Katy McDermott

I’d be a truly dreadful fantasy novelist – I could no more invent a world out of whole cloth than fly to the moon. I tend to stick to the author’s oldest rule: write what you know. Well, I may not know anything about murder, but I do know a little something about planning meetings. For Meeting Murder, all the details relating to meeting arrangements, the “pace” of the planner’s life onsite, the personalities of the meeting freelancers, and the political dance carried out by pharmaceutical executives were familiar to me. I felt like I was on solid ground writing about them.

I had only the most glancing of acquaintances with the animal rights movement, but I did attend a meeting where protesters donned fake animal heads to demonstrate against a pharmaceutical product. The big scene in the middle of Meeting Murder, which features a theme dinner called Safari Night, comes straight out of my own experiences setting up theme dinners on many meetings. No Safari Nights, I’m afraid, but the specifics of that setting were inspired by a proposal a vendor sent to me long ago.

All the characters in Meeting Murder are made up, of course, but many of the anecdotes and details come from my own background: getting caught as a child while raiding my mother’s lingerie drawer for Valentine’s Day chocolates, imagining a vanished parent to be a spy wasting away in a foreign prison, urgently asking for a meeting group’s breakfast in high school Spanish… and many more.

The real problems came with the police procedures and details regarding the crime of murder itself. I’m sure I got plenty of them wrong, research notwithstanding. For future books, I plan to delve into those aspects even more deeply, but I’ll probably always pepper in a few more personal nuggets.

Wherever I go now, I find myself wondering “could I use this for a book?” I look at faces and sometimes see the physical manifestation of a character I’ve imagined. Random experiences trigger thoughts of new scenes. A friend’s quirk may show up later as a character detail.

Write what you know. Or in my case, write what you know, plus what you see, plus what you research, plus what you imagine…