The Writing Show - Information and Inspiration for Writers

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Correction!

Later digging revealed that this advice is actually from E.L. Doctorow:
"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

EH: Writing to me has always been a kind of exploration. If you want to get to those places that you’re not conscious about, you know? You discover all kinds of things in there. Some of the darkness that’s in the characters I write has got to be in me because that’s where it comes from. But I didn’t know that until I started to write those characters. They weren’t necessarily planned out. Some of them just appear on the page. Their thoughts and ideas and feelings are interesting to explore. It’s a great way to purge things out of your own soul that you don’t really want to have to do but you can have your fictional characters do.

EH: And some people say to me, "Does it disturb you to write dark characters, or villains or people who have evil in them?" And I think, "No. This is what writers do." Writers imagine their way into the reality of other beings, fictional or non-fiction. It didn’t bother Shakespeare to write Richard III with Richard as his hero, really, with great darkness in him but great attraction as well. I think that’s real. That’s something that writers need to be able to do.

MH: Let me take us back just a little step, here: you’re talking about the characters in your book. Can you tell us just a little it about them? You write a series?

EH: Yes, the first story [Haunted Ground, 2003] began with two main characters- an archaeologist named Cormac Maguire, who is a specialist in wetlands archaeology and human remains. His foil is an Irish-American doctor who is interested in bog pathology, and her name is Nora Gavin. They are thrown together in the first story while investigating the remains of this red-haired girl who is found in the bog. They also develop a relationship throughout the course of that book. They continue into the second book. There is a whole set of secondary characters- each book is separate- but they are the two continuing characters. Although I may bring back some of the people from the first book in the third book, too. There is a policeman who became kind of a third main character in Haunted Ground�.

MH: Yeah, Garret Devaney! I was kind of surprised that he wasn’t in the second one.

EH: A lot of people missed him so I am thinking of bringing him back for the third in the series. He was teaching his daughter to play the fiddle and I have to see how she is getting on � I don’t know until I write it.

MH: Progressing from book to book: Cormac and Nora get together in the first one. Then in the second there is a little bit of tension there�.

EH: You don’t want it to be stagnant. I’ve heard people talking about married characters � how once they get married, the romance goes out of it. This is true for several long running television shows as well. I don’t think that that’s necessarily true, but there still has to be a spark between them to make it interesting to read about, you know? If you read the Peter Wimsey series- is it Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey?- there was always a spark between them, even after they got together and got married. A couple of those books were written after they were married, but they always had great dialogue and interplay between them. I think if you retain that then it doesn’t matter if things, on paper at least, are settled between them. You know, but they have to be interesting people to begin with.

EH: So, yeah, I’m toying with that. The main problem with my two main characters is that they have this baggage, you know? Cormac has his parent’s marriage as a kind of roadblock for him with relationships. Nora has a past which includes the traumatic murder of her sister and she is not really over that. She lost her fianc� because of that situation. She’s a little bit skittish about romance as well.

EH: So they have this continuing baggage. I’m not trying to stretch it out as long as possible but circumstances have not been right for them to get married or anything like that. They’re still not sure about each other, really. It takes time. They really haven’t been together that long, you know?

MH: Let them mature a little bit. They’ve only been together for what, two books now. You mentioned that Nora has a tragic past. The novels are set in Ireland but she has run from her trouble in the States.

EH: That’s what she’ll be tackling in the third book. She’s come to Ireland about two years or so after her sister was murdered and she suspects her brother-in-law but they have no proof that he committed the crime, and so she worked and worked on the case with the police and wasn’t able to come up with anything and so the brother-in-law is free, and the reason that she has come home in the third book is that he’s about to re-marry. That puts the wind up her and she decides that she must face him again and see if she can’t resolve what happened to her sister.

MH: That’s at least one strong element for the third book. I’m looking forward to it. The first one begins with the discovery of the red-haired girl’s remains and then there is also a contemporary mystery involved as well.

