I’ve invited Sharon Dunn over to have a cup of cyber coffee with us and some chitchat about writing. So get cozy with a cup of your favorite coffee and join us for some fun.
Sharon, did you have a defining moment that made you want to start writing or did the desire build up over the years? Tell us about your journey.
Writing was always something that I had a sense I did well, but it was sort of a back burner thing until I started having children. I’ve always been a creative person. For years, I expressed that creativity by doing theater. After my oldest son was born, it became obvious being gone four hours a night to rehearse was not going to work. So I started writing when my babies napped or when my husband watched the kids. At first, I just worked on shorter stuff. A book just seemed like too big a project. Then I read in several different writing articles that if you wrote a page a day, by the end of the year, you would have a 365 page book. I didn’t exactly write a page a day, sometimes I did two pages, sometime none and sometimes five, but when the task of writing a book was broken down that way, it seemed more doable.
What author influenced you the most with your writing? And why.
I found Agatha Christie in college. And after that Sue Grafton and Sharyn McCrumb. I love the puzzle aspect of a mystery, that the clues are laid out and the suspects lined up and you as the reader get to figure out who did the crime. I also like that the mystery genre, just by its nature, is an examination of good and evil. You notice all my influences are secular. When I started writing, other than Father Brown I couldn’t find any good Christian mystery authors in the Christian bookstores. They just weren’t being published in that market ten or twelve years ago. Now there are a ton of good Christian mystery writers.
Your Ruby Taylor novels are mysteries. Did you read a lot of Nancy Drew-type books growing up? As far as teen detectives, I was always a Trixie Belden fan.
Nancy Drew was probably the first series that I got really excited about. I remember being a fifth grader in our small country school library and working my way through the pink books. Nancy Drew had pink covers back then. I bought a couple of Nancy Drews at a garage sale a while back just for old time sake.
Do you enhance your creativity at the computer with any special music, scents, snack foods, or favorite coffee and teas?
I am kind of a bare bones person when it comes to enhancing. So much of that becomes a way of procrastinating for me. The next thing you know, I have cleaned my whole house and lit a hundred pretty candles, but haven’t gotten a single word written. I have to focus. Sometimes, I will turn on music or talk radio just for background noise and I do usually bring a cup of coffee with me when I sit down at the keyboard. I have heard other writers say that instrumental soundtrack from movies are really helpful, but I haven’t tried that yet.
Do you write every day? Be honest now.
For the longest time, I wrote almost every day, in usually a two or three hour block. I tried to get it done in the morning because that is when my mind is the sharpest. Lately though because of some life related stress and a disruption in my schedule (I started working mornings at my job at the university) I find my writing is not as consistent or focused. I usually manage to get a journal entry done and copy down some Bible verses (I’m forty, so if I don’t write them out I forget them). With some of the ideas for future books, I want to get at the deep things of the human condition and that is requiring a lot of journaling. Most of what happens with Ruby in the Ruby Taylor series echoes whatever spiritual journey I have gone through, so they were easy write in that way.
What was the first thing you did when you found out you sold your first novel? What were you thinking and feeling? How did you celebrate?
It’s funny, the first Ruby Taylor had been floating around editors’ desks for almost two years. There were a couple of times when I thought the book was going to sell only to have it rejected in the twelfth hour. I had come to the point of thinking maybe I should put Ruby in a drawer with the other two books I had written and not found a publisher for. At a writer’s conference, I spent a lot of time praying about the book asking God why it hadn’t sold yet. I came to a place of contentment, that I would put Ruby in a drawer and go back to being a student of the novel, to learning everything I could about story structure, character development, etc.. I was okay with the idea that I might not sell a novel for ten years. And then about three weeks after coming home from the conference, I got the email from Kregel wanting to know if Romance Rustlers (called Stolen Vows back then) was still available because they were interested in offering me a contract. For me, getting that first contract had a real numb surreal, quality. This was the thing I had dreamed about, and suddenly it was happening. I celebrated by bringing chocolate to my writer’s group, and I bought some cool furniture from Pier One with part of my advance.
link - www.sharondunnbooks.com
Biographical Information - Sharon Dunn is the author of three books in the Ruby Taylor mystery series. The first book in the series Romance Rustlers and Thunderbird Thieves was nominated for Inspirational novel of the year by the reviewers of Romantic Times magazine. Book Two, Sassy Cinderella and the Valiant Vigilante was voted Book of the Year by American Christian Fiction Writers. Sharon lives in Montana with her husband of eighteen years, three children, two cats and lots of dust bunnies.
Sharon Dunn’s Ruby Taylor books are old fashioned follow the clues mysteries written in a humorous first person, chick lit style.