{"id":669,"date":"2015-06-15T05:00:21","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T05:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=669"},"modified":"2020-01-18T08:53:47","modified_gmt":"2020-01-18T13:53:47","slug":"can-i-be-in-your-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/can-i-be-in-your-book\/","title":{"rendered":"“Am I In Your Book?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I once heard a rumor that someone thought they were “in” one of my mystery novels and was really pissed off.\u00a0 Well, it was a bizarre situation because this person wasn’t remotely<\/em> in my book, not even near<\/em> my book.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, a fan once jokingly said, “You should put me in one of your mysteries” and I walked away smiling.\u00a0 Because this fan–a lifetime academic–had apparently read them all without realizing I’d used a dramatic incident from the fan’s life as a plot point in one of the books.\u00a0 So you could say that fan made a phantom guest appearance.\u00a0 Sort of.\u00a0 Or a contribution?<\/p>\n

The thing is, nobody gets shoved into my books from real life.\u00a0 Ever.\u00a0 And each one of my characters is a composite of fact and fiction.\u00a0 Sometimes more of one, sometimes more of another.<\/p>\n

Take Juno Dromgoole in my Nick Hoffman mystery series<\/a>.\u00a0 She’s a luscious professor of Canadian Studies who’s beautiful, foul-mouthed, and intemperate.\u00a0 By making her over-the-top, I was playing with the American image of Canadians as quiet and well-mannered.\u00a0 How was she born? She was actually inspired by several different women I met at a mystery conference.\u00a0 But the more I worked on her, the more she became sculpted by the storyline and interactions with other characters and the further away she grew from her “sources.”\u00a0 I don’t even remember anymore who those women were exactly, but I did finally imagine her as having the glamor of Tina Turner at her best.<\/p>\n

Curiously, I did once run into a woman who looked and dressed just as I envisioned Juno did, when I was staying in a German hotel on a book tour–and she was Italian.<\/p>\n

The smallest thing can inspire me: a look, a gesture, an outfit, a snarky line, an accent–and suddenly a grain of sand is on its way to becoming a pearl.\u00a0 So people do make their way into my fiction, but always through shards, fragments, bits and pieces.<\/p>\n

Even if I had wanted to put that angry person mentioned above in my book, I wouldn’t really have been able to.\u00a0 For me, people are just models and sometimes inspiration.\u00a0 Fiction sculpts them into something completely different from what they were until they become unrecognizable. If it’s good, of course.<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael is the author of The Edith Wharton Murders<\/a> and 24 others books in many genres which you can find on Amazon<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I once heard a rumor that someone thought they were “in” one of my mystery novels and was really pissed off.\u00a0 Well, it was a bizarre situation because this person wasn’t remotely in my book, not even near my book. On the other hand, a fan once jokingly said, “You should put me in one … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[196,189,74,23,121],"tags":[497,5,1053,95,219,198,321,165,197,583,19,496,495],"class_list":["post-669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical-fiction","category-blogging","category-creative-writing","category-crime-novels","category-mysteries","tag-authors","tag-books","tag-characters-in-fiction","tag-creative-writing-2","tag-crime-fiction","tag-fans","tag-fiction","tag-inspiration","tag-mysteries","tag-nick-hoffman-mysteries","tag-novels","tag-publishing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3069,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions\/3069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}