EH: Right. I had to have something that was contemporary because if the murder that you’re first investigating is 350 years old, like the one in the book, there’s nothing that makes it really pressing. It’s the ultimate cold case if it’s centuries old. So I had to have also some kinds of suspenseful thing in the story that would make things really, really matter and put things into a life and death situation for the main characters. And so there is a disappearance that echoes the story of the red-haired girl as well. At the end you find out that there is a parallel between the story of the red-haired girl and the disappearance of a mother and child who have been missing for two years. Nora and Cormac get caught up in this disappearance because it’s the wife and son of the man who has hired Cormac to do the preliminary excavation on a development site on his land. He also lives next to the place where they found the red-haired girl.

MH: The second installment, Lake of Sorrows, once again there’s an ancient murder with distinct parallels here in the modern day.

Mick Halpin’s interview with John MacKenna for writingshow.com

EH: Right. I love parallel stories, you know? Things that echo or reverberate from the past to the present. There are elements of that in Lake of Sorrows. The first death in that, the first body they discover, is probably from the Iron Age- about two thousand years old. And then they discover a man in the bog who appears to have been killed in the same way that the Iron Age people were sacrificed- but he is wearing a wristwatch! So they know that it’s someone more recent even though he looks kind of similar to the ancient body.

EH: With that as an opening, I’m able to explore ideas about how we never really leave the past behind. I love that quote from William Faulkner about "The past is not dead�

MH: "It’s not even really past. "

EH: I think there are so many echoes of even the ancient past in our own beliefs, in our own behaviour, and I wanted to explore that a bit more. Through that story, Lake of Sorrows, I was able to do that by bringing in old customs, people. There is a fellow in the story who makes bonfires and who has these little rituals of doing things three times. All of these are leftovers from very ancient practices and beliefs and superstitions that we carry within us. We have a really hard time shaking all that, no matter how advanced out technology is or our intellectual prowess, all these things are still within us.

MH: The character you mention, that’s Charlie Brazil, right?

EH: Charlie Brazil, right.

MH: He was probably my favourite character from Lake of Sorrows. He was really interesting. He’s sort of a local outcast because of a family history� how would you put it exactly, Erin?

EH: People look at him and just see an odd duck. He’s the youngest person in the place where he works- a workshop on a big industrial bog- and he’s kind of a loner, and he does all these odd things. He doesn’t really talk to people. His co-workers pick on him a bit. But he’s an interesting, thoughtful kind of guy underneath it all as well. A very compassionate character.

MH: That really comes across. Who is it again, his father that is rumoured to have dug up a golden treasure trove out in the bog and then instead of turning it in, as you must do by law in Ireland, kept it for himself?

EH: Well, part of it. It was an expensive hoard. His father and uncle discovered this. And there was publicity about the discovery, but they didn’t turn over everything that they discovered. They kept some of the things for themselves as well.

EH: There’s a big education push going on in Ireland for the workers and other people who work in and around bogs for them to recognize and understand the importance of the things they might come across while they are digging. So there are posters all over when you go to Bord na M�na workshops and education campaigns. That’s the reason this recent find, the Book of Psalms that was found in Tipperary, that was the reason that the guy who owned the land knew that he should cover the material back up with wet peat and help preserve it before the museum people could get there. That’s one of the reasons why that artefact was preserved.

MH: That’s really a fantastic story, isn’t it? One of these big harvester machines that was turning the bogland into little peat briquettes and this- how old was it once again, that find in County Tipperary?

EH: I think they said it was about twelve hundred years old.

MH: It’s amazing that a book could last that long. And there it was! It almost got turned into a peat briquette. If this fellow hadn’t covered it back over with the wet turf, it would have just dried up and blown away overnight.

EH: Well, who knows how many interesting artefacts have been turned into briquettes and gone up in smoke?

MH: Tell us about some of the other interesting things that have turned up in the bog.

