On Where We Get Our Ideas ‹ CrimeReads

There is more than one devastating murder in my debut novel One Night, New York. It would, of course, ruin the book to reveal who dies at whose hand, but what I want to do here is poke around a little bit in the who and the when and the how of writing these murder scenes. For someone who hasn't killed or been killed (adding a ‘yet' here seems ill advised either way) murder scenes can be tricky. As writers we are told to write what we know, to mine our own emotional experience so that our characters might rise up off the page and cling to the reader as full-bodied, living, breathing souls. And so, we dig. We pull up old loves and resurrect them, we sift through traumatic conversations for nuggets of gold, we pan our lives for passion and spite and heartbreak and despair. But what happens when we haven't experienced something, when we have no idea what it might be like to murder someone or to suffer the most violent of deaths? I turn, as I have always done, to films and photographs, to books and paintings and buildings and lethal creative minds for inspiration. These are the words and images, the faces and spaces, that have helped give life to the deadliest scenes in One Night, New York.