Smokescreen (36 page)

How do you research your stories?

I do a lot of background work in the library or on the Web. Books, magazines, newspaper articles. More comes from medical or scientific studies, governmental agency reports and diaries. When I’m familiar enough to know what to ask, and where I’m going to focus, I seek out professionals or subject-matter experts and speak with or
interview them, depending on what I need for the story. Early on I was writing a thriller and needed specifics on how a person being murdered would react to specific tactics used to kill him. I called a doctor I knew and put the questions to him. He went silent, stayed silent. Finally, in this wee voice, he said, “Vicki, where is Lloyd?” Lloyd is my husband. The doc was worried I wasn’t speaking hypothetically! I learned right there and then not to assume that anyone
knew
I was a writer and to
always
specifically state that I am before asking the first question.

How do you develop your characters?

This is going to sound a little wacky—and maybe it is, but it works. I interview them. I pretend I’m sitting across a table from them, and I listen to them tell me their life story. Without fail, what they tell me drives the story events and their reactions to those events. Many times I’ve had in mind to write one story, but the characters led me to write another. They know what matters most to them and why. I just have to listen.

When you’re not writing, what are your favorite activities?

I love to do remodeling. There’s something empowering about knocking down a wall or tearing up a tile floor and replacing it with a new one. And I’m crazy about power tools. My
husband doesn’t fear me running loose in a clothing store, but he quakes in his shoes when I go into Home Depot or Lowe’s.

Could you tell us a bit about your family?

Delighted. My husband is an artist. He does realistic wildlife woodcarvings. Prior to this, he had a very different career as a U.S. Air Force officer in Special Operations. We have three children—two sons and a daughter. One is an electrical and computer engineer married to a nurse; the other son has a degree in environmental studies, owns a boating company and is married to a newspaper reporter. They’re expecting a baby as I write this. My daughter is a teacher who had the great sense to marry a brick mason who is hands down the world’s greatest son-in-law. They have a daughter who is the joy in my life; my sun, moon and stars. And we have a hundred-plus-pound Weimer (Gray Ghost), my faithful sidekick, who has no idea she’s a dog and never lets the rest of us forget it.

What are your favorite kinds of vacations?

I’m a simple woman and I have simple tastes. Open the gates to a water park anywhere, and I’m very happy. One of my favorites is in San Marcos, Texas. I love the slides and the rafting. It’s a kick—and I get a license to act like a kid again.

Any last words to your readers?

It’s hard to verbalize this, but I’m going to try. Writing requires so many sacrifices. Yet I love it and I can’t imagine my life without it. The truth is that it’s my readers’ support that grants me the gift of being able to do it, and I am very grateful. I read their letters and I’m so touched. I can’t begin to tell you how much I cherish them, but I do. I save them all, and when times get tough, I pull them out and reread them, and I remember why I do what I do. Many readers write and tell me how much my books help them. I want them to know that they help me, too.

Marsha Zinberg, Executive Editor of Signature Select, spoke with Doranna, Meredith and Vicki in the winter of 2005.

We asked Doranna Durgin to tell us a bit more about the heroine in CHAMELEON. Here Doranna discusses the heroine’s abilities and talks about the point at which the heroine knew she was different.

Samantha Fredericks: nine years old, sobbing her pillow wet at the latest brutal honesty from her parents. You’ll never be pretty, so get used it; you’re not smart enough to aim high, so get used to going low. Samantha Fredericks, escaping into her own mind. She imagined she was a princess.

She didn’t ever imagine she could actually make it so.

You’re nine years old and you want to be anyone but who you really are. So you haul out your imagination and pretend that it’s so. You’re a princess. Maybe even a warrior princess. With hair that gleams.
Tame
hair. And you imagine it night after night, perfecting the details. Until one night you
look in the mirror and—
whoa!
—it’s not you in the reflection.

Welcome to Sam’s world.

Of course, turning into a warrior princess overnight is bound to attract some attention. And since attention was the last thing Sam wanted, she set about being unremarkable: she controlled her hair, softened her young features. Even at nine a girl can study magazines to refine her fashion imagination…. But for Sam it wasn’t enough; once she realized this was something she could do, really
do,
she set about exploring her limits. She investigated different skin colors, different shapes, different sizes. She even experimented with changing her apparent sex—and turned it into her first undercover adventure by checking out the boys’ room at school, which wasn’t nearly as interesting as she’d hoped…except for the ultimate excitement of pulling it off.

