Introducing Laura Lippman…

Here's the thing: Baltimore's murder victims are, overwhelmingly, young black men from poor neighborhoods. If I was going to keep writing about homicide in this city, I felt I had to address that reality. This is how murder happens in my hometown.

Granted, those murders don't make for riveting plots. So I married a pedestrian, everyday murder to a "red ball," the kind of case that gets lots of attention. All I wanted to say was: Murder is murder. There shouldn't be a hierarchy, although there clearly is. In media coverage, in the way we feel about the cases. True, young black men in the drug trade have made disastrous choices, choices that have led to their deaths. We should still care about them.

As for social issues: I was a reporter for twenty years and the best years were those I spent on the social services beat for the Evening Sun and, later, the Sun, the morning paper that swallowed its evening counterpart. I was, technically, the last poverty reporter at the Sun; they tended to shy away from that term after I left the beat. And it was the one time in my career that I felt I was doing really vital work. There are plenty of people who want to cover politics and presidents. There have been some great journalists who write about poverty -- Katherine Book comes to mind -- but it's rarer, because it's not seen as a career path to the top. I loved that beat, but I burned out, in part because it was a lot of human misery to contemplate. And, in part, because my bosses didn't really have much love for what I was doing.

In my fiction so far, I've written about domestic violence (The Last Place), race relations (Butcher's Hill and No Good Deeds), media's role in society (most of my books) juvenile justice (Every Secret Thing), parenting and the potential for toxicity in female friendships (To the Power of Three). Eventually, I may write about block-busting in the '60s, but I don't lead with my social agenda. I write the stories I want to write, and try to address all the issues that those stories raise.

If each book isn't harder than the last, you're in trouble. I'm somewhere between a tortoise and a hare -- I can write a book a year through plodding, day-in, day-out work. I can't procrastinate because I have no hope of catching up if I fall off my pace.

I don't have an innately beautiful or poetic voice. I wish I did, but I don't, so there it is. As a result, I try to write clean, lucid prose that attracts very little attention to itself. Character is revealed through details and voice. I hope.

As for the business side: I think a lot of writers who sign a contract think it's their license to become an "artiste." It's just the opposite. The day you sign that first contract, you have to be ready to be an utter pro. Court your muse however you need to (unless that involves seeking daily feedback from your editor or agent. They really don't have time for that kind of hand-holding.) But when it comes to the business side of things, you need to be as professional as possible. Meet deadlines. Have realistic expectations. School yourself in how the business works. Be a partner, offering ideas for marketing and publicity, but not sulking if your ideas aren't accepted for some reason.

The first-timer can refer to the advice about, about being professional. To get to that first contract -- you have to write the book. There are no short cuts. I know it's been said that no one enjoys writing, only the experience of having written. I don't really buy that. Granted, the latter is far superior. There's no better feeling than finishing, really finishing. But I like writing and think people should like writing for writing's sake. The business will break your heart otherwise. Writing novels if you don't like writing -- it's like trying to marry for money and finding out your spouse is broke.

Newspapers like all the information to be true. I'm glad I don't have to play by those rules anymore.

Seriously, as a newspaper reporter, you can never absolutely know what's in someone's head. Even if you found someone's diary -- it would only be one version, written and recorded in one way. People's motivations are ultimately mysterious to journalists, and that limits a writer's authority. As a novelist, I know why my characters do what they do. Journalists don't, they can't. That's not necessarily a limitation. I'm crazy about Krakaeur's Into the Wild because he reported into the problem if you will, being scrupulous about what he could know and what he could only theorize. He allowed the mystery to be. And that's one advantage that journalists have. They can tell a great story without providing the why of things. That's harder for novelists.

The discipline is the same. And the respect for fact is the same, jokes aside. I try to get things right. Granted, I don't always succeed, but I made a few mistakes as a journalist, too and readers were far more tolerant.

Well, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot: I'm not Dennis Lehane, nor was I meant to be. In fact, when the stand-alone fever hit crime fiction after Mystic River appeared in early 2001, my response was to try to write a bigger novel within my series, a la Peter Robinson (In a Dry Season) Robert Crais (LA Requiem) or Jan Burke (Bones). Then I had the idea for Every Secret Thing, found I couldn't fit it within my series for several reasons and the rest is -- well, not history, but an amazingly satisfying career. I'm pretty content with the way things are, alternating series and non-series. "Literary" is a judgment for others to make, and one to be made later. Right now, I can't imagine a different career path. But then again -- in 2001, I said I had no intention of writing a stand-alone and that changed within the year.

As for television and film -- I have a pretty interesting window on that world and it doesn't do a lot for me. I'm really proud of my significant other's work in that realm, but I'm also conscious of how hard he has to work. Writers fight their battles with the page. Television writers have to deal with human beings, nature, technological issues, network executives, budgets, union rules. Can you imagine writing furiously, feeling great about the momentum you're getting going, only to be told that you have to break for second dinner because you started shooting twelve hours earlier? You have to be very strong and somewhat combative to achieve your vision in that world, and I'm a wuss. I have no stomach for conflict. Maybe one day I'll write a script -- but it won't be for The Wire, I can tell you that much.

My childhood reading was a little odd and clearly influential. Just today, I noticed a passage in my next book that is clearly influenced by a scene from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I'm aware that some highbrows look down on this book, in part because of its stunning popularity when it was first published, but I think it's a great novel that has never gotten its full due. Certainly, I put it ahead of A Catcher in the Rye, which I find grossly overrated. (I like Nine Stories, though. And Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter, and Franny and Zooey.)

I was also crazy about this Denver writer, Lenora Mattingly Weber, who wrote YA novels about a girl named Beany Malone.

But I have never wanted to be a writer more than I did when I read the opening lines of All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers by Larry McMurtry. It's hard to explain, for the first line is very simple, but I remember I was on a Greyhound bus, going to visit my boyfriend at the time. I was 23, living in Texas, familiar with some of the places that McMurtry was writing about. I was so happy and excited and content when I started reading that book, and I thought: I wish I could make someone else feel this way.

All writers need to recharge. Once my galleys go in, usually about the first week of December, I take the rest of the year off. A little travel is involved, often to New York, particularly if something by Sondheim is on stage. (I caught Sweeney Todd last year and Pacific Overtures the year before.) And, every year, I usually celebrate finishing a novel by buying something for my house. This year, for example, I had some pantry shelves built into the utility room behind my kitchen. I'm a homebody and my house is very important to me, a true sanctuary. I love coming in the front door after a long trip. Heck, I like coming in the door after my morning writing sessions at the coffeehouse, or when I've been at the gym. It's not fancy or grand, it's just a Baltimore rowhouse. But it's home and I love it and I feel a contentment here that I can never quite find anywhere else.