EH: There are lots of metal artefacts that you can see now in the National Museum. There’s a tiny boat made of beaten gold. That’s a really interesting artefact because it is the first evidence of a masted boat anywhere in Ireland. It was found with the boider torc, which is an Iron Age artefact. And the broider torc itself, it’s really an amazing piece of work. It’s very specifically Irish in design. It matches some of the other stone carvings and metalwork of the time and they know for a fact that it was made in Ireland and they know for a fact that the ends of it were manufactured on mainland Europe and brought to Ireland and attached there. It’s amazing how they can figure out all this stuff! And when you see pictures of the broider torc, it looks like a bracelet. It looks like a decorative bangle, a hollow gold tube with scrolls and things engraved into it. But when you see the real thing, it looks like Finn MacCool might have worn it. It’s enormous! It’s probably about eighteen or twenty inches in diameter. It’s an amazing object. Also they found lots and lots of early Christian things- Chalices and bishop’s crosiers. All kinds of different things in bogs.

EH: There was a story that I actually used in Lake of Sorrows about a woman who discovered a Viking brooch, just digging in her garden, and wore it as a lapel pin on her winter coat for a couple of years before someone realized it was a thousand year old artefact.

EH: There have been other things found as well. Just a couple of years ago- this wasn’t in a bog, it was on a beach- a man from Cork was on holiday up in Mayo somewhere and was out on the beach and found two gold torc necklaces- twisted gold necklaces- he left one at the holiday place and took the other one home and took it into a jewellery shop in Cork. He asked, "What is this?" and they said "It’s a fabulous ancient artefact that you must turn over to the National Museum immediately." "Oh," he said, "alright." He wasn’t sure what it was, but it was a solid gold piece probably from 2500 BC.

MH: You’ve done some bog archaeology yourself. You’ve actually gone on a couple digs.

EH: Well, I went to one dry land site because I was working on Haunted Ground and that includes excavation around a priory, a religious community which did not have much left above ground. So I needed some dry land experience and observations and I talked to a very nice archaeologist who explained a lot of things to me about how they do the excavation and what different marks mean and all that stuff.

EH: And then when I was working on Lake of Sorrows, as well, I went out to a Bord na M�na site- that’s the big company that does the bog excavation and cuts peat by the ton and burns it in power plants to create electricity- I went out for a couple of days with these archaologists who are hired by Bord na M�na. Whenever you do any development in Ireland, you have to hire archaeologists to oversee and see if there is anything of archaeological interest on the site. For every summer they go out for six or eight weeks at a time and look at different sites that have been pinpointed over the years that should be investigated. So they were uncovering wooden platforms and wooden roadways and woven wicker roads across the bog. They let me get down in the ditch with them and dig with my hands like they were doing. They explained in detail all of the work they were doing, and that was how I was able to get so much detail into the story. It was just wonderful, fascinating stuff.

MH: The first-hand knowledge really does show in your writing. It’s very well researched. How did you make initial contact with the experts in the various fields?

EH: Remember the woman who told me the story of the red-haired girl? Her son-in-law was an archaeologist. He’s the chair of the Archaeology department at UCD in Dublin. He talked to me for several hours and took me around the department and showed me all the work they were doing and explained a lot. He gave me a piece of two thousand year old bogwood, which I keep on my mantelpiece.

MH: Wow, that’s nice!

EH: Yeah! He also gave me the names and phone numbers of colleagues of his who might be willing to talk. That’s how I got into the conservation lab at the National Museum and actually got to observe as a technician was taking peat off of a leather satchel that had just been discovered a couple of days before. They thought it was probably about five hundred years old. It looked like absolutely fresh leather, something from a department store that just happened to drop in the bog the day before.

