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[Rosamunda Froats]

How can you write a series which keeps your readers engaged, while still keeping your creative spark alive? How can you sustain a writing career for the long term? With Tess Gerritsen.

It wasn't until I wrote a book called Harvest and that was published in 1996 where the medicine came into play. And I found out, hey, audiences do like these details. So I incorporate my memories of what it's like to be a doctor, also how doctors think.

I think that's what makes this special, is we know how doctors would approach a particular problem. And that's mainly how I incorporate it. When it comes to medical details, I either know it or I have a bunch of textbooks that I can consult or I have colleagues I can ask if it's a specialty I'm not fully aware of.

Tess: It is. You have a patient who comes in with an unusual symptom. So you're going to go down your checklist of which systems in the body should we be looking at. And it's a fairly methodical system. And, in fact, you can go online probably and have some computer do it for you. But it is a way of approaching a problem, a mystery.

I don't do outlines. I've tried. I don't have my plot planned out ahead of time. It's very much for me just taking the path, starting down the dark road, and seeing where it takes me.

Tess: I like to start with an emotional springboard, and it has to do with what is the scene that plunges me or my character into the story. I think that the best premises are those that affect your emotions, that you may evoke something like fear or shock, something that makes you want to ask what happens next.

I start with the premise, and I have to know something about my characters beforehand. And that is one thing I do know, is who are these people and what kind of a voice do they have. I like to listen to a voice in my head. I like to hear this voice in my head, and that will really guide me down this path.

When I started writing that book, Harvest, for instance, the voice that I first heard was that of a 12-year-old boy. He directed a lot of the action, and that told me where my story was going, which is this 12-year-old boy is going to be one of the main characters and he's going to help solve the crime.

So if you can hear the voice, you know who this person is, you know whether they're male or female, young or old, you can tell by their language whether they're educated or uneducated. And I think that really defines which way the story is going.

Tess: This was really inspired by a voice. And that was the voice of Angela Rizzoli, Jane's mother. I heard her talking, and she's a warm, funny, somewhat annoying woman, but you want to hang around and see what she says. So that book was started by the thought of Angela Rizzoli as an older woman.

She's had a lot of things going on in her life in the course of these last 12 books. She was introduced very early on, and things have happened to her. She was a happily married woman who had raised her children. She just devoted her life to her husband and her children. And then about halfway through the series, her husband left her for another woman.

Angela clearly says things. She bothers her daughter about this. And we get to follow Angela's investigation as something of an amateur sleuth who is a nosy neighbor. We also get to follow Jane and Maura, of course.

They're doing their own real murder investigation of a nurse who has been bludgeoned in her own home. So we have simultaneous investigations, one that's an amateur, one that's a professional. And they will in some ways affect each other's investigations.

Tess: That is a real challenge because I don't like a series where the characters never change. I want to see them evolve. And that is, I think, one of the things that has kept the series alive, is that Jane and Maura are constantly growing. They're evolving.

Jane, when you first saw her in The Surgeon was not a very likable person. But then she fell in love, she got married, she had a baby. So she's matured in many ways, mellowed a lot of ways. So she now, I think, is a lot more likable.

You also saw her struggle to become respected. That would get really old if that struggle was still going on at book number 12. Now, it's book number 13. The cops know who she is, and they respect her. So we've seen that journey for Jane.

We've also seen Maura have a similar journey, although it's been more of a depressing journey because Maura is searching for love. She's finally found it, but there were a lot of romantic misadventures.

There are people like Barry Frost who's Jane's partner in the homicide unit. We've seen his life have ups and downs. We've seen Angela's ups and downs. I think that it's a little bit like a real-life situation where you know your relatives are going through crises, various crises, and you want to follow those.

Joanna: It's interesting because a lot of detective series and especially those that get adapted for TV are these sort of more episodic where there isn't such a change because you want to keep having the stuff go on forever.

Do you see an end because, of course, your characters are moving forward in their lives? And you mentioned Angela there. Do you see ends for these characters? Because, of course, that can be very difficult for readers, very difficult for writers. Or do you just see this series going on forever?

Tess: I don't know. When I finished book 12, I didn't think I was going to write another book. I leave my characters where they are, and, eventually, maybe I'll come back to them. I don't know.

I don't think I will ever write what I would call a finale because I think of them as real people. I don't want to kill them. I just think that when they become fully happy and everybody settle down, the series is really over.

Tess: I do write other books. It's been a 5-year gap between book number 12 and book number 13. It's because I did other things. I wrote two other books that had nothing to do with the series.

I made a film with my son, and I took some time to creatively recharge the batteries. I think it's interesting that, as I get older, I feel that time is running out, and all these crazy ideas I had for books, well, this is the time to write them while I still can. So I am kind of trying to rush through inspirations that I have been harboring for a long time, and now is the time I'm writing them.

I live in the state of Maine, up in New England, and we are rumored to be one of the most haunted states in the country. Years and years ago, back when I was probably in my 20s, I had this idea for a book about a ghost and a single woman who comes to live in this house, and she falls in love with a ghost, sort of like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

That's a very old book and also a very old movie. But in this case, the ghost may be dangerous. So she doesn't know whether she's fallen in love with the perfect lover or whether she's fallen in love with a sadistic spirit.

And because the house comes with a history of women who've died in this house, it becomes more of a thriller. That book was The Shape of Night. It was fun to write. I loved writing it. I think my readers were puzzled. But that's where your creativity takes you.

Tess: Yes, publishers will definitely try to box you in because they know how to sell your previous book, they know which books sell the best, and, clearly, series novels sell better because people are waiting for the same characters.

I made a film with my son, a documentary film, which was a great deal of fun. We were hunting for the ancient reasons behind the pork taboo. It sounds like a crazy idea, but I come from a family of restaurant tours.

I like to eat just about everything. And it always puzzled me that any culture or religion would forbid a source of protein. So my son and I, we went around the world interviewing archeologists. We were just sort of looking for the ancient history of why pork was ever outlawed.

Tess: It was. But in a way, it is similar because it's a mystery. My son and I were trying to solve the mystery which just happens to be a nonfiction mystery with roots that are thousands of years old.

We were like little detectives going from archeologists to pig farmers to pig behavioral experts looking for why the pig holds such a position in human attitudes. People either think pigs are darling and cute, they're like Babe or they think they're disgusting and dirty.

My college degree was in anthropology, so it was in my wheelhouse, and I was the one responsible for trying to contact all these scholars that we dealt with. So we split the work that way, and it worked very well. I think we both had similar ideas for how we wanted the final edit to look.

Tess: The great thing about writing novels, you are in control. You don't have people asking you for this rewrite or that rewrite unless it's your editor. I love being in charge of my universe.

Because, of course, as authors, those of us who are not adapted hear that basically they just want the author not to be there. They don't want to have the author anywhere near anything because we're just a pain in the neck. How's that been?

And then they had their own team of writers, so they wrote all the episodes. I had nothing to do with it. I got a consultant's fee, but I didn't have to do anything for it. So it's like the best job of the world. You get paid for not having to work.

Joanna: I think that has to happen, too, because when they get married, either it's going to be the end of a series or they're going to have to have some kind of disaster because happy people can't be happy for long in these dramas.

Tess: That's right. You hit the nail on the head. That is really the key about drama or series is when everybody is happy, it's a happily ever after. Where do you go from there? There's just nowhere to go. So you have to keep a little drama going.

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