Writers' Rituals - J. M. Hayes
The Mysterious Writing Habits of the World's Top Crime Writers
Oct 15, 2008
Are writers obsessive-compulsive? Overly superstitious? Or do habits and rituals provide security? Searching for clues to the secrets of writing, Suite 101 has an exclusive interview with author J.M.Hayes.
Hayes is author of The Grey Pilgrim, a stand-alone historical suspense novel about Native American resistance to the draft in 1940s Arizona, and the Mad Dog & Englishman Mysteries, staring an under-funded rural sheriff and his born-again Cheyenne brother (in Central Kansas and, soon, Southern Arizona)
Q: How much research and plotting do you do before you're ready to write a book?
A: Not much, now that I'm writing a series. I already know the characters and the setting. During the course of writing the previous book I come up with the crime and the criminal for the next. That's usually based on a current social issue that has caught my interest and I will already have researched it heavily. I continue doing so as I write and time and circumstance affect the issue. For example, election integrity and polarization are among the subjects that drove the plots in my last two books.
Q: What hours do you devote to your writing and what time of day do you prefer to write?
A: My hours are regularly irregular. I try to write something every day, but my production can vary from half an hour to ten, or more. It depends on whether the muses are silent or shouting. I'm a night person, so I usually write afternoons and/or evenings.
Q: Do you take breaks, and if so, what do you do during them?
A: Oh, yeah. When the muses are hard to hear, I go looking for them. I pace, do minor household chores, even go running/swimming—anything but sitting and staring at that empty screen.
Q: Where do you write?
A: We've converted a spare bedroom into an office.
Q: What do you write with?
A: Usually direct into a computer. Occasionally, by hand to a notebook when I'm away from home.
Q: ...and why is that your preference?
A: The editing process is so simple, to say nothing of how nice it is to be able to read what I've written.
Q: What do you like to keep within arm's reach while you're writing?
A: A dictionary, a thesaurus, some reference books or notes, and a 40,000 year old hand ax, to remind myself that the need to create new and "beautiful" things has always been part of the human condition (and how lucky I would be to have something I create survive even a tiny fraction of the millennia that stone tool has).
Q: What can you see when you look up from your writing?
A: A wall, a window on which I usually keep the blinds drawn so I can maintain my focus, hundreds of books, and a parfletch made for me by the father of the Cheyenne Arrow Keeper.
Q: What was the first thing you wrote which was published?
A: A submission to Playboy After Hours. The published version of that first sale was so heavily edited that it hardly contained more of my words than the articles (a, an, the) and taught me a lesson about the difference between writing and entertaining.
Q: What is your latest book?
A: Broken Heartland (Poisoned Pen Press, November 2007). And coming in May, 2009, Server Down.
J.M. Hayes, was born in Hutchinson, Kansas and now lives and works in Tucson, Arizona. Find out more on his website.
Read about Peter May, Jane Finnis, Ruth Dudley Edwards and many other Writers' Rituals
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