TAD: Why a three-year hiatus between “A” and “B”?

Grafton: “A” was easy because I did it as a lark, and I had nothing at stake. All that could happen was that I might fail, and I’d failed at things before. Then “A” picked up some good reviews, and I was suddenly self-conscious. By the time I got to “B,” I was facing writer’s block. It just took a little time to coax my soul back into my body.

TAD: Are you happy with Holt?

Grafton: Oh, sure. They leave me alone. I don’t like editorial interference. What happened to me in Hollywood is that I became too much of a prima donna and not enough of a star. I still have the attitude that I know what I’m doing, and I want to be left alone to do it. I must say, Bantam’s done a tremendous job for me with the paperbacks. That’s been a wonderful relationship. Between the two of them, I’m one happy pup.

TAD: I take it, then, that your books don’t require a lot of editing?

Grafton: Very little. Partly because I’m so obsessive. I revise endlessly. What I’m striving for is to go back at the end of a book and find every single sentence exactly as I meant it to be and every single word precisely what I intended. I don’t know that I’ll ever achieve that goal, but I devote a lot of my time to the refining process.

TAD: Do you have a writing “routine” that you follow?

Grafton: I get up at six every morning and I run three miles. Shower, breakfast, and at the machine at nine. My husband and I work with a Fortune 32:16 which has two monitors and two keyboards. I write from nine till about eleven-thirty in the morning. Sometimes, if I’m working on a short story or a script, I’ll write again in the afternoon, a separate session. Or, if I get slightly behind on the book, I’ll double up. I’ve been known, when I was doing a film project, to get up at 4:30 in the morning and work on that from five to six before I ran. Then work 9:00 to 11:30 on the book and in the afternoon on another script. I couldn’t keep that up for long, but I needed to know I could do it in a pinch. I’m always pressing myself.

I try to do a chapter a week. My chapters run 10 to 12 pages, so I end up doing about two pages a day, which doesn’t sound like much, but it’s persistence that counts. Takes me 10 months altogether to write a book. Late afternoons, after the work is done, I walk four to five-and-a-half miles down at the beach. I was writing seven days a week, but I’ve now decided I should have Sundays off. I don’t exercise on Sundays either. Just lazy, I guess.

TAD: What do you do if you’re on page 87 of the next Kinsey book and a TV deal comes along where you only have three weeks to put it together?

Grafton: I’ve been saying “No” to those. I could do it if we were down to our last dime. I would work on it in the afternoons and still do the books in the morning because that’s when my energy is best.

TAD: You have done a few short stories. Do you enjoy them as much as novels?

Grafton: I think they’re much harder to do. The canvas is so tiny it’s like painting the lid of a pillbox with a brush with only one hair. I like to do them, but they almost have to come to me intact.

TAD: If you were to break a book down into component parts–plot, setting, whatever–what do you feel you do well and what do you feel you need to work on?

Grafton: I always need to work on plot. That’s the real struggle of my life – learning how to plot. I feel like character comes to me more naturally. Dialogue is easy to do, but it’s not very satisfying. What I love best is doing a paragraph of prose where I feel I’ve been succinct and evocative, I also love to do research and then render it back into the books–without showing off, I hope. I do a lot of research.

TAD: Who do you read that you feel has it all together?

Grafton: Elmore Leonard, Dick Francis, Ruth Rendell, Agatha Christie for her cleverness but not for character development. I like Ross Macdonald, but he tended to tell one story over and over again. Now they call it his “leit motif” and praise him for it. If I did that, the critics would have my hide.

Part of my current plotting/writing technique I learned from Tony Hillerman. He’s wonderful. He wrote an article for The Writer magazine in which he said he never did outlines, and he just decided to stop feeling guilty about it. His attitude is that writing a novel is like driving in fog. You can see some distance ahead of you, so you write to that point and then the road clears a distance ahead of that. I’ve been using this method of late and loving it. I do outline, but I keep it very loose.

TAD: How much of Sue Grafton is in Kinsey Millhone?

