Spotlight Profile
August/September 2005
"You cannot write something until you know it and you cannot know it until you write it, so what are you to do? You write it wrong until you get something you recognize." Stephen Spender
"Writers are people on whom everything is lost except the most important." Reynolds PricePatricia Sprinkle is no newcomer to the writing scene. She decided in ninth grade to become a writer and has never looked back. After graduating from Vassar College, her spirit of adventure prevailed, and she set off for a Scottish Highland village to pursue her chosen career. She traveled light, with only $750, a single suitcase, two coats, and a typewriter. Room and board cost $14 a week, and by the time the money ran out, she was the published author of a poem, an article, a short story, and a one-act play. Her career as a mystery novelist began at her husband's request; he suggested she write a mystery to help pay for all the ones she was buying. Since then, this busy lady has written the beloved MacLaren Yarbrough mystery series and two well-received non-fiction books. Patricia is the National President of Sisters in Crime.
Please join me in welcoming Patricia Sprinkle to the Spotlight.
IC:
Can you tell us a little about your MacLaren Yarbrough mysteries? How many of them are there now, and what's in the works?PS:
MacLaren Yarbrough is a magistrate in little Hope County, Georgia, down between I-20 and I-16. She and her husband also own and run Yarbrough Feed, Seed and Nursery, because in Georgia you don't have to be a lawyer to be a magistrate in smaller counties. Most of the seven books so far have taken place in Hopemore, the county seat, and involve the kind of people who live there. Who Killed the Queen of Clubs? tells the story of a club-woman and bridge player, who is found dead in her father's pecan grove; Who Let That Killer in the House? is about the suicide of the county senior high girls' fast-pitch softball team in the middle of a winning season; When Will the Dead Lady Sing? centers around a state politician out to get the Hopemore vote, but who is a blast from MacLaren's own past. The upcoming book, due out next spring, is Did You Declare the Corpse? and in it, MacLaren takes a bus tour of Scotland with a group of Georgians bent on investigating their ancestors--until one of them turns up dead.
IC:
At "Murder in the Magic City," you mentioned that people often come up to you and talk to you as if your characters are old friends. Could you elaborate on that? How does it feel to have created characters that other people respond to as if they were real-or should I say, corporeal-people?PS:
When I write readers back, I sometimes say that I feel MacLaren and I now have a mutual friend. It is wonderful when people consider the characters real enough to know because they are certainly that real to me. I am always surprised when I drive from Atlanta to Augusta and don't see a sign for "Hopemore" on I-20. I think maybe one reason people find MacLaren somebody they feel they know is that she has both foibles and a few stellar qualities, just like the rest of us.
IC:
I recently finished Who Invited the Dead Man and thoroughly enjoyed it. Your characters are so well-drawn. How did you decide on your main character?PS:
Which one would you consider the main character? MacLaren, the amateur sleuth? Hiram Blaine, the old coot who gets murdered? Joe Riddley, Mac's husband, who is recovering from brain injury? Each of them came from a real person originally. Mac is based on a real magistrate down in Waynesboro, Georgia, who took the job after her magistrate husband died. Joe Riddley and his brain injury were inspired by a friend who developed a brain tumor, and changed so drastically that we all had to get used to the "new" Gerard. And Hiram and his crazy convictions that aliens are massing on Venus, ready to attack earth, came from a conversation my son and I overheard in a doctor's office. You don't have to make up crazy people. You just have to eavesdrop a lot.
IC:
All of the above, but I was thinking primarily of MacLaren. What do you like best about her?PS:
That's a tough question. I like her feistiness, her determination to see justice done even when everybody else is telling her to let it go, her ability to like people who aren't immediately likable because she knows them so well she knows their good qualities as well as their bad, like Hubert Spence, her smelly neighbor, who also has fixed her appliances free for decades. And while she has few illusions about her husband and sons, she loves them dearly.
IC:
In your opinion, what makes a successful series character?PS:
They have to change and grow, and I find that having a fairly large family around them helps that happen. Mac has achieved reconciliation with a daughter-in-law she originally disliked, has gotten close to one of her grandsons she scarcely knew, has dealt with confessing to her husband a mistake in her own past, and next spring will take her first overseas vacation without her husband of more than forty years. I think having people around the main character that people like or dislike can help, too. It puts them in a bigger world, which we all inhabit.
