Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Actually, when I was young, I wanted to be a painter. My hand still tingles when I encounter interesting and complicated lines and forms or some particular slant of light that brings out the colors of things--or damps them down. Sometimes I wish I'd stuck with it; however, although I was indulged as a child with a few bottles of poster paints, some newsprint, the occasional box of new crayons--my mother considered every other type of art supply too expensive or too sophisticated for me (she may well have been right!). Also I had nowhere to paint except down in dark and chilly depths of the cellar. These seem like poor excuses to me now, but I was an impatient child I suppose, and at a loss about how to realize my artistic cravings. So around the age of 8 or 9, I made a conscious decision to focus my creative impulses on writing. I had all I needed to write--pencils and paper were everywhere in our house (my mother was a writer herself, and my father taught English at the local university). I realized too that writing was a lot more portable than painting, and it can be quite satisfying, when it works. Nevertheless I still love browsing through art supply stores, trying out pens, fingering the huge variety of papers, yearning for an expensive paint brush. I tried ceramics once, and water colors, but found I didn't actually have the talent and didn't want to spend the time needed to develop much skill. Much as I hate to admit it, one must make a choice sometimes, and then just stick with it for as long enough as it takes to become decent at it.
So after you decided to be a writer, what did you write?
Well, I didn’t start out writing fiction, and I've kept rather serious journals since I was about 10. I recall early on doing different kinds of newspapers--a household newspaper, for example. Over the years I've written and edited all sorts of journalism, including a lot of book reviews. In my thirties I edited the New Jersey League of Women Voters statewide publication, which meant writing most of the articles and re-writing most of the submissions. Then I did something called "The Hazardous Waste News," also in New Jersey for ANJEC (the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions). This was a large format monthly newspaper about pollution and pollutants for local officials and citizen activists. I worked with a Princeton professor on this project and learned a lot, about writing as well as about journalism as well as chemicals and so forth. In fact, I was always getting assigned the newsletter task. Writing journalism is good practice though for fiction writers: one must be precise and accurate about the words, and work within specific word counts so you can't just drivel on and on, and you have to observe and listen to a lot of different people and learn their stories. I was rather reluctant to give that up, but I did finally when I came out to Berkeley: I hired staff to the newsletters and the websites. At Berkeley I needed to focus on academic research papers, which I did, with a few forays into popularizations of various planning topics. And I wrote poetry--still do occasionally. Only when I retired from work did I start to write fiction. I think it takes a lot of energy and time to create stories. But it is great fun. More than I ever expected.
How do you go about writing a novel? Do you just start out and let your imagination go where it wants to or do know how everything will work before you begin?
I've found that writing fiction is a somewhat different discipline from writing non-fiction, although they are certainly related. I'm a slow writer though, and I tend to be a perfectionist. Which is a curse. I vacillate between unscripted writing--that is, starting off with a character or situation and simply seeing where it goes--and really wanting to have an outline. Particularly for the mystery genre, there one writes down a lot of blind alleys using the former strategy, and you have to throw a lot out that simply does not work. What works for me is to imagine pretty clearly a beginning and an end, and then free wheel a bit through the middle. But I still do change my mind about some thing, while other bits happen more or less by serendipity. I admit I became kind of lost in the middle of writing Fog: I couldn't figure out how to get the story or the characters to the end I thought this story was going to have. It got way to complex for one thing. So I pulled out an old trick I learned in college when writing complex research papers: get a very big sheet of paper and write down the ideas in snippets without making any effort to put the snippets into any kind of order. Then start drawing lines and arrows to connect things up. This part can get pretty messy. When I think I'm done I collapse on my bed--for hours, or days--and go into a kind of half-sleep during which I yield my rational brain to my partly conscious brain, and just let that mechanism (whatever it is) struggle with it. It's amazing, very often when I get up, I'll know how to proceed. For Fog, I was in this half-sleep state when I realized that my original end was all wrong. So I changed it and then the rest of book went smoothly. I still find it surprising and wonderful what good work the semi-conscious, or sub-conscious, brain can do.
Where did the idea of writing a series of murder mysteries on contemporary ethical issues come from?