Grafton: She’s a stripped-down version of me. She’s the person I would have been had I not married young and had children. She’ll always be thinner and younger and braver, the lucky so-and-so. Her biography is different, but our sensibilities are identical. At the core, we’re the same, but I’ve discovered many things about her. I don’t just make this stuff up, you know. Because of Kinsey, I get to lead two lives–hers and mine. Sometimes I’m not sure which I prefer.

TAD: Any non-Kinsey books in the future?

Grafton: I don’t know about that. If I ever got bored or burned out on the series, I’d stop and do something else. Maybe a children’s book–Kinsey at age five. It would be great to hook readers in kindergarten and baby them along through young-adult fiction to adult fiction. I get dibs on that idea, by the way.

TAD: You have how many children?

Grafton: I have three, plus a granddaughter who’ll be three on Halloween. I think that’s the perfect birthday.

TAD: Have your children followed in your footsteps?

Grafton: My son is getting into special effects; he’s very interested in pyrotechnics. And I have a daughter who has a small business with her husband repairing VCRs. My youngest is in art school in San Francisco but is just discovering the joys of secretarial work. She had worked at Mel’s Diner, which is one of those ‘50s diners, and just got tired of crabby, hungry people. So I’m waiting to see whether she’ll finish school or what. They’re really good kids, and I’m crazy about ‘em.

TAD: What about the “gimmick” of the titles?

Grafton: Part of that is because my father’s short-lived series was based on a nursery rhyme. The Rat Began to Gnaw the Ropeand The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher. I remember when I started working on the first mystery, I was looking at a collection of cartoons by Edward Gorey called, I think, Catagorey, in which all the cat characters were alphabetized … I can’t quite remember. Suddenly, it occurred to me to do a mystery series based on the alphabet. I’ve since found out that Lawrence Treat wrote several stories with a similar idea – “V” as in Victim, “H” as in Homicide. His weren’t sequential, and I don’t think they featured a continuing character, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, so much for my originality.

TAD: Publishers and editors talk a lot about writing with a “different voice.” Talk a little about that, whatever it is.

Grafton: Voice is a big issue. Until I found the right voice for Kinsey Millhone, I wasn’t in business. “Voice” is about getting connected to your “stuff.” A sense of authenticity or truth. A writer’s voice is that unique blend of viewpoint and language that echoes a writer’s soul, if that doesn’t sound too lofty or pretentious.

TAD: Out of a field of perhaps a dozen women writing private eye fiction, you seem to be the one with a sense of “marketing.” The titles, the singsong quality of the name Kinsey Millhone–both seem to imply a kind of “slickness” or a conscious effort toward marketing.

Grafton: Marketing is as important as the writing when it comes right down to it. It dawned on me some months ago that I am, in effect, in business with Henry Holt and Bantam. We’re partners. Before that, I’d taken the position that I was just a lowly writer and grateful to be published. Not any more. I was raised to be chronically modest, but you get to the point where that just doesn’t sell tickets. Consequently, I’m really very actively involved in the publication of these books. The promotion is fun; it’s the writing that’s agony.

Another reason I might seem “slick” is that I’m really an old warhorse. I’ve been writing for 25 years. When you go through the Hollywood training ground, I think it does something to you. What, I’m not sure. All I know is, I work hard on these books, and I’m so committed to the process that it’s a pleasure to get out and sell. Besides which, I like people, especially mystery readers. They’re such fanatics.

TAD: With all the time spent in Hollywood, have there been any options or movie deals?

Grafton: Some nibbles from television, but I worked in TV too long to do that to myself. Television has absolutely no regard for writers. They take your material and do with it as they see fit, and, because they pay you large sums of money, you’re supposed to keep your mouth shut. I’m not interested in that any more. I’m very possessive of Kinsey Millhone. I am interested in the notion of film, but not a movie-for-television. My inclination would be to make a deal with an actress who has a deal with a studio … an actress whose work I know and admire. Otherwise, it’s too much of a crapshoot. Plus, you run the risk of losing the rights to your own character. Think about that one. Anyway, we’ll see. I’ve got 20 letters to go.

TAD: If you could cast it…

Grafton: Sigourney Weaver or Debra Winger.

G Is for (Sue) Grafton

Get to know the famed mystery author and creator of the Kinsey Millhone series, who delights readers as she writes her way through the alphabet.