WHAT INSPIRES US
Where do your ideas come from?
That is the most common question we are asked by readers. So we thought we would give you this page to help explain how we do what we do.
See the picture at the right? That is Eloise Hospital in Westland, Michigan, which from 1839 to the 1970s was one of the largest insane asylums in the country. As kids, we used to ride our bikes to Eloise and our childish imaginations would conjure up all sorts of tales about what went on inside those iron gates. Two years ago, we revisited the hospital -- and its abandoned cemetery -- and this time our imaginations worked in service of fiction. The result was our newest Louis Kincaid mystery, An Unquiet Grave For more stories behind the stories, click here.
All of our books were inspired by real places. To see photographs from the places that gave life to our previous books, please see our Location Photo Gallery. We also are inspired by our friends and people we meet at events.
How We Write Together: Wine and Post-Its
We don't know what readers are most surprised about when they discover who P.J. Parrish really is -- that we are women or that there are two of us. Our readers are okay with us being two old white Yankee women writing about a young black man from the South. But they have trouble wrapping their brains around the fact we are a writing team. One lady told us that if she had known ahead of time our book was "written by committee" she never would have bought it. For the record, she enjoyed it. But she was confused because she "couldn't see the seams."
So, how do Kelly and I do it? The lofty answer is that we share a common vision of what we want to accomplish with our books. We also know our character Louis Kincaid from his heart out. Everything we do is in service to this vision. And when you have that dynamic going, there's no room for ego.
Now, here is the less lofty answer. We do it with wine and Post-Its. That's right: Booze and little slips of gummy paper. See that picture to the left? That is Kelly hard at work on book. You can guess how wine enters our creative process. But what about Post-Its?
Here's how it works: We start with a doughball of an idea, then we roll it out into a concept. Then we work about 3-5 chapters ahead using a template of each chapter's purpose(s). We choose "assignments." We write down each chapter's main points on Post-Its and stick them on our big boards. Each Post-It is one major scene -- kind of like how Katherine Anne Porter once described her way of writing as creating scene islands and then building bridges of transitions to connect them. Since we live in separate states, we each keep a Post-It board going. We write our chapters, exchange them over AOL and edit each other.
But once a year, as we sprint madly for the finish line, Kelly comes down to Kris's place in Fort Lauderdale and we do the hard work of finishing and rewriting. That's when our Post-Its really come into play. We then switch to three-color system. The Yellows are for major plot points. Blue is for backstory. Purple or Pink is for changes we have to go back and make during rewrites.
This all started by accident. A couple books ago, we were struggling to get the plot points in the right order. Kris got frustrated and went to the store (probably to buy more wine). When she came home there was Kelly, sitting on the floor with dozens of scraps of torn-up paper, moving them around like pieces of a big puzzle. Kris grabbed her Post-Its and we found an old piece of cardboard. Voila! The PJ Parrish Method of Post-It Plotting was born.
Post-Its is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. And the PJ Plotting Method is going to be featured in a special comemmorative book. Maybe the nice folk at 3M will send us a couple free packages. Now, if we could just get Turning Leaf on board...
Louis's World: How We Create Our Characters
One of the hardest things about working separately in different states is coming up with a common vision of what things look like. It's easy with places: We travel to our locations and take a lot of pictures. You can see these real places by clicking here.
But agreeing on characters -- that's not so easy. One of us might think a character looks like Jerry Orbach but the other just can't visualize that. So often, we end up leafing through magazines and finding faces we like. We have found our characters in everything from society magazines to the Florida prison system website. It's kind of like the games readers play when they "cast" their favorite characters in a book. You just simply "see" someone in your head. A few examples: Louis's foster father Phillip is the old actor Michael Rennie to us; Joe Frye is the actress Charlotte Rampling; and Mel Landeta was inspired by our friend and fellow author Jonathon King.
Once we agree on our characters, we cut them out and paste them on a big piece of cardboard so we can keep them hanging around. That's our character board at right.
So who do you see as Louis? Well, we have our own idea, but we aren't telling! If you want to e-mail us with your ideas, we'll followup with a letter on the subject!