Well, I love reading mysteries: they're entertaining and the best ones are both thoughtful and humorous. I thought about writing my own for a long, long time, just to see if I could. But there are as you know a lot of different kinds of fiction in this genre. I however tend to favor the traditional ones, those that depend on detection. You know, solving puzzles, finding the coherent pattern in a random assortment of clues. I read a lot of mystery stories while I was growing up, from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys to Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Earl Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout. But it wasn’t until I was in college and reading W.H. Auden’s comments on the murder mystery in The Dyer’s Hand that began to see the mystery as something one might take seriously. At the same time I've always liked chewing on hard problems, particularly the kind people argue about in the public forum, like civil rights, abortion, the death penalty, that sort of thing. I find I rarely want to take a hard line: there seem to be so many ways to look at things. Well I can get really exercised about these questions sometimes. Anyway, it came to me that maybe it would be interesting to try to join together these two passions: the complicated rational mystery puzzle with a consideration of a philosophical dilemma. I started thinking about what kinds of dilemma might have murderous associations. I did not, however, want to take a hard advocacy position, but rather to promote and tease readers into seeing both sides of a question as partly valid, you know, rather like what the sleuth does as she takes a look at all the possibilities for how a murder was committed and by whom. It must not be all that clear in the beginning: the sleuth must have an open mind and try to take in all the clues and all the implications of all the clues and be on the lookout for what's missing in the various stories about the murder that get told. It struck me that this was a though process very similar to what one uses when parsing out an ethical dilemma. It's not always so easy to see what is the right thing to do. So that's where Fog came from. I'm hoping readers will find the story entertaining on the traditional mystery level and at least a little bit intriguing on this deeper level.
I read this book expecting you to take a strong position on the death penalty, but you left the question open? Do you or don’t you support the death penalty?
Frankly, I'm not sure where I stand, which may just be the point. Even after doing the research for my book and working out all the positions that are stated in my story, I'm not sure. Maybe I'm with Morgan, maybe not. I couldn't find many mysteries out there that dared to take up this death penalty debate, and most of those that do, tend to use the death penalty as a literary device to increase the reader's experience of suspense rather than as a philosophical or ethical problem that needs resolving--in other words, the threat of execution becomes a kind of ticking time bomb for an innocent victim of the State who will be wrongly killed unless the detective succeeds in finding the real murderer. The philosophical underpinnings of these stories, it seems to me, tend to be against the use of the death penalty on grounds that occasionally innocent people are executed. We all know that happens. But what interests me is should society therefore say we'll never do that. Maybe I'm just being contrarian about this: I do so hate those words "always" and "never" and truly evil people do exist. Anyway, I am hoping that readers of Fog will want to talk it. If people send in comments, I might well create a place on this website for them to get into it.
So, what ethical dilemmas will you get into next?
Conflicts of interest, for sure: the really murderous kind, involving big money and big power. Being of the older generation now, euthanasia also interests me, pretty obvious choice for a murder mystery too.
Actually, when I was young, I wanted to be a painter. My hand still tingles when I encounter interesting and complicated lines and forms or some particular slant of light that brings out the colors of things--or damps them down. Sometimes I wish I'd stuck with it; however, although I was indulged as a child with a few bottles of poster paints, some newsprint, the occasional box of new crayons--my mother considered every other type of art supply too expensive or too sophisticated for me (she may well have been right!). Also I had nowhere to paint except down in dark and chilly depths of the cellar. These seem like poor excuses to me now, but I was an impatient child I suppose, and at a loss about how to realize my artistic cravings. So around the age of 8 or 9, I made a conscious decision to focus my creative impulses on writing. I had all I needed to write--pencils and paper were everywhere in our house (my mother was a writer herself, and my father taught English at the local university). I realized too that writing was a lot more portable than painting, and it can be quite satisfying, when it works. Nevertheless I still love browsing through art supply stores, trying out pens, fingering the huge variety of papers, yearning for an expensive paint brush. I tried ceramics once, and water colors, but found I didn't actually have the talent and didn't want to spend the time needed to develop much skill. Much as I hate to admit it, one must make a choice sometimes, and then just stick with it for as long enough as it takes to become decent at it.
So after you decided to be a writer, what did you write?
Well, I didn’t start out writing fiction, and I've kept rather serious journals since I was about 10. I recall early on doing different kinds of newspapers--a household newspaper, for example. Over the years I've written and edited all sorts of journalism, including a lot of book reviews. In my thirties I edited the New Jersey League of Women Voters statewide publication, which meant writing most of the articles and re-writing most of the submissions. Then I did something called "The Hazardous Waste News," also in New Jersey for ANJEC (the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions). This was a large format monthly newspaper about pollution and pollutants for local officials and citizen activists. I worked with a Princeton professor on this project and learned a lot, about writing as well as about journalism as well as chemicals and so forth. In fact, I was always getting assigned the newsletter task. Writing journalism is good practice though for fiction writers: one must be precise and accurate about the words, and work within specific word counts so you can't just drivel on and on, and you have to observe and listen to a lot of different people and learn their stories. I was rather reluctant to give that up, but I did finally when I came out to Berkeley: I hired staff to the newsletters and the websites. At Berkeley I needed to focus on academic research papers, which I did, with a few forays into popularizations of various planning topics. And I wrote poetry--still do occasionally. Only when I retired from work did I start to write fiction. I think it takes a lot of energy and time to create stories. But it is great fun. More than I ever expected.