IC:
How do you choose your topics?PS:
My antennae are always out for things that are indigenous to Middle Georgia, sometimes with surprising results. I knew nothing about girls' fast-pitch softball until a woman in a Michigan ice cream parlor lamented that her daughter just made her first home-run and she wasn't there to see it. I checked, and sure enough, that is central to life in Middle Georgia. A trip to Scotland inspired the story that comes out next year. My own new membership in a women's investment club made me aware how perfect a setting that will be for a Mac book. And just recently, I was at a family reunion in a North Carolina hotel where they were having the state taxidermists' convention. I toured their exhibits and talked to several of them. I have no idea how that will be used, but I know a taxidermists' convention is the sort of thing Hopemore would host. Watch for it! I am about to begin a new series, as well, which deals with family heirlooms and genealogy. That series, and the books, grew out of "stuff and stories" families pass on because of sentimental purposes--but which often come with an unexpected skeleton attached.
IC:
You also have some very popular non-fiction books, including WOMEN WHO DO TOO MUCH and CHILDREN WHO DO TOO LITTLE. Could you tell us a little about them?PS:
Women Who Do Too Much grew out of my own life experience, which I amplified by interviewing other women who had also become something of "experts" in dealing with stress because of life experiences they had gone through. First I taught it as a class, then the class asked me to write it down so they could have it in print. That book crosses many lines-- national, racial, ethnic,--and is now available all over the world in five different languages. Children Who Do Too Little, which is about why we don't teach children skills they will need to function in their own homes (cooking, cleaning, balancing their budgets, etc), why we NEED to teach them, and how to do it as painlessly as possible. That book grew out of my own need to know how to teach all that as I raised my sons, but also out of interviews for WWDTM. I discovered many women who regretted that they had been stressed in earlier years because they did too for their children--and now those children were grown and did not know how to plan meals, keep a house, or even function as part of a family team. Once I had written the books, people kept asking for workshops, so I've been giving one-day workshops for about thirteen years now, by request. I've done both workshops all over the US, and also have done WWDTM workshops in Canada and Venezuela.
IC:
How does the research you do for your novels differ from the research you do for your non-fiction books?PS:
Not much, now that I think about it. Research for me always involves three aspects: personal interviews with people who know more about a subject than I do, reading everything I can find about a subject (or, in the case of a mystery, a method of murder or a place where I plan to commit it), and personal experience. In my non-fiction, that means personal stories about raising kids or about times when I've had stress in my life. For my fiction, the personal experience involves actually going to the places where I set my books and smelling, seeing, feeling, and in some cases tasting the locale. In Deadly Secrets on the St. Johns, for instance, Sheila Travis fell in the St. Johns River three times, so I lowered a gallon jug into the river and brought up enough water to taste. And I joke that both when I was writing the first edition of Women Who Do Too Much and when I was writing the second edition, I had more stress in my life than at any other time.
IC:
What is your creative process? Do you work from an outline, or are you a "seat-of-the-pants" type? What kind of schedule works best for you? How do you go from a germ of an idea to a completed novel?PS:
Gracious! I'd have to write a book to answer all that! I do outline, because I tend to find life is easier for me if it's organized. Sometimes I outline a whole book and sometimes I outline (by which I mean write a sentence or two) the next few chapters to a major break in the book. I need to know who did it and why before I begin. I don't outline what happens to lesser characters as much, although I do try to keep track of various themes once a book gets going, to be sure I mention them often enough so the reader doesn't forget them. The schedule that works best for me is to write all day and read all evening, but I seldom live in that perfect a world. I prefer to write for at least three- four hours at a stretch, but sometimes have to break that up to care for my elderly parents or my young grandson or to do something for one of the organizations I have decided are worthwhile enough to invest time in. I try to write every day, but am not even rigid about that. When I'm not physically writing, I'm thinking about the book. I also tend to do a lot of thinking about a book before I begin to put it on the computer screen. For weeks after I get an idea I walk around like a sponge, soaking up anything that might possibly fit into that story--I jot down descriptions of people I see who are like some of the characters or even tear pictures from the newspaper and catalogues to remind me what they look like; I jot down anecdotes from my own and other folks's pasts that might fit in; and I may even take in a taxidermists' convention because it MIGHT fit in. I often also go through a file folder I have of mystery ideas in case one of them belongs to this story. By the time I begin to write, I usually have a file folder of all sorts of stuff, some of which fits. The rest goes in the mystery ideas file for another story.
