Today, I’m interviewing Marni Graff. She has been a nurse, a TV and movie consultant, a mystery writer and a writing instructor. She’s studied at the Iowa Writing Program and at Oxford University.  Here is an interesting woman.

 Jim:  You had a career in nursing, and wrote for a nursing journal.  Did that inspire you to write fiction, or was that always in your mind?

 Marni:  I wrote nonfiction to hone my writing skills and obtain publishing credits after I’d studied journalism. I always knew I wanted to write fiction, and studied different forms “on the side” during my nursing career in preparation for my second career in writing. I even went back to school as an adult for a degree in English.

 Jim:  Tell us a little about your consulting work for TV and movies.

 Marni:  I’d taken screenwriting at NYU and saw an ad in the paper for a nurse consultant. The job became two-fold: working on scripts from home, and working on set for things filmed in Manhattan. One time I edited a skit for The Carol Burnett Show where Harvey Korman played a surgeon carving the Thanksgiving turkey. And I did a scene for Steve Martin in the movie Grand Canyon. At that time, Law and Order was filming in NY and I did that show often, working with Paul Sorvino, Jerry Orbach and Chris Noth, but most of my on set work was on soap opera sets, particularly One Life to Live. One actress, Marilyn Cris (who played Wanda Wolek), remains my friend to this day.

 Jim:  You had a series of books where a nurse was solving crimes.  But now, you seem to be concentrating on the young writer in England.  Is that the end of the line for the nurse capers?

 Marni:  No, Trudy Genova is just in hiatus while I concentrate on Nora Tierney, a Connecticut gal living in England. I may bring out Trudy’s Death Unscripted next year. Trudy does the exact job I did as a medical consultant and lives in the Big Apple.

 Jim:  Your 2014 The Scarlet Wench will be the third set in England (following The Blue Virgin and The Green Remains).  Does that end the series, or is there an Orange or Purple or Yellow to follow Scarlet?

 Marni:  I have six planned as of now and am already working on The Golden Hour, which starts with Nora visiting her CT home, but the main action takes place in Bath, UK. 

 Jim:  Tell us a little about The Scarlet Wench.

 Marni:  Nora is living temporarily at Ramsey Lodge in the Lake District in the village of Bowness-on-Windermere, right on the shore of England’s largest lake. Her infant son is six months old and she’s juggling single parenting, writing her children’s books, taking on freelance journalism assignments, and helping her illustrator friend run the lodge. A theatre troupe arrives to put on Noel Coward’s farce Blithe Spirit; the only non-actor is DI Declan Barnes, ostensibly there for a hiking vacation but hoping to further his relationship with Nora. A series of pranks and accidents will escalate to murder. All the chapter epigrams are actual lines from the play. When I received permission from Coward’s estate to use them, they asked for a copy of the book for their archives, which is a great honor.

 Jim:  You’ve studied at the Iowa Writing Program and at Oxford University.  How would compare the two?

 Marni:  Apples and oranges. Iowa is a typical workshop where you submit 20 pages of a work before meeting, everyone reads each other’s work before the class meets, and there is critiquing after a class lesson. There are individual visits with each teacher for one hour to go over your work and hear suggestions.

 Oxford goes back in time to the tutor method. Classes are much more academically based, and time to do research in the famed Bodleian Library. I was able to read the original broadsheets of Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White there. It’s much more about the conventions of the genre and the classics that form the background. As a mystery writer, my class concentrated on Wilkie Collins and Daphne Du Maurier.

 I should point out here that St Hilda’s College in Oxford is home to a yearly Crime and Mystery Conference that just had its 20^th outing and I was happy to attend. Famed crime writers give papers based on a theme and readers and writers attend the sessions, have tea together, and eat in the college dining room as a group. One of this year’s participants was the Baroness herself, P. D. James.

 Jim:  Lastly, any advice for writers less experienced than you?

 Marni:  Read, read, read. Read in the genre you want to write in; read the cereal box; read the classics. You cannot be a good writer if you are not a reader, I’m convinced of that.

 Carry a small notebook. Record the sights and sounds and scents of an area. Note the feelings a certain type of weather provokes in you. Neil Simon talks about being the kid at bar mitzvahs who stood against the wall and just observed people.

 Allow yourself the freedom to experiment in different forms. If poetry speaks to you, try your hand at that.

 Learn from the masters. Read people like Robert McKee’s Story; Lewis Turco’s Book of Forms for Poetry and Dialogue to get a handle on that, too. Annie Lamott’s Bird by Bird  is a standard, but give Elizabeth George’s Write Away a try to see how a successful writer still has anxiety, and learn the method she uses.

 Finally, remember to write first drafts without your editor’s hat on. As P. D. James told me once: “The real writing gets done in the revision.”

 Thanks for this wonderful opportunity to connect with your readers, Jim!

 Jim:  It was my pleasure – and my readers’ pleasure – to have you today, Marni.  And readers, check out some of Marni’s books at:

http://amzn.to/1h1XAww

and leave a comment and ask Marni a question about Oxford, Iowa Writing Program, or working with TV.

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