EH: That was how I got in to see Dr. M�ire Delaney, who is the expert on bog bodies. She would be the medical person who would do the examination of any bog remains that are found. She was invaluable at explaining how you have to do excavation of human remains out on the site. All kinds of medical detail about DNA analysis and all that kind of stuff. I actually had to change my plot slightly to reflect the reality of DNA and bog remains. Nuclear DNA is very fragile and is destroyed by the bog environment, so I had to change one of my plot twists to reflect that information. So it was really, really good to have people who knew the science able to advise me.

EH: It was good to have done quite a lot of research before I actually talked to them. It was pretty late in the process of writing Haunted Ground that I went and tried to fill in where there were holes- that was why my plot was wrong and had to be fixed! But it’s really important to me to get the science right. I was really, really lucky to have those people who were willing to talk to me.

EH: I also talked to the guy who was the keeper of antiquities at the National Museum. He was very good. I have an ancient book in the first story and I have all the physical artefacts- he was able to help me out with lots of details about those kinds of things as well.

MH: That follows on to another question. When do you know that you have done enough research?

EH: You can never do enough research!

MH: I have met many people who have told me, "I’m writing a great novel!" And then you ask them, "Well, how much you actually written?" � "Oh, nothing, but I have been researching it for ten, fifteen, twenty years�"

EH: It’s a great time waster!

MH: Yeah, pretty much! At the end of the day you do need to set pen to the paper and actually produce something. How do you know when you’re at that point? How do you know when you have enough to run with?

EH: I kind of do it in several stages. You have to make your story go forward. And then, as I’ve said before, I have this story in place, and then see where my ignorance was. Where were the hole that had to be filled in with actual, factual details? There’s so much interesting scientific or cultural detail or any of those kinds of things that you could just go crazy and put in everything that you’ve learned, and that’s kind of boring for readers as well. You have to be able to pick and choose and put in the things that will advance the story. That’s a hard thing to do because it’s all so fascinating, you want to include it all.

MH: Some difficult choices, I bet.

EH: Yeah, I cut a lot of things out that are just so interesting. Well, then again you can always save them for another book.

MH: That’s the truth. You’ve not only have a lot of accurate archaeological detail in there, but you�ve got a lot about the culture of Ireland. Tell me a little about that. How did you capture the setting?

EH: You know the thing that really kept me going all the time that I was writing that book- which was six years- was ignorance. I really didn’t know what I was doing the whole time. I had models of books that I liked that I looked back at several times and analysed to see how they worked. But none of the books that I had ever read covered the things that I am really interested in: folk music and folklore and then these elements of archaeology and pathology. I had never read a book that combined all those things, and so really I was flying by the seat of my pants. They were all interesting things to me and I hoped that they would be interesting to other people as well.

EH: The cultural stuff- my husband is a traditional musician. He plays the button accordion, and so most of our friends are musicians as well. So the reality of my experience of Ireland is that everybody plays music or sings or does something. There’s always music involved when we were over there. I wanted to put that in the story as well because it’s very different than life in the States, for one thing. And it’s a connection, again, between the past and present. Which is something that really fascinates me. One of my big themes in all of these books is that connection.

EH: There are all kinds of tunes. My husband plays tunes that were composed five hundred years ago and yet they are still in the repertoire of people who have never read music, they’re passed on from one musician to the next through those centuries. I’m just fascinated by that.

EH: I love the atmosphere of a music session- the chat, the drink, all that kind of stuff. I wanted to convey that, especially to American readers who maybe not experienced that.

Mick Halpin’s interview with Kevin Stevens for writingshow.com

MH: Like yourself, I’m married to an Irish musician. I’ve gone along to many a "sessoon."

EH: It’s just a reality. It’s what happens.

MH: Completely part of life over here.

EH: Exactly! You had a question, too, about The Quiet Man and how that is not a real representation of Irish culture-?

MH: Last December I interviewed an Irish-based American author named Kevin Stevens- his latest, Song for Katya I really enjoyed. On the topic of Ireland and the way it is perceived by America he said that the worst thing that ever happened for Ireland was that John Ford film, The Quiet Man. He said it’s not a bad film, in many ways, but it’s bad in the sense that it presented a vision of Ireland in the fifties that was taken for realism, but was just miles and miles away from what life was actually like over here.