How do you go about writing a novel? Do you just start out and let your imagination go where it wants to or do know how everything will work before you begin?
I've found that writing fiction is a somewhat different discipline from writing non-fiction, although they are certainly related. I'm a slow writer though, and I tend to be a perfectionist. Which is a curse. I vacillate between unscripted writing--that is, starting off with a character or situation and simply seeing where it goes--and really wanting to have an outline. Particularly for the mystery genre, there one writes down a lot of blind alleys using the former strategy, and you have to throw a lot out that simply does not work. What works for me is to imagine pretty clearly a beginning and an end, and then free wheel a bit through the middle. But I still do change my mind about some thing, while other bits happen more or less by serendipity. I admit I became kind of lost in the middle of writing Fog: I couldn't figure out how to get the story or the characters to the end I thought this story was going to have. It got way to complex for one thing. So I pulled out an old trick I learned in college when writing complex research papers: get a very big sheet of paper and write down the ideas in snippets without making any effort to put the snippets into any kind of order. Then start drawing lines and arrows to connect things up. This part can get pretty messy. When I think I'm done I collapse on my bed--for hours, or days--and go into a kind of half-sleep during which I yield my rational brain to my partly conscious brain, and just let that mechanism (whatever it is) struggle with it. It's amazing, very often when I get up, I'll know how to proceed. For Fog, I was in this half-sleep state when I realized that my original end was all wrong. So I changed it and then the rest of book went smoothly. I still find it surprising and wonderful what good work the semi-conscious, or sub-conscious, brain can do.
Where did the idea of writing a series of murder mysteries on contemporary ethical issues come from?
Well, I love reading mysteries: they're entertaining and the best ones are both thoughtful and humorous. I thought about writing my own for a long, long time, just to see if I could. But there are as you know a lot of different kinds of fiction in this genre. I however tend to favor the traditional ones, those that depend on detection. You know, solving puzzles, finding the coherent pattern in a random assortment of clues. I read a lot of mystery stories while I was growing up, from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys to Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Earl Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout. But it wasn’t until I was in college and reading W.H. Auden’s comments on the murder mystery in The Dyer’s Hand that began to see the mystery as something one might take seriously. At the same time I've always liked chewing on hard problems, particularly the kind people argue about in the public forum, like civil rights, abortion, the death penalty, that sort of thing. I find I rarely want to take a hard line: there seem to be so many ways to look at things. Well I can get really exercised about these questions sometimes. Anyway, it came to me that maybe it would be interesting to try to join together these two passions: the complicated rational mystery puzzle with a consideration of a philosophical dilemma. I started thinking about what kinds of dilemma might have murderous associations. I did not, however, want to take a hard advocacy position, but rather to promote and tease readers into seeing both sides of a question as partly valid, you know, rather like what the sleuth does as she takes a look at all the possibilities for how a murder was committed and by whom. It must not be all that clear in the beginning: the sleuth must have an open mind and try to take in all the clues and all the implications of all the clues and be on the lookout for what's missing in the various stories about the murder that get told. It struck me that this was a though process very similar to what one uses when parsing out an ethical dilemma. It's not always so easy to see what is the right thing to do. So that's where Fog came from. I'm hoping readers will find the story entertaining on the traditional mystery level and at least a little bit intriguing on this deeper level.
I read this book expecting you to take a strong position on the death penalty, but you left the question open? Do you or don’t you support the death penalty?
Frankly, I'm not sure where I stand, which may just be the point. Even after doing the research for my book and working out all the positions that are stated in my story, I'm not sure. Maybe I'm with Morgan, maybe not. I couldn't find many mysteries out there that dared to take up this death penalty debate, and most of those that do, tend to use the death penalty as a literary device to increase the reader's experience of suspense rather than as a philosophical or ethical problem that needs resolving--in other words, the threat of execution becomes a kind of ticking time bomb for an innocent victim of the State who will be wrongly killed unless the detective succeeds in finding the real murderer. The philosophical underpinnings of these stories, it seems to me, tend to be against the use of the death penalty on grounds that occasionally innocent people are executed. We all know that happens. But what interests me is should society therefore say we'll never do that. Maybe I'm just being contrarian about this: I do so hate those words "always" and "never" and truly evil people do exist. Anyway, I am hoping that readers of Fog will want to talk it. If people send in comments, I might well create a place on this website for them to get into it.
So, what ethical dilemmas will you get into next?
Conflicts of interest, for sure: the really murderous kind, involving big money and big power. Being of the older generation now, euthanasia also interests me, pretty obvious choice for a murder mystery too.