Writing the Rich
Elizabeth Zelvin
I’m delighted to welcome today’s guest blogger, Elizabeth Zelvin, a New York City psychotherapist whose mystery series about recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler and his friends includes Death Will Help You Leave Him (in stores now), Death Will Get You Sober, and three published short stories, one nominated for an Agatha award. Her author website is www.elizabethzelvin.com. She blogs on Poe’s Deadly Daughters.
Members of Mystery Writers of America were excited to get a recent email announcing that the next prestigious MWA short story anthology will be edited by former MWA president Nelson DeMille, and that the tentative title is The Rich and the Dead. The rich are not like the rest of us, DeMille said in explaining his choice of topic. How far will they go to keep what they have? I’m not so sure DeMille himself isn’t one of “them,” at least in terms of money. He’s been a bestselling author for a long time. But it’s a fascinating premise, and it’s got at least a few writers I know already fingering their stock of story ideas like Silas Marner’s hoard of gold, thinking about which of them might be spun into a tale about the rich to submit by the March 15 deadline.
Everybody wants to be in an MWA anthology. Half the stories are acquired by invitation only—those are the slots that go to award winners, best sellers, and veteran short story writers with a significant track record in the genre. The other half—usually ten stories—are selected by blind submission. As I understand the process, a committee appointed from within MWA reads the submissions, and Mr. DeMille will either accept or veto their picks. The most recent anthology, to appear in 2010, combines the paranormal and classic detection, is edited by Charlaine Harris, and drew around 225 submissions for those ten slots.
Nelson DeMille himself has written a brilliant novel on his proposed theme: The Gold Coast, which I consider one of his best. A Mafia don moves in next door to an old-money guy on the North Shore of Long Island; the two are fascinated by and ultimately destroy each other. So the challenge is to do it in 3,500 to 7,000 words and make it about the rich but completely different from DeMille’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and everybody else’s.
At least half my own short stories have been written with a particular market in mind. It can be helpful to start with a theme, whether it’s a type of protagonist (cop, PI, werewolf, jet setter), a setting, a season, or a subgenre. I came up with a couple of ideas, maybe workable, maybe not, before it occurred to me that I know a handful of real-life people who are very, very rich. One of them is a household word: one of the late 20th century’s two or three top songwriters, with whom I went to grade school through high school. One, a college classmate, owns the football team that almost had a perfect season last year. The third is unknown but loaded: a junior high school buddy who’s a financier, collects Old Masters, and seems unperturbed by the downturn in the market.
Of course, we don’t use real people as our fictional characters, no no no. But most writers will admit to using bits of people they know as a starting point. So what’s the problem? It’s this: all three of the rich folks mentioned above is a perfectly lovely person. Each of them has a social conscience. Not one of them is a snob. So how can they inspire me to turn to crime? “They’re too nice!” I complained to a friend at the MWA holiday party, a couple of days after the call for submissions went out. Being a crime writer herself, she gave me a sinister leer and said, “We’ll have to do something about that!”
Death Will Help You Leave Him
December 7, 2009
Posted in: Guest Blogs
Loading ...
Leave a Reply