EH: Right. It’s in Technicolor! There were all of these elements that were really exaggerated. There are those elements in Irish life � or there were, in the fifties- but they were all- I don’t know-

MH: Disney-fied? It’s really over the top in many respects.

EH: Right, right! This was a chance for me to explore the music, the culture, the wit of the people that I know from Ireland and try to be as realistic about it as possible. I tried not to make it too twee, although I have had some complaints from Irish people that Ireland is much more modern than I make it out to be. But I have characters in the books that are kind of throwbacks. Those people do exist as well.

MH: The setting is very well presented. In recent years, there have been a lot of new crime fiction novels set in Ireland, and even many ones that are written by Irish authors, it could very well be in England or America or any place. It’s relatively generic, the setting that the plot plays out against. But especially in Lake of Sorrows, there were a lot of characters (like Charlie Brazil) that you presented that are similar to people I have encountered.

EH: Oh thank you! They’re based on people that I have met and gotten to know. Friends of my husband’s or relations of his or neighbors. Charlie Brazil was a little bit based on a neighbour of Paddy’s that he had when growing up, a guy who was just painfully shy and couldn’t look you in the eye and blushed fourteen shades of red if you were even to make eye contact with him. I imagine that that’s the sort of character that Charlie Brazil was- not very outgoing, but an interesting, good person inside that not many people took the time to get to know.

Haunted Ground signed To Mike by Erin Hart.

MH: I worked with a fellow exactly like that. He’s a hell of a musician. He can play the Blues like you wouldn’t believe! But anyway, you inscribed my copy of Haunted Ground, "Hope you can hear all the tunes in here." Where can people who would not be familiar with the Irish trad genre� what artists would you recommend, and what sources for hearing some of them?

EH: Gosh! Most bands nowadays have their own website where they have samples of their music. You can also go to record websites like shanachie.com, Green Linen, although their catalog has just been taken over, I think, by another company. And of course in Ireland there’s Claddagh and there’s Gael Linn and the other traditional labels.

EH: I’m kind of a hardcore traditional listener. We listen to a lot of old recordings of people that Paddy used to know in the old days. Seamus Ennis, Willie Clancy, Bobby Casey, and John Kelly. Paddy used to play in a couple of different bands, the Castle C�il� Band, and a group called Ceoltoiri Laighean that don’t exist anymore but you can still find recordings of them and those are great old C�il� band style of music. Not the kind of snare drums and rhythm only kind of C�il� band music, but very melodic music, influenced by tunes from West Clare and the players of West Clare, which is a really great hot spot for traditional music.

EH: Cathal McConnell is a big influence on me. I love his style of singing. He plays with a group called The Boys of the Lough. He plays flute and whistle, but he’s also just a wonderful singer. And lots of people that most people would never have heard of at all because their records came out on very small labels, or they’re homemade tapes or people I heard at competitions who have never have recorded commercially at all, ever.

EH: I also listen to a lot of singers. I’m really interested in unaccompanied singing and traditional singing. The people I really love are Susan McKeown, Cathie Ryan- I love Nic Jones from England, even though he’s not recording any more. He’s a great, great interpreter.

MH: Do you mean the shan oh’s singers?

EH: Yeah. Unaccompanied singing is something I am really interested in. It’s the kind of singing that Nora does in the books a little bit, although she has not had much exposure to it, it is something that is part of her. She hears it and has to know how to do that. That’s my experience as well. I heard these people singing unaccompanied in the early 80’s and had to learn to sing in that style because it felt like expression for me, a type of expression I hadn’t been exposed to before.

MH: There’s a book called Father’s Music by Dermot Bolger where the main character’s father was a shan oh’s singer.

EH: I don’t think I’ve read that one but I’ve read Dermot Bolger. I must get it though!

