By Lori Rader-Day
Home Is Where the
Drama Is
My third novel, The Day I Died, is getting published soon and maybe it will
surprise no one that it’s set in Indiana. Well, half of it is. Here’s how the
book begins:
On the day I died, I took the new oars down to the
lake. They were heavy, but I was saving myself the second trip. The blades rode
flat along the ground, flattening two tracks through the wet grass.
It was morning. The air was cool, but down on the
dock, the slats were already hot. I noted a lone fishing boat out on the water.
Inside, two men hunched silently over their tackle, their faces turned out
across the lake. Beyond them, mist rose off the water, nearly hiding the far
shore.
This moment. This is what I return to.
Later, I will note the long crack in the new oar,
just before my head goes under, just before the flume of blood rises off my
skin under the water like smoke. I will come back to this moment and think, if
I had just gone back up the steps to the house immediately. If I had just
stayed up at the house in the first place.
If I had just.
________________
That’s a prologue
of sorts. You can read the first full chapter HERE, where you’ll see that the
protagonist has survived whatever-this-is to find a home in a small town in Indiana
with her son.
I love to write
about home. “Home,” though, is a complicated word. Is it where I grew up? Or is
where I’ve lived for the last sixteen years? That’s exactly the kind of thing
the protagonist of The Day I Died, Anna Winger, thinks about, with one big
difference: she can’t go back to hers. Or at least she thinks she won’t. And
then there’s the current situation brewing inside her apartment with her son.
Home makes good stories, because home is
where the drama is.
My first novel was
set in the surrounds of Chicago; the second back home in Indiana. This one is
split between the place Anna lives now and the place she yearns for. I can
already tell you that my next next book is set in Michigan; the protagonist is
a transplant to Chicago, like me, merely visiting. I had to borrow the Michigan
setting, but I was able to bring a Chicagoan’s hard glare to everything she
encounters there. That makes the story easier for me to get inside of, the
better for me but also the better for my reader.
But with that next
work-in-progress drafted, now I have a moment to think: What’s next? The
Sisters and Misters of the Speed City Chapter probably feel the same as I do:
Ideas are easy. I had three ideas while I was brushing my teeth this morning.
But which idea has legs enough to run for four hundred pages? How do I want to
spend the next year of my writing life?
It’s really no
wonder I so often write about home. Home is where I’d rather be, no matter
where I am.
How do you decide
the setting of your stories?
--
Lori Rader-Day, author of The Day I Died, The Black Hour, and Little
Pretty Things, is the recipient of the 2016 Mary Higgins Clark Award and
the 2015 Anthony Award for Best First Novel. Lori’s short fiction has appeared
in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Time Out Chicago, Good Housekeeping, and
others. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches mystery writing at StoryStudio
Chicago and is the president of the Mystery Writers of America Midwest Chapter
and the co-chair of Murder and Mayhem in Chicago.
Lori is also a member of the Speed City Chapter of Sisters in Crime.
No comments:
Post a Comment