic teen heroine? Were you free to make changes to the character of Nancy, or were you instructed not to tamper with her? What was the most rewarding aspect of doing Nancy Drew? Was there a downside as well?
CW
Since I had never envisioned writing for young adults, have no children of my own, and was rarely around young people, I always approached writing my YAs in the same way I would write for an adult. I did avoid words with which I thought a teenager might not be familiar, unless their meaning was obvious, but other than that my style and voice have been the same from the very beginning.
The only thing Nancy Jackson and Carolyn Marino required of those I wrote for Silhouette's First Love imprint was the inclusion of a moral. The trick was not to make it obvious. I was complimented to be considered for a Nancy Drew slot. I was invited to try on the basis of the quality of the books I'd written for Silhouette's YA line.
At that point there were two Nancy Drew series being updated to the 1980s, one for the younger reader, one for the older, and I was far more comfortable trying for the latter, which has since been discontinued. But it was the hardest writing assignment I've ever attempted.
Nancy Drew is an icon. Her character, personality and those of her friends and her father, even the town itself, are set in stone, thanks to, at that point, 50 years of her adventures in black and white. So even though she was now driving a Mustang rather than her roadster of the 1930s, and she and her buddies could use more contemporary language, and she and Ned could engage in a chaste kiss, (which incidentally caused great uproar from parents who were fans of the earlier series), Nancy, et al, had to be the same easily recognizable characters they'd always been.
There was no coloring outside the lines, so to speak. I found it very confining. And it took a discipline I was hard-pressed to dredge up. But I did it. Twice. It was a good lesson. And I get more reaction because of those two books than the remaining twenty-three I've written. That says a great deal about the popularity of that one young woman.
IC
As Joyce McGill, you wrote award-winning romantic suspense novels for Silhouette Intimate Moments. Your novel Unforgivable was Silhouette's first ethnic romantic suspense, featuring African American protagonists. Did you set out to blaze a trail, or did you simply write what interested you?
CW
I wrote Unforgivable because I was asked to, and was tickled brownish-pink to have been given the opportunity. Forgive a moment of blatant self-promotion, but my very first book, Lesson in Love for Silhouette's YA, was the first in the line to feature African American teens as the protagonists as well. I didn't think of it as trail-blazing at the time, although that's what it turned out to be, in both instances.
And I approached both as I do for any book I attempt. I write solely to entertain and engage the reader, no matter their ethnic background. You buy a book to be transported into another world, whether or not it's one with which you are familiar. That is and always will be my goal.
IC
You're three books along in your series featuring Leigh Ann Warren. The second book, Killing Kin, has been nominated both for an Edgar and an Anthony. That must be a heady experience. How do you deal with it?
CW
It's not so much a heady experience as a complete surprise. I still haven't gotten over it.
IC
Tell us a bit about the series. What prompted you to make Leigh Ann a police officer?
CW
Probably because in 1993 when this was written, I thought there was room for one more, especially an African American police officer. But I really wanted to focus on what was happening to her as an individual, rather than involve her in a series of job-related crime-solving events.
IC
Where has your research for Leigh Ann's character taken you? Any surprises along the way? What predictions do you have for Leigh Ann's future?
CW
Aside from one idea which will have to wait awhile, I don't have any surprises. Leigh Ann has come to the end of one stage of her life, in that she's committed to marrying Duck, her police detective fiancé, she's found a family she didn't know she had, and despite her disability, she can continue to be a police officer, albeit in a different venue from the one in which she's worked for the previous eight years. So the problem now is coming up with credible crimes in the community in which she'll be working. That can get sticky, since practically everyone in Ourland Shores will be related to her. But it also raises interesting possibilities. We'll see.
IC
Loss of Innocence features Troy Burdette, a very appealing protagonist. Do you plan to take Troy further, or have you shelved that cast of characters? If so, why?
CW
Troy, like Leigh Ann, was never meant to be a series character. When I wrote Sunrise and Loss of Innocence, the last thing on my mind was writing a series. It was only due to the clamor about Leigh Ann and Duck and whether or not they'd survive as a couple that I decided to continue. It's possible Troy may appear again but I doubt it. However, Julia (Aunt Jay) Wingate, the elderly woman who launched Troy's quest to begin with, just may, also due to popular demand.
IC
Tell us a bit about how you write. Do you keep to a schedule? Do you write a first draft in one swoop, or do you edit and rewrite as you go? Do you outline? Do you write out character studies before you start or develop them as you go?
CW
I always thought, while I was holding down a 9-to-5 and writing at night, that if I ever got to the place where I could write full-time, I'd keep to a schedule, plop my fanny in front of the computer at a certain time at least five days a week, and write for a certain number of hours. Yeah, right.
That hasn't happened. I've been very disappointed in my lack of discipline. I seem to write better under the gun, with a contract deadline staring me in the face. I must change that pattern.
