Life in the Fast Lane (Mary Strand)

This month at YA Outside the Lines, we’re talking about how to make our novels memorable or, alternately, how to mine our lives for inspiration for the novels we write.

I constantly mine my own life for inspiration to write my novels. (Sports injuries? Ask me anything!) And sometimes I’ll try new things just to be able to describe how to do them. For me, the key is paying attention and being open to new experiences.

My Bennet Sisters YA series has a theme: music. Each of the four novels becomes progressively more involved in music. Liz is simply into rock music in a big way. Mary has always played piano but has a deep desire to switch to guitar. Cat (better known as Kitty in the original Pride and Prejudice) hangs out with other teens in a basement band (which might ordinarily be a garage band, but in Minnesota that would be a Bad Idea in January), and is goaded into singing with the band, and let’s just say it doesn’t go well.

And in book four, Livin’ La Vida Bennet, Lydia knows absolutely nothing about playing guitar but brags about it anyway, and suddenly she’s forced to take guitar lessons if she doesn’t want the whole world to know that she’s not who she claims she is. (Gotta love Lydia!)

When I started writing Lydia’s book, I realized that I knew almost as little about guitar as Lydia did and had no idea what guitar lessons would involve. That day, I signed up for guitar lessons. They turned out to be life-changing for me.

For Lydia? Not so much.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m always on the go. At the moment, I’m studying four languages on Duolingo, most of them every day. I play almost every sport, and in very happy news a publisher just asked me to write children’s sports novels. I’m releasing my debut album in June and playing lots of gigs right now as a result. It’s a frantic life, sometimes too frantic, and there’s a very blurry line between what I do and what I write about.

In almost all of my novels, the heroine plays one or more sports. Cat Bennet, in Cat Bennet, Queen of Nothing, drove me crazy because she’s perhaps the only heroine I’ve ever written who’s not athletic. It was hard for me to identify with her. But rather than force her to play sports, I gave her art, a car with a manual transmission, a crush on a drummer, and a trip to Wisconsin Dells. It made my life much easier: I’ve been there, believe me!

Sometimes life throws curveballs, and not just in baseball. My life has been derailed several times for things like visits to hospitals, either for my own sports injuries or the illness and/or death of people close to me. Even in those situations, my writer brain paid attention, memorizing the details of all those wires and beeping machines, the words and actions of medical peeps and family members, and how I felt during it all. And those details have shown up in my books.

When we talk about making something memorable, it's all about the details. I once read a skiing book by an author who obviously had never skied in her life. Books about lawyers (I’m a lawyer, too) by authors who obviously have never practiced law. A book featuring a power boat that inexplicably had a sailboat mast. We’ve all read books like those. And we’ve sometimes thrown them against the nearest wall.

My goal is to experience everything I possibly can, remember all the details, and write about it in such a way that you KNOW I’ve been there. So my readers can go there, too.

Welcome to my world. Oh, and here's my upcoming CD, GOLDEN GIRL. June 23!

Mary Strand is the author of Pride, Prejudice, and Push-Up Bras and three other novels in the Bennet Sisters YA series. You can find out more about her at marystrand.com.