Katy McDermott

By the time I was ready to write the second half of Meeting Murder, I’d been out of the meeting planning industry for several years. No business travel. No fancy hotels. And I had only the vaguest memory of my chosen setting.

Clearly, a research trip was indicated.

Now before you start thinking that jetting to Miami Beach to do research for a book was glamorous, let me share a few things:

1) It was August – not exactly prime tourist time. The brutal heat was relieved only by the biblical downpours (with hurricane season only weeks away, the weather was volatile to say the least.)

2) I had no “status.” Not as a meeting planner, not as an author. In order to gain access to the places I needed to see, I was forced to – shall we say – “pretend.” The fact that the hotel I’d chosen to “case” had been the scene of a highly publicized real-life murder (of all things) just months before made my task even more difficult. No one wanted to talk – especially not to a writer. I did get a few answers though, and took a few surreptitious snapshots that served as definite inspiration once I returned home.

3) I was “between jobs” (translation: unemployed). Unlike the well-fed, cosseted drug reps and executives in my book, I made my trip as cheap as possible (hence Miami in August). And there was no time for lolling on the beach either – I didn’t even pack a bathing suit! Rather, I stayed in my ratty motel room and filled pages with notes, emerging only for “reconnaissance missions” which sparked more pages of notes…

In the end, though, I got the information I needeed – everything from the recollection of how cold it gets on planes to the names of streets in Miami. And I had one truly lucky break – a gentleman from the Miami Beach Film and Production Office took me on a guided tour of the town and gave me incredibly valuable insight (much of which appears in the book).

My characters and plot may be imaginary, but the details I got from that trip were real – and irreplaceable.

I am, however, thinking of setting my next book in Tahiti!

One of the biggest challenges I face in my books is how to make my characters three-dimensional. It’s so easy to fall back on stereotypes – cardboard cut-outs straight from Central Casting. How do I write a cynical police detective in a way that doesn’t put his cynicism front and center? My main character, Laurie, is a focused career woman – what quirks, what shades of personality, can I give her to make her more believable? What drives the two of them to act in the ways they do?

The answer, of course, comes from looking at all the real people I know in my own life. Family. Friends. Co-workers. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met a true archetype. Bad people have good qualities (well, most of them do…), good people abound with flaws, seemingly boring people harbor unexpected streaks of color. The only consistent element is that of surprise.

In Meeting Murder, I started to explore that idea, and I tried to give my characters a few unexpected traits. In future books, I’d like to do much more of that – to create characters that are as complicated, as multi-layered, as the people I see every day. As for my own motives, they’re pretty easy to figure out – as much as I want people to enjoy Meeting Murder, I just hope to write a better story each time.

Creating believable characters is hard enough without something on which to base those characters. Often, for me, it’s names. Names can come from anywhere – the phone directory, old yearbooks, novels I’ve read, former acquaintances or current co-workers (but I do try to change the names enough so that I don’t get sued!) 

Most times, though, they just pop into my head. I may have a vague – very vague – idea of who a character will “be” in a book, but picking a name helps me crystallize that character. Sometimes, admittedly, I think of cliches – this one’s a grande dame, this one’s a crusty local – what would they be called? Often the name changes after I develop a character profile (one suspect in Meeting Murder went through 3 name changes before I was satisfied!) – but that first name I think of lets me get to know him or her.

A character’s ethnicity sometimes helps, too. For example, I knew I wanted my main character, Laurie Kilcannon, to have an Irish-American background, but I also wanted to avoid the “Bridget O’Leary” stereotype. “Laurie” came from a passage about an old song in a book I read long ago; “Kilcannon” came from “Irish-izing” the last name of a high school classmate… A Japanese-American character’s name, on the other hand, presented itself to me fully formed – and with an appropriate nickname to boot.

At the moment, I’m working on character profiles for my second book. For one fellow, I have a name and nothing else. I look at the blank space beneath the name I’ve invented for him and think “Who are you?” I know he’ll tell me, in time. Maybe his name will change, maybe it won’t – but the name’s a pretty good place to start…

For good or ill, I got to see pharmaceutical launch meetings from both sides. As a meeting planner, I learned what goes on behind the scenes; as a drug rep during the 1990s heyday of Big Pharma, I saw up close both the decadence and the drudgery that characterized your average product launch.

It was a perfect perspective for writing Meeting Murder. My original inspiration (which takes such a deadly turn!) came from a pharma exec who showed up (having slept through both his alarm clock and the hotel wake-up call) literally minutes before a speech.

Added to that, I was able to draw on my experiences of overcrowded district breakout meetings, yawn-inducing workshops, and the dreaded role plays (drug reps out there will know what I’m talking about!) that make events like the theme dinner featured in Meeting Murder such a relief.

I’m grateful to have had both worlds to inform my writing – and to all the drug reps out there who’ve had deep sea fishing excursions cancelled on launch meetings, my apologies! (Read the book and you’ll see what I mean… believe me, you’ll understand…)