MH: I’ve read a number of his books tough that one’s my favourite. There is a little bit of "Everything plus the sink- if it’s a Belfast sink." As long as it’s Irish, he’ll chuck it in that book. You can level that charge against it. I was speaking with Dermot just briefly on it. I got a chance to meet him just recently. He said, "I wish I had chopped five thousand words off of that book."

EH: There are always regrets! You never really finish, you know?

MH: Speaking of regrets and lessons, what did you learn from your first book that was of help to your second?

EH: I learned a lot about how difficult point of view is. Instead of starting with a single point of view- first person- which a lot of beginning writers think that they’ll do that because it will be easier. I immediately leapt in and I tried to swim the ocean with multiple points of view. It’s confusing to some readers who are not used to that, who like a single point of view, but I like being able to tell a story from various different angles, almost like a [Akira Kurosawa’s film] Rash�mon effect. "This person doesn’t know what that person knows, and that person doesn’t know what THIS person knows." And each of them have a different perspective on the event which they have all witnessed. I like the complexity of that. I like really chewy, complex novels, and mystery novels can be that way as well. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be. I find them pretty unsatisfying if they’re not that way. I’m really kind of picky, you know?

EH: So I learned a lot about point of view in the first one, and I hope that I was able to apply that in the second one. And about pacing and bringing an emotional heft to each character, each scene. Those are things that I tried to do in the first one and was really aware of as I was writing the second one. It’s always difficult. It’s never really easy.

EH: The other thing I found out was I’m not really a writer- The first draft for me is like bloodletting- I’m a re-writer. I like to go back and improve things, make passes through each draft and fix things up. And also- you know when we were talking about how some people want everything plotted out and outlined so that they know where to put the twists in and where to put clues in, things like that? I do that after the fact. I call it embroidery. I know that we have to put in a little hint here, so I go back and write a little chapter that will be inserted in that place so that it will foreshadow something three or four chapters down. All of that happens after the fact, once I get the story in place. That’s all very enjoyable to me. I love going back and hiding things in plain sight and trying not to make them too obvious but just sort of part of the background. Then when it comes up, three or four chapters after that, and comes to the foreground, you think, "Ah!" It makes the reader feel very smart.

MH: What about Lake of Sorrows? How long did you take on that one?

EH: Longer than people think. It came out a year after Haunted Ground, but I had already been working on it for two and a half years before Haunted Ground came out. So altogether, three years for that one. So I figure I’m right on schedule for the third! I didn’t really begin it until after Lake of Sorrows was out. It takes me a long time. I’m a slow writer.

MH: Do you have a working title for the third one?

EH: At the moment I’m calling it The False Mermaid. There are several traditional songs about people posing as mermaids who aren’t really mermaids, in folk mythology. I wanted to incorporate that idea into the story as well, kind of as a background thing, a mermaid image running through the book. There is also a rare plant that grows in boggy areas in the United States- and possibly elsewhere as well, I’m not sure about Europe or Ireland- but it definitely grows in Minnesota, a plant called false mermaid. Which may be a clue in the story of the murder of Nora’s sister.

MH: I’m looking forward to when that one’s available, then!

EH: I can’t wait to find out how it ends!

MH: Just talking about the general outlines of many mystery novels� When you look at them from a distance, they’re quite similar. There’s a distinct pattern. It starts off with the discovery of a body- usually some beautiful young woman- then the investigator pokes around, there’s maybe a car chase, maybe a love interest, and then there’s a surprise twist. So many mysteries follow that general outline. What can be done to make your fiction distinct? What can be done to put a new twist on the old formula?

EH: Part of the attraction of crime writing is that formula. The expectation that things will be resolved at the end. A lot of people are really dissatisfied if they’re not resolved at the end. I would probably be one of those! But, you can resolve things and you can resolve things. It can be a very pat sort of a resolution, or it can be a more realistic solution where things are not completely resolved. That’s the sort of ending that I prefer as a reader.

