Remember when you were small and stuck at family gatherings, parked next to dear old Uncle Frank, hearing for the umpteenth time his story of how he blew out all the tires on Grandfather's car?
I try not to be Uncle Frank. But if you pick up one of my series novels (Mrs. Murphy, Sister Jane, Six of One or the Nevada series) without reading the first, what do I do? Well, pray, perhaps. But I recall Mother intoning, "God helps those who help themselves." So you need to know about those four blown tires, so to speak, because facts are essential to character and series. Back in the 6th century B.C., Heraclitus said, "Character is destiny." A writer would do well to memorize that. So would a politician.
The other fence a writer must vault over is the relationships between standing characters. Are they married? Did they ever have an affair? Are they best friends? What do they share? Class or racial bias? Are they hiding something like homosexuality? Are they emotionally honest?
A character can be a moral paragon and deeply unlikable. What do the other characters make of this person? In the South, the response will be consistent; the South has a place and a phrase for such people which every other Southerner understands just as they understand you never call your unmarried aunt who is ugly as a mud fence just that. If you have a scrap of breeding, you will refer to her as "an unclaimed treasure."
Somehow I have to transmit this without bogging down the plot. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don't. That is why one has editors.
Often a person will ask me how I keep returning to the same territory. Do I get bored? No more than I get bored with my family and friends, which is to say sometimes yes, sometimes no. And sometimes, I could just kill them. In the books, I really can.
The reward for all this is I laugh when I write; sometimes the smoke comes out of my ears, and sometimes I cry. I love the English language, so I generally have a wonderful time. The other reward and one I never considered when I started writing in high school was that many people hear an echo in my books, whether it is the series or the stand-alone books (e.g., Rubyfruit Jungle and The Sand Castle).
It really is call and response, but then, I'm a Southerner. It's second nature. --Rita Mae Brown, whose latest book, with Sneaky Pie Brown, is The Big Cat Nap: The 20th Anniversary Mrs. Murphy Mystery (Bantam)