As far as the process is concerned, I edit and rewrite as I go. And I don't outline or do extensive character studies either. I've tried and my brain simply refuses to participate. So I start out with a general idea of the crime, and whodunit, and fumble my way from there, making it up as I go along.
I don't advise it to others, especially beginning writers. There've been any number of times I've written myself into corners, or inserted a bright idea that just occurred to me into Chapter Eight, which meant going back and setting it up in Chapter Two. There have been times that characters did something or reacted entirely unexpectedly. And in Sunrise, once the culprit was revealed, I realized that it was anticlimactic. I needed something else to happen to end the book. The character who solved the problem for me acted of her own volition. It came as a complete surprise.
That's what makes writing fun for me. But it can also be maddening, and I've got the gray hair to show for it.
IC
Do you have a room or home office dedicated to writing, or do you write wherever you happen to be?
CW
I've always had a home office and that's where I work. The only time I may drift into another room is if I'm stuck. Then I grab a lined pad and a pencil and work it out in longhand. I've been fortunate to be able to take working vacations, camping out on a balcony overlooking the Atlantic on Hilton Head Island with my laptop for a week, indulging in intensive writing. I get a lot done during those periods. Wish I could write anywhere, e.g., on trains and planes, but I can't.
IC
What is the hardest part of writing for you? The easiest? The most fun?
CW
Plotting kicks my butt. I have never been able to plot a book from beginning to end before sitting down to write it. I've blown months trying. I've given up. What works for me is sitting down in front of the computer and getting on with it. In other words, winging it.
Characters are the easiest for me, and the most fun. Like the plots of my books, they develop on their own into who they turn out to be. Probably because of the influence of my aunt's friends sitting on the front porch and chewing the fat with her, my elderly characters always seem to be the most appealing. The fact that Leigh Ann struck a nerve with readers was a surprise, because I wasn't sure my younger characters were as strong. Shows what I know.
IC
Do you have a theme in mind when you begin a new novel?
CW
No, just a general idea of the crime, the circumstances, and in most cases, the perpetrator. It seems to take off from there.
IC
How has your success affected your friendships and family relationships?
CW
I'm very fortunate in that most of my close friends are also writers. I'm a member of a critique group that has been meeting twice a month since the mid-seventies. Some very solid friendships have developed as a result. The few close friends who are not writers are very supportive and cheer me on. Family-wise, my half-brothers and -sisters comprise one heck of a fan club, and talk me up at every opportunity. My husband died in 1998, but I was so touched at how proud of me he was. Keeping at this writing business would have been very difficult without his wholehearted support. So I'm very fortunate to have family and friends rooting for me.
IC
Besides Sisters in Crime, are you active in other writers' groups? What have you found to be the greatest benefits and/or source of enjoyment?
CW
I belong to the Authors Guild, Romance Writers of America, Washington Romance Writers, Black Women in Publishing, African American Writers Online, Novelists Inc. And, of course my critique group, which has kept my batteries charged for almost thirty years. I could not have persisted without them.
IC
What is the best advice anyone ever gave you about writing?
CW
One, read, read, read. Two, put fanny to chair and fingers to keyboard. You can't consider yourself a writer if you ain't writing!
IC
What advice would you give a writer just beginning a career?
CW
Exactly what I just said. Add to it, don't give up. Stick to it. With every sentence you write, you learn more. If you can, find a critique group. Listen to the mistakes others are making, and learn from them. But first and foremost, DON'T LOSE HOPE and DON'T GIVE UP.
IC
If you could go back and start over with writing, what would you do differently?
CW
I would probably try to be more disciplined about the whole process and write something, anything, each and every day. I don't regret the ten years of hit-and-miss tries, and the learning process of those years before my first book was published, but I could probably have cut a few years off of it if I hadn't let life get in the way.
IC
Do you make time for hobbies and other interests? What do you most enjoy doing when you have time and leisure to spare?
CW
All my former hobbies have fallen by the wayside. When I have leisure time, I tend to spend it reading, which I've always enjoyed. There are lots of things I would like to do, but time and energy simply won't allow it.
IC
What are some of your favorite books when you read for pleasure?
CW
I tend to read mysteries for the most part, and I try to keep up with as many of the books written by fellow SinC authors as I can. It may be bizarre to call some of their books inspirational but, for me, that's precisely what they've been.
IC
Where to next, Chassie? Where do you hope your writing will take you?
CW
I'm trying to launch a single title, part mystery, part family saga, just to give myself a short break from the series. Whether I get anywhere with it remains to be seen.
IC
Have we overlooked anything? If there's something you'd like to add, now's your chance. You're in the Spotlight!
CW
I think that about covers it. I can only say how invaluable and precious my association with this community of writers has been. Writing can be such a lonely and isolating process. Y'all have made a considerable difference, and I'm very, very grateful.
IC
Thanks so much, Chassie, and best of luck to you!
This interview was conducted during the month of June 2001 for SinC-IC
by Pat Browning.
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E-mail Chassie
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Read an earlier Spotlight Profile