EH: You can make the texture and the character quality of a mystery story- there are wide variations in that across the board

EH: I prefer mystery novels that are novels that happen to be mysteries. That are enough about the characters and the depth of those characters that they are actual novels that just happen to follow a crime.

EH: I’m not sure that you really need to tweak the formula so much as the texture of it. If you look at excellent and successful novelists like P.D. James or Dennis Lehane, in essence they follow the same formula of the crime novel, but they’re so much deeper than your average run-of-the-mill genre fiction piece. And it’s the depth of the characters that makes that true.

MH: Looking back on a couple of the really fine crime novels that I have read over the past year � have you read Motherless Brooklyn by Mr. Jonathan Lethem?

EH: Yes, a wonderful book.

MH: Really takes a new spin on every single little element and makes everything brand new all over again.

EH: And he is able to play with language like poetry, almost, because of his character’s condition. He writes about a guy with Tourette’s syndrome. Random words come out of his mouth all the time and come out of his mouth all the time and they run through his head all the time, and he incorporates that into the texture of the novel. It just turns the whole thing on its head. It’s a very rich and satisfying part of the character, but also just in technical terms of writing, it’s very exciting. There’s a poetic quality to it.

MH: I just finished another one by a fellow called Hugo Hamilton, who is an Irish-based author- Headbanger. Much the same way that you were referring to earlier, it’s a novel and the main character just happens to be a cop and he does solve a crime, but it’s much more interesting just that he is flipping out, going over the edge.

EH: I think of the crime format as somebody might think of a sonnet. In a sonnet, you’re limited to a number of lines and a number of feet of meter per line. And yet there’s so much you can do with it. I think of the mystery form like that as well.

EH: Or I think of it the way traditional musicians think of what they do as well. They’re playing tunes that have existed for a long time, but their interpretation of those tunes is the important thing. Not necessary the notes, but the way they’re interpreted. I like the restriction of the form and pushing against it at that same time. Enough really good writers are also interested in doing that that you can find an endless supply of really, really excellent crime writing.

MH: Who would be some of your favourites? I know we have mentioned Dennis Lehane and others. But what’s on your nightstand at the moment? What’s the last really good crime fiction that sticks out in your mind?

EH: I just finished reading Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith. He’s an excellent writer. In Wolves Eat Dogs he’s writing about Chernobyl, and his descriptions of the black villages and the forests that have turned red because of radiation exposure. It’s such a beautiful visual picture. But I also love the observations of his character Arkady Renko who’s an investigator for the prosecutor in Moscow. He’s very jaded about the Soviet system but also about the new Russia and his observations about the social milieu are really, really interesting. He’s also very compassionate character- not sappy or anything, but interesting, a very real person.

EH: I also finished reading Edna O’Brien’s book In the Forest. A very sad, terrible story.

MH: Yes, that’s based on a real crime that occurred over here in Ireland.

EH: The crime occurred about the time that I was working on Haunted Ground, which is about the disappearance of a mother and child. I remember reading about this book and how disturbed people had been that she used these real details and I thought, "and here I am writing about another mother and child which are totally made up." But it’s a terrible sad story. But she really gets inside the head of someone who is really, really messed up very well, very beautifully. A lot of people are afraid to feel any compassion for a character like that. But she’s able to do it, and really paint it well. I really enjoyed it though it is a wrenching book to read.

MH: The only think I’ve read from her is The Country Girls which is miles and miles away.

EH: But again- she touches on painful things about things that people do and say and how they behave that nobody wants to talk about, that are pushed under the rug, and secrets. That’s why she’s been banned so many times- she wants to talk about these things that are very, very unpleasant to a lot of people. So, I admire her courage for doing so and the beauty of the language that she uses.

MH: Let me move from the territory where I am over to your side- what darkness resides in Minnesota? You’re based there, P.J. Tracy, John Sandford- his novels are based there as well. Is there something going on up north?

