Writing for an Audience of One: A Chat with Charlaine Harris

You said in an interview last year about Midnight Crossroad that the Midnight series might or might not be a trilogy. How are you feeling about that now that the second book is out?
Well, the third book is almost completed—that’s what I need to go home and finish before my next thing—and it still seems to be a trilogy. I’m not closing any doors though, because I’m leaving a little that I could say if I write a fourth one. The big event that I’d planned all along is happening in the third book, but the people in Midnight are so internal that there’s no telling what other secrets they have.
That’s such a good point, it’s like having doors and behind each door…
You just keep opening a succession of doors—“Oh no, not really, but!”
This will be one of the shorter series that you’ve written, right?
It will be. And as I say, I’m okay with that for now, although I may change it later, if I get the opportunity. And there are other series I would [return to]—I’m going to write two more Aurora Teagardens, which is a series I haven’t touched in a long time.

That’s right, you started writing that in 1990.
Since the Hallmark movies have started showing, there’s been renewed interest in it. I always felt like I would like to write another one for her, and maybe one more Harper [the Harper Connelly series] if I ever have a great idea, because Harper was a good character too.
So the door is never really closed for you.
Well, it’s closed for Lily Bard, and it’s closed for Sookie. I will never do that.
You mentioned that the event that you had planned in your head from the beginning is going to happen in the third book. How much planning do you do in advance?
[Laughs] Not a lot. No, I don’t plan a lot in advance, which is fun and scary and maybe sometimes bad, but that’s just the way I write. Some people outline obsessively—they’ll have a 64-page outline, but I might as well write the book as try to do that. That’s so alien to me.
I never know what’s going to happen when I turn on the computer in the morning, and that is just fun for me, because I write to entertain myself. I have a very low boredom threshold, and I feel like if I’m entertained than readers may be. I write for an audience of one: me.
And millions of other people enjoy that.
And that worked out! It’s not possible for me to say “I’m writing for an audience of 40-year-old librarians,” because how do I know how they feel? Everybody’s different. I don’t like to stereotype people. I look like everybody’s aunt, but I’m not a stereotypical person—I have many diverse interests, I have views on every social issue. So I just don’t see how you can categorize people and write to them. Other writers may have much more success with that than me. Everybody writes books differently.

Reading your books, the reader is instantly sucked into these worlds that you build. When you’re doing your world-building, do you have maps? Do you have collages?
Well in Dayshift there’s a map, and it’s just gorgeous. I do draw a map for myself, because it wastes time. You know, if I don’t feel like writing—“No, I’m writing, I’m writing, I’m doing a map today.” When Paula and I did the map of Bon Temps for the The Sookie Stackhouse Companion we spent a good four or five days [on it]. We had a great time. “Oh no, they need a flower shop. And they’ve got to have a tire place.” So that was a fun time-waster.
But that’s part of writing, is being able to see it clearly in your head, so you don’t make the wrong turns. The town kind of developed as I needed it to.
And is that the same thing with your characters?
I had never done a multiple-point-of-view before I did the Midnight trilogy, and that has been a huge, huge challenge to me. But I don’t like to be scared to accept a challenge, so I made myself do it. Some of the points-of-view were male, and I’ve never done that before, so I’m hoping it’s convincing. I’m hoping that I’m changing the voice enough to where people say “oh yeah, that’s Joe speaking, or that’s Bobo speaking.” Because to me it’s challenging myself, and I think writers need to do that.
And how is this different from the Southern Vampire books, where you had, again, a lot of people—
Huge cast of characters.
Is that harder in some ways, because you’re not accessing their points-of-view?
It is hard! It’s hard to write from a first person point of view through 13 books. In the last one I had to put some different points-of-view or the ending would be incomprehensible. I just couldn’t think of another way to make it work—maybe a failure of imagination on my part, but the choice I made at the time. Which led to a—I hope not widely held—theory that I was not the one who wrote the 13 book.
Wow!
And I’m going, “wow, a conspiracy theory!”
You’re like Elvis!
I know it! I know it!
You mentioned that you have a couple new books in continuing series going. Do you have any new series bubbling in the back of your head that you might be willing to give me a hint about?
No. [Laughs] I find that people who talk don’t do. I’ve had so many people tell me about the book they were going to write, in great detail, and I’m just going, show me the book. Don’t tell me about it.

You wrote a graphic novel, Cemetery Girl—
I did! With Christopher Golden. I loved it. We loved it. The second volume is coming out October 15, because it was always planned to be a trilogy too. But the artist had lots of complicated family problems and he was very late with the art. So it’s coming out October 15, the second part of Cemetery Girl.
You’ve written in several different mediums. How does your personal writing process change?
With the graphic novel a lot, because it was just so hard for me to get it through my head that I wasn’t writing descriptions, I was just writing dialogue. Just dialogue. And you can’t show motion in dialogue—you can’t say “now I’m walking over here.” That was why I wanted to write it with Chris, because he’s so skilled. He’s written lots of graphic novels, and movie scripts, he’s written everything. And he’s a good friend of mine; he’s the greatest guy.
Finally he said, “Charlaine. You can’t write what the artist can’t draw.” And I thought about it, and finally Bing! Light bulb. I said, “I can’t write what he can’t draw. Dialogue is what I’m doing.” I can say in this scene they’re in the house belonging to the caretaker, or in this scene they’re running through the graveyard, but I have to only put in the dialogue that shows what the characters are doing.
Once that worked through it went real fast, even though the format’s different, and you’ve got to have it in the right format. But once you learn that, and you get that one basic fact through your thick skull, it went very well.
And what’s that like, to have an artist doing so much of their creative work with your words?
You know, it was weirdly similar to having the TV show, because that’s a different version of your work. Or having the recorded books, because that is an artist’s interpretation of your work also. It’s strange, to hear your work from another angle.
With the recorded books, I thought, “oh, Sookie sounds so angry.” She just sounded much angrier than I thought I wrote her, but that was the way Joanna was interpreting my work. And then, in the TV show she was angrier too, and I thought, “am I angrier than I think? Or is this just them? What’s with that?” And I still don’t know. But it was very interesting and scary.