Over time she grew and stretched her startling talent, and by the time she graduated, had used it to suss out the dark secrets of her high school, including several anonymous tips that led to drug busts. The last skill she conquered was that of going
unseen,
and she tries not to rely on it too much; it can be too difficult to manage, and has left her cornered once too often.

Sam’s skill doesn’t encompass actual physical change, but is as complete as a psychic experience can be. Those who perceive her guises do so visu
ally and tactually—and because of that, she’s limited in what she can pull off. She can change her skin color, but not radically. As a freckled, fair-skinned woman, she cannot present herself with deep black skin tones—chocolate is as dark as she gets. As a short, slight person, she can only gain a few inches and perhaps fifty pounds of mass, whether in muscle or jiggle. And when she changes to a male form, she can appear as wiry and slender with little effort, but has trouble with beefy and barrel-chested.

Then again, she’s still young…who knows what she’ll learn next!

Everything we sense is fed into the subconscious part of our minds. It never forgets anything. But the subconscious takes everything literally, and that’s where we get into trouble remembering. The subconscious can’t differentiate truth from fiction, doesn’t interpret right from wrong. If we sense it, we store it. But—and here’s the trick—we remember best that which engages our senses.

FOCUS

It is as we sense that our conscious minds do the interpreting and make value judgments on what we’re sensing and taking in. If we’re half listening and half hearing, glimpsing rather than really looking—preoccupied—then that sensory input gets jumbled up. If you want to remember something, as you’re sensing it, focus intently on it. Then you’re filtering truth from fiction, making those value judgments as you sense.

An example. My children used to deliberately wait until I was at the computer, writing, to ask me for permission to do things they knew I wouldn’t approve of them doing. They’d ask, and I’d respond with an “uh-huh,” and later when I’d ask them why they’d done whatever thing they’d done, they’d say, “But you said I could.” That led to the inevitable “When?” Canned response: “When I asked. You were at the computer.” To that I had no defense, because I vaguely recalled a glimmer of that “uh-huh” and knew that, preoccupied, I very likely had given permission for whatever had been done.

Focus. Focus intently. It not only improves memory but also eliminates the embarrassing incriminations you earn at the hands of your children.

FOOD

Some scientists say tea, gum-chewing and/or vitamin supplements can improve your memory. Others disagree. But there is consensus that a balanced diet helps give the brain what it needs to function well.

EXERCISE

Muscles and the brain are said to have a common bond. Exercise them both and they’re stronger and stay stronger longer. Activities that make you use your imagination and really think
about what you’re doing or imagining—like reading—are great exercise for your memory. Exercise will also help in other areas that have a major impact on memory, such as stress, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

REPETITION

If there is something that you want to remember, you have to get it from short-term memory to long-term memory. Much of short-term memory is fleeting and lost within the first day. To get that information from short-term to long-term, focus and repeat the significant portion of it to yourself multiple times. Now, an hour from now, five hours from now, when you’re in that twilight sleep: almost sleeping but not quite. According to the experts, if you perform this repetition for three days, you will have committed the information to long-term memory.

ASSOCIATION

Some find that association works well to enhance memory. Using a child’s birthday as a security code. Using the name of your first pet to jog your memory of a password. Associate a needed series of numbers with a string of birthdays, or with birthstones. Association is effective in helping us remember, provided we use analogies that are significant to us.

GET CREATIVE

If you’re trying to remember a list of items, get creative and use what you’ve got to help you. Ten fingers, ten toes. Two feet or hands or eyes or ears. Associate the number of items with a body part. Say, for example, you’re off to the grocery store. You need five items. Five items equals one hand. If when you’re shopping, you remember the hand, you’ll be less apt to leave the store short an item.

There are a lot of tips on bettering your memory. Some are by well-respected authorities and some are by elementary school children, who learn a lot by rote and repetition. Practical tips are all around us. We simply must open our eyes to them—and then focus on them long enough to grasp them and put them to use.

RECOMMENDED READING

Memory Prescription,
Gary Small,
ISBN: 1-401-30066-9, Hyperion.

Brain Power: Practical Ways To Boost Your Memory, Creativity and Thinking Capacity,
Laureli Blyth,
ISBN: 0-760-73231-0, Barnes & Noble Books.

The Memory Bible,
Gary Small,
ISBN: 0-786-88711-7, Hyperion.

Total Memory Workout: 8 Easy Steps to Maximum Memory Fitness,
Cynthia R. Green,
ISBN: 0-553-38026-5, Bantam.