AfterEllen:
Thank you for taking the time to talk with us.
Laurie
R. King: I’m happy to, and in fact I have gone
to great efforts to get you a scoop….I just approved yesterday
a contract for a Kate Martinelli book.
AE:
That’s great; I’m really looking forward to reading
it! Since you just signed the contract, though, it’s still
years away?
LRK:
Yes; it will be—next summer’s book is already…in
copyediting, so this will be for the summer of 2006.
AE:
Wow, excellent.
LRK:
No name yet.
AE:
Well, I’m sure you have many readers who are dying to read
the next one.
LRK:
Yeah, it’s really difficult because you know when you start
becoming a part of the publishing industry, you find yourself
hedged around by your very popularity. I love writing the Russell
character but it means that people don’t want me to write
other things, and since I can only write a book a year (laughing)….If
I could write two or three books a year, everybody would be happy.
AE:
Yes, but that would mean never leaving your house or breathing.
LRK:
Yeah, my mind would only—it would break down, I’m
sure.
AE:
It’s really impressive that you manage to write a book a
year, because your books are fairly substantial.
LRK:
Yeah.
AE:
How do you manage to do that?
LRK:
Some of them are a little difficult to get completed, but I kind
of like having a cycle, you know, a yearly cycle. It fits well
with my way of working and my way of looking at the year. Some
people’s books, they really need 18 months or two years.
I happen to write fairly rapidly once I get started, and because
I wrestle best with the book on the page, you know, as I’m
writing, it means my preliminary time isn’t as big as some
writers.
AE:
Tell me a little bit about your process then.
LRK:
Normally I start a book in September…. I will have at that
point…an idea of the characters, the setting and the main
problems, whatever the main concentration of the plot is. And
that’s about all I’ll have. I won’t have the
minor characters, I won’t have the solution to the problem;
I’m writing blind. Some people cannot stand it; this is
not something they function with and they have to have an outline.
I find an outline impossible. I can’t envision an outline
before the book is going…. When I finish my first draft,
it is in effect a 300-page outline that tells me what the story’s
about. And in the rewrite I then make the book work.…
My
first draft is utter nonsense. There are characters who appear
out of nowhere, their names change, there are scenes that suddenly
develop and then peter away unrealized. Because it’s a working
manuscript, it’s not a developed thing. And when I do the
rewrite, that’s when I make sure that all the people match
what they’re supposed to do, you know, that the plot actually
develops and goes somewhere. You know the first draft tells me
what book I want to write, and then [in] the rewrite I actually
write the book.
AE:
So how long do you spend on the first draft, then?
LRK:
Well, the first draft—and again it’s normally roughly
300 pages…normally takes me from say, if I start the first
of September, until the Christmas holidays, when the kids were
small and they were home. I tried to get it finished before the
holidays, not usually managing, but I tried to get it out of the
way and sometimes it goes into January. And at that point I would
know where the book needed to go and also what kind of research
I needed to do to get it there, because I would have done a certain
amount of research before starting the book, but not detailed
stuff. Research is so addictive that you can get permanently bogged
down and you’ll never start writing the book…. I find
that it doesn’t really help me to know the minute details
of something because I may not use it…
After
the first draft is out of the way, the more detailed and specific
research begins. And usually I will continue doing that over the
next several months while I’m doing the rewrite. On the
one hand I’m rewriting with an eye to plot and character,
and I’m doing the research with an eye to getting it right.
The rewrites generally take me longer than the first draft. The
first draft will take three or four months, the rewrite will take
four or five. And then when I finish the thing and send off the
final version I then spend the summer doing general research for
the next book. So I don’t take holidays (laughing). I had
a holiday in 1999, I think it was Hawaii for five days.
AE:
Do you write all day as well?
LRK:
I used to, when I was first starting out. I used to do these huge
days of 12 hours…I can’t do that anymore, my brain
won’t stop and so I have to call it quits at dinnertime.
I cook dinner and I’ve done all I can do, because otherwise
I’ll go to bed and my brain will be turning over and I won’t
sleep (laughing)….I write five to six days a week, seven
if it’s toward the end of a manuscript and I’m really
pushing. And each day I’ll write, oh, say five to ten pages…
AE:
That’s a pretty good rate.
LRK:
It is. At the end of Locked Room, the one for next summer,
I was just being driven mad because I had started the book and
put it down four times over the course of the spring, and each
time I didn’t know what it was doing and it would take me
two weeks to get back into it, and then I’d have to go off
on another set of conferences. In June I was going insane and
I just sat down and wrote and did nothing else for a week, and
I wrote a hundred pages in a week, which is kind of a lot.
AE:
Yeah!
LRK:
You know it was just incredible, the book actually had an end
to it and it worked! It was really quite miraculous.
AE:
That’s great. Have you always wanted to be a writer? I know
you spent a lot of time raising your kids and going to grad school.
LRK:
Yeah, I was an academic and a mom and a sort of general dogsbody
and repairman at the house, that sort of thing. I didn’t
start writing until I was in my thirties. I think I was 35 when
it suddenly occurred to me that actual human beings wrote those
books on the shelves…and to realize that if that many people
could write books then maybe I could write one too. So I sat down
and started and just kept going.
AE:
You started with the Mary Russell books, right?
LRK:
Yes, Beekeeper’s Apprentice was the first book
I wrote in full.
AE:
What made you decide to go from the Russell stories, which are
historical mysteries, all the way to contemporary San Francisco?
LRK:
I’d written two of the Russells, and had sent them out to
a certain extent…. It was clear that the publishing world
was not beating down my door to get at Mary Russell—you
know, the irony of it.
AE:
They would later!
LRK:
Yeah, well, that’s typical, isn’t it? Nobody wants
something because it’s different, until suddenly they want
it because it’s different. At any rate, I’d written
two of those, and because neither of those had sold, I thought,
well, rather than write a third one and just entertain myself—which,
I was entertained with writing—I thought, what if I changed
the whole focus of the story? I was at that time working with
the idea of a world-ranked woman artist, a sort of female Rembrandt:
what would she look like? And she didn’t really seem to
go in the Russell/Holmes setting. It…was not a good fit.
I thought, what if I took that seed and planted it in another
area? Instead of historical England, to set it in an area that
I knew—California, San Francisco—made it contemporary
with me. I was then writing in the late 80s early 90s, and all
of the changes that came were due to that change.
Continued
on Page 2: King talks about
her lesbian detective novels.
