Suzanne Crain Miller
Temperatures
DOSSIER: Your book WAGE, about the cost of serving overseas and having too come back to the US and deal with a whole different level of treachery, came in at 506 pages; you followed up with THE SELECTIONS that came in at 698. Now that TEMPERATURES is out at 312 pages, The Dossier wants to know … were you paid by the page for the first two?
MILLER: Oh, I wish… It’s just practice I’d say, though my next one coming out next year, Souvenir (a crime one as well) has been tough to keep under 500…
As a reader, I don’t mind longer books, such as Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen and the two book collection offering for Cormac McCarthy’s last. Both excellent and I can’t imagine what could have been cut. I like to be immersed and feel as if a book is becoming a friend I’m spending time with. This is not the same for everyone.
As a novelist who’s also done some screenwriting, I am learning that in an age where you’d like your work adapted, you need to be more concise. You must say a lot with a little, keeping only what pertains to the main story, or scene at hand. If you’re telling about a time the character committed their first robbery in their twenties, you might just not be able to tell all about their entire childhood even though you know it and feel it’s important to you.
I’m learning to look at writing the same way I used to look at first dates way back in my teens and twenties before I got married—you want to tell so much because you’re so excited this person has finally given you the time of day (in the writer’s case, the reader has picked up your work) but you can’t just be a verbal machine gun and tell them everything or you’ll scare them off. If you’re lucky and they like the first read, they’ll ask you on that second date, so to speak , and read another one.
And of course you have to wear your hot pants and put on the dog, as we say in the South, so a kickass cover doesn’t hurt. Winding Road Stories, my publisher of Temperatures knocked it out of the park with that. Regarding page numbers, with Temperatures, I also had a really good editor in Michael Dolan with WRDS and he helped me not veer off in the weeds and keep it relevant to what we had to know to get to the finale.
DOSSIER: A lot of Southern writers (Eli Cranor and Scott Blackburn, for instance) often reveal some dark issues in their characters. TEMPERATURES revolves around a baby left in a hot car and the two cops who deal with it. Do you think it has something with the South that draws writers to such harsh topics, personal life conflicts, or a combination factors? Or is it something else altogether?
MILLER: For me, having lived most of my life, except for my years in college, in the South, I think it is a barbarian esque and yet beautiful place. Anywhere you have money, especially old money obtained by savagery and enslaving means, you’ll have violence and atrocities committed on others to keep that money, and to preserve a way of life. The difficult thing about the modern South is atrocities are acted out differently. No one might take you out back and put a bullet in your head, though there are some parts where that just might still happen, but they’ll buy up land, raise your taxes and squeeze you out of the place you live until you have no choice but to vacate or make it difficult for you to get employment that pays a living way, or they’ll lock you up for a traffic violation. All these ways of keeping certain groups of people down are rampant in the South, and so then ripe for gritty stories.
As for myself when writing about crimes in general, I look for crimes that may not always be the first ones people think of perpetrated by ordinary people, as in Temperatures using the two cops and a single mother, and Wage using a soldier back from war.
Alternately, I can also go for very different, out of the ordinary characters perpetrating (or blamed for) somewhat usual crimes as I did in my book Queen with a transgendered Tina Turner impersonator blamed for a murder and Selections about a con artist who lives in hospitals and mooches off patients.
DOSSIER: When and where do you write, and what kind of environment do you prefer? (Music/silence/picnic table in the backyard with pine straw under your feet?)
MILLER: When I was younger and not yet disabled, I used to live by the idea that I needed to be in the mood or have a certain environment to write. I used to feel I had an infinite amount of time. Sometimes I miss those days. Now, with becoming disabled from a work injury in my early 30’s, I did my best to get rid of that and train myself to write anywhere, anytime as I don’t get the big blocks of time that I used to what with doctor’s appointments, treatments for my disability and daily maintenance of my disability just to keep mobile. Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way really helped me to be able to write anytime anywhere as well.
I use my notes app if I’m waiting at the doctors, talk into my voice command so it goes on my notes app while I’m in the car then email it to myself, scribble in notebooks (as I hand write all my first drafts now in Sharpie in notebooks). I will say, I am partial to this as I can write outside or in a comfy chair not at my desk glued to the computer like I have to be for hours a day with work. Overall though, I get that draft out by any means necessary, and I don’t worry about my mood. I turn on the channel in my mind and listen to my characters. They always say “Fuck your mood! Let’s get this shit done!” Ha!
(L) Initial inspiration for how Cobb and Hogue would look from a Rolling Stone article about detectives.
DOSSIER: You talk about true crime and how you’re not surprised that more people don’t go missing in places like south Georgia. You even mention the time you saw a man rolling his I.V. along the sidewalk wearing nothing but a hospital gown in 100% degree heat. When you saw him, did you immediately think that he would make a good character in one of your books? You did, didn’t you?
MILLER: I totally forgot about that … or the time in L.A. when I was there for a writing workshop and we were all standing outside a coffee shop near Hollywood Boulevard and saw a man in a hospital gown pulling a freezer, yes a freezer on a dolly behind him that was chained shut with blood dripping out of the sides. None of us even knew what to say and you get that delusion that surely someone, like the police will see him or have been called, to make yourself feel better about turning back to drinking your coffee. This kind of complicitness plagues me and I write about it a lot. It’s certainly a theme in Temperatures—the level of complicitness we all live with just to survive.
These days with living in the sticks, I see people every day on my drive home from walking my dog who look like they might be missing from somewhere or who’ve escaped from something, to be honest. After talking myself out of asking them if they need a ride, because that’s always my first inclination—wanting to help, and in my younger days I did that a bit as I think I felt like pre disabled me could pull over and outrun them if necessary. (I also remember that statistically, a stranger is not going to be the person to do anything to you. It will be someone you know.)
I then ask myself where did they come from? How’d they end up here? Sometimes they answer me. Sometimes they’re one of my characters. Other times, there’s only silence.
DOSSIER: It would be an understatement to suggest that you present yourself to the world as 100% who you are, and that seems to be reflected in your blog and your writing. What’s your opinion on fiction writers who work hard at, and are sometimes very successful at, writing books that simply tell an entertaining tale without heart, emotion, or a personal connection to the material?
MILLER: John Lennon says an artist’s job is to show the world to itself. I guess I don’t consider myself an entertainer. I consider myself an artist and in that, I try to do my job—show the world to itself.
The only way to do this is to bare it all. Finding interesting ways to do that may involve some entertaining but that’s never my goal.
Another favorite artist of mine, David Foster Wallace, says “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
So that being said … the truth … I’m always just trying to find better ways to air the truth and make readers glad it’s not done with them yet 😉
Connect with Suzanne when she’s on social platforms weekly on Wednesdays. Follow her on X and Instagram.
Website: Tattooed Daughter
Jeff Circle 