EH: Well you know, nine months of winter will do it to you!

MH: I suppose!

EH: Though actually it’s darker in Ireland than it is here all winter long because you’re further north than we are. There has always been a great book community here and writing community. I don’t know why mysteries. Partially because a lot of people who turn to mystery writing are journalists, and they cover dark and urgent things in their work. Several of them have turned their hands to mystery writing.

EH: I don’t know what it is exactly. People always ask me that. And there are tons of us. We have a great time together. We do workshops and panel discussions�..

MH: Whatever it is, hang onto it! There’s a lot of good material coming out. Just moving on: what’s your opinion on some of these new technologies that have recently come out? Podcasting, blogging, webzines, printing on demand? Outlets that writers would not have had even ten years ago?

EH: I think they’re really, really exciting. People are always looking for new writers. They’re looking for things they might like. You can find out so much about all kinds of people on the Internet now. That was not available before. You had to rely on publishers’ publicity things, or if you had a good bookstore they could recommend to you. Now you can kind of do that kind of looking for yourself. "If you like this sort of an author, you might like this sort of writer." There are all kinds of places for you to find out that sort of thing.

EH: They’re also excellent resources for writers themselves to talk to other writers. We’ve talked about Internet communities. You can find out about peoples’ experiences. with publishers. You can find out how to do a lot of your own marketing- which a lot of writers have to do now. And you can share information and resources. It’s just invaluable.

EH: Podcasting, too, is so exciting! It’s a little intimidating to people who are fixated on the written word. But it’s a great opportunity for people to actually hear your voice and for you to do public speaking in a different kind of forum and to connect with readers. The Thriller Writers Association is trying to encourage authors to do podcasts and they have a whole committee set up to try to educate people on how to do them. It’s a way to connect with readers, with librarians, with booksellers, with all kinds of people who might not have been able to learn about you before. And to give them a taste of the kind of writing or the images that are in your book in a way that you can’t really do with a press release.

EH: There’s all kinds of visual technology now on the Internet where you can do a little video preview of the book with excerpts or visual images. I think that’s terrific, but it also takes a huge amount of time to do all these things! Once again, the writer is torn between devoting time to actually writing the book and doing all the publicity. It’s a sort of schizophrenic life doing both.

MH: Your own home on the Internet is erinhart.com.

EH: Yes it is, that’s correct.

MH: I have read some of the interviews and other material. It is frequently updated with news. It’s well worth a stop by any of your fans.

MH: Is there anything that I have not mentioned that you would like to bring up?

EH: I would just like to encourage people who might be working on a book or writing that mystery that they’ve always meant to write to really keep going. Believe in the light at the end of the tunnel. The main thing that stops people from publishing books is that it’s really hard to finish. I’d like to encourage people to really stick to it and see what will happen if they can actually finish a book. It took me six years to write my first book. But I was so convinced that that girl, that red haired girl found in a bog, had to have a story. And had to have an ending to her story so that we what might have happened to her, and why. That was what kept me going. I encourage people to find a story that they can really latch on to like that that will take them right to the end. It’s very satisfying to finish something like that.

EH: A question I get all the time is "How did it work for you?" I had freakish good luck in trying to find an agent and a publisher and all that sort of thing. But the main thing rests on being able to finish a novel. Once you can do that, everything else is small potatoes.

MH: Excellent advice! Erin, it’s been great having you on the show.

EH: Oh, it’s been a pleasure!

Mick Halpin’s "unruly review" of Erin Hart’s novel Lake of Sorrows can be found on criticalmick.com. Dig up more information about Erin Hart at erinhart.com.

And now for an important disclaimer from Critical Mick

Yo! This interview transcript and all content on the DFA Guide site are copyright 2006 Mick Halpin. All links to other sites and documents are copyright to whatever source wrote something cool enough for Mick to give it a referral. Try to claim them as your own work and bad karma will catch up with you, baby. Believe it.

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