IC:
Which came first? Fiction or non-fiction? Do you prefer writing one over the other, and if so, why?PS:
I started in college with fiction. Figured I'd write the great all-American short stories. Then I discovered that non- fiction paid better, and I did that for years. When I started writing fiction again, it was such fun to write that it took me a while to take it seriously as a profession. I kept writing non-fiction to satisfy my conscience that I had done some "real" work during the year in addition to writing a mystery. And I have to admit I enjoy doing the research and hard work of putting a non-fiction book together. It requires a lot more disciplined research on my part. And while my plans for the future largely involve writing mysteries and additional fiction, I do have some non-fiction books I'd like to write that I secretly consider "more valuable" than the mysteries. Sigh. When will I outgrow the Protestant Ethic?
IC:
How did you develop an interest in writing, an crime-writing in particular?PS:
I think it's an aberration of the mind you are either born with or not. When I was five I thought I wanted to be a surgeon, but I drew elaborate plans for a hospital with a chapel on the top floor and the mortuary in the basement. Mysteries were always my favorite reading material, but I never considered writing one until my husband took a look at our first year's expenditures and suggested, "Why don't you write a mystery to pay for the ones you keep buying." At that point I knew immediately what I wanted to write. I also went to my files and found that mystery ideas file, about half an inch thick, that I had been unconsciously filling for years. So I don't think I ever decided to write mysteries, it was just inevitable. We Presbyterians call that predestination . . .
IC:
You're currently National President of Sisters in Crime. What prompted your interest in Sisters in Crime?PS:
Sisters in Crime exists to seek a level playing field for women authors. Currently women write approximately half of the mysteries in the U.S. but get about 27% of the reviews and are less likely to be invited to be guests of honor at national conferences except at conferences featuring traditional (cozy) mysteries. This past year, women were not even nominated for Edgars in many categories. The exceptions were for Best Novel and Juvenile, where women were in the majority. We are often seen as writing only traditional mysteries, when women actually write in all the mystery genres. And we are more likely to be published in mass market paperback originals, which significantly reduces the chances that our books will appear in libraries, get reviewed, or be taken seriously as literature. I don't understand how women OR men can put up with that kind of discrimination in this day and age, and appreciate that there is an organization dedicated to researching the situation and loudly proclaiming the inequities until they begin to be righted.
IC:
What have you learned as President that you'd like to pass on to others?PS:
The war is far from won. We have yet to attract sympathetic men in significant numbers. After nineteen years of protest we have gone from 10% to 27% of the reviews while holding steady right at writing 50% of the books. Traditional myteries are still not taken seriously as literature, and Sisters is too closely linked with only traditional mysteries. And just in the past few years, publishers have come up with the term "chick lit" for books written by women for women, which I personally think is a denigrating term, reducing us to something cute and cuddly but not to be taken seriously. I'm not sure we have as many gains now as we did back in the seventies when the feminist movement was hotter. As I said, the war is not won.
IC:
Any advice for new writers seeking to be published?PS:
It's very hard these days, as everybody keeps saying. I do remember when I had my first book ready to submit, I used to worry that it wasn't as good as Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers, so I kept revising it and revising. Finally I went to a Bouchercon and had a revelation. I needed to read all the books I could that had been published the previous year. And I didn't have to be better than Agatha Christie, I just had to be better than the other first time authors. That was a relief. Know your competition and better them. And remember that publishing is a networking business like anything else. It often depends not on what you know but who you know. Attend conferences. Make friends with writers. Join Sisters in Crime (get a plug in there) and a chapter if there is one near you. And keep writing! Your second book will probably be better than your first.
IC:
You're in the Spotlight. Is there anything you'd like to address that we've overlooked?PS:
I'm exhausted from all this introspection, so let's just leave it at that so I can get on with writing a book. Thanks!
This interview was conducted for SinC-IC
by Beth Terrell-Hicks.
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