...Submitted by Karna Small Bodman
We are delighted to welcome International Bestselling Author, Tess Gerritsen to our Rogue website.
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Tess Gerritsen |
Tess graduated from Stanford and received her MD from UC San Francisco. Taking a break from her practice as a physician she wrote the screenplay "Adrift" which aired as a CBS movie. In addition to numerous thrillers, her series of novels about detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the TV series "Rizzoli & Isles." But where does Tess get HER inspiration? Here is her own story:
Want to Come
Up With Something New? Combine!
By Tess Gerritsen
“Where do you get your ideas?” Every novelist has heard
this question, and most of us can pinpoint the moment we read a news article or
overheard a juicy bit of gossip and instantly saw it as an idea for a
story. But too often that story idea feels
anemic and not quite enough to sustain an entire novel. It might work as a starting point to launch
the plot, but it’s lacking that special something
that gives it truly new twist.
That’s the time to use my
tried-and-true formula for creativity: 1 + 1 = 5.
Translated: When you find
a way to combine two unrelated ideas in a way that hasn’t been done before,
you’ll end up with something greater than the sum, something unique and fresh.
Years ago, I read about
the declassification of a government document concerning the “Dugway Sheep
Incident.” Decades earlier there’d been
an accident involving military nerve gas in Utah. Errant winds had blown the gas into a place
called Skull Valley (I’m not making this up) and overnight, thousands of sheep
and countless birds were killed. For
decades, the sheep deaths remained an unsolved mystery – until the incident was
finally declassified.
I read that article and
instantly thought of the story possibilities.
What if people had been killed in that accident? What if a whole town was killed? How could
that disaster be hidden from the public, and how far would the responsible
parties go to escape prosecution? I
played with various plot scenarios, but I couldn’t come up with a story that
felt fresh, so I set the article aside in my “ideas” folder, where it sat for a
few years.
And then I had a little
GPS misadventure. I was trying to
navigate to a bed and breakfast in upstate New York and I faithfully followed
my GPS straight into a cornfield. Luckily
there was a rudimentary path plowed through the cornfield, and I could see tire
tracks already there, so I continued through that field and rejoined the
pavement a few hundred yards later. When
I arrived at the B&B, the owner asked: “Did you come through the
cornfield?” Some GPS glitch had sent
many a driver through that same field, which explained the earlier tire tracks.
Mine was a minor
calamity, but other drivers have blindly followed their GPS’s into lakes, onto
railroad tracks, even to the edge of cliffs.
I began to imagine all the possible disasters (that’s what writers do,
after all) and suddenly the magic story combination struck me. A GPS
mishap. A group of stranded travelers
stranded in a snowstorm. A town where
everyone has mysteriously died. That’s
how the plot of Ice Cold came
together. I melded two ideas -- the
Dugway Sheep Incident and GPS mishaps -- into a story that felt fresh and
unique.
My newest novel, I KNOW A
SECRET, came together in a similar way.
While traveling in Italy, I found myself weary of viewing portraits of
the same religious figures in art museum after art museum. After seeing twenty versions of “Madonna and
Child,” how many more can you take? Then
in Florence, I bought a book called How
To Read A Painting and suddenly I saw symbols that I’d never noticed
before. Now I knew that a woman holding
an ointment pot must be Mary Magdalene, the wild-looking man dressed in shabby
animals hides is John the Baptist, and the man shot with arrows is St.
Sebastian. I became obsessed with decoding
the meaning of every painting. Then
(because I’m a crime writer) I thought: what if a killer staged murders in the
same way medieval artists depicted religious scenes?

It
was a start, but it wasn’t a plot yet.
It needed that special “something” to make it unique – something that I
took from my own life. A few years ago,
my son Josh and I joined forces to make a horror feature film called “Island
Zero,” about islanders off the coast of Maine who are suddenly cut off from the
outside world after the ferry suddenly stops coming. Their phones are dead, and every boat sent to
the mainland fails to return. I wrote
the script, Josh directed, and we shot the film during a very cold March in
Maine. Immersing myself in the world of
horror films was a quirky, exhausting experience, and we faced all the
challenges of indie filmmaking, from hiring crew and actors, dealing with bad
weather, and of course the inevitable snafus.
Now that “Island Zero” is on the film festival circuit, I’ve discovered that horror fans are pretty
cool people, and I thought it would be fun to set a novel in their oddball
world.
I combined those two
themes, horror filmmaking and religious symbolism, to come up with the plot for
I KNOW A SECRET. The story kicks off
with a murder scene that baffles Det. Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura
Isles. The victim is a female horror
film producer whose eyes have been removed post-mortem, and Jane and Maura
wonder if the killer is copying scenes from the victim’s films. Other murders follow, each crime scene
bizarrely staged, and the ultimate clue might be the one hiding in plain sight
– on a movie screen.
If you ever find yourself
not quite satisified with a story idea, consider falling back on the 1+1=5
formula. Collect and keep all your
possible story ideas in a dedicated folder.
Some of those ideas you may never use.
But someday, when you’re stuck for a plot twist or you have only half a
premise, you may find the one idea you need in that folder, the missing piece
that you can plug into that equation to make your plot shine.
Tess's new thriller "I Know a Secret" will be released August 15. then she will be embarking on an extensive nation-wide book tour. For dates and details, visit: www.tessgerritsen.com. Thanks, Tess, for sharing your 1+1=5 "formula" with all of us here. As for our Rogue visitors -- leave a comment below -- we'll share it with Tess.
...Karna Small Bodman
What a great post, Tess, and a huge welcome to Rogue Women Writers. Thank you for visiting! I love the formula 1 + ! = 5. The math sucks, but the logic is supreme. LOL. I admire the way you break it down, that combining two story/plot ideas gives a fresh perspective & book. A lesson for all of us! Gayle
ReplyDeleteI'm interested to know, Tess, how you've retained the rights to your characters and are still able to write books for them, as I thought so many series authors were obliged to give up their characters to a stable of TV script writers once film rights sold. Would love to see your thoughts!
ReplyDeleteFascinating reading on how ideas can combine to produce something completely different. Thanks for a terrific post.
ReplyDeleteLove this. I've been toying with several ideas, but just couldn't get them to work. The 1+1=5 formula just pulled two together. Thank you for a great book idea.
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for guest blogging on Rogue Women Writers. I'm excited to read the new book.
Chris
Wow! Major eye opening here. I realize I've done this in a minor way, more like 1+1/4=1&1/2, hopefully. But I like the idea of 1+1=5.
ReplyDeleteFrancine, to answer your question, I retain the rights to my book characters, but I sold the rights to any TV/screen depictions of my characters. I think that's pretty standard.
ReplyDeleteMadonna Con Bambino! That's a joke in our family due to all the pictures in Italy we saw with Madonna and Baby. I laughed when I read this. I LOVE the premise of I KNOW A SECRET. Creepy and cool and I look forward to reading it. Thanks for posting here and thanks for the great writing tips!
ReplyDelete