Guest Blog: Author Pam Harris

Pam Harris is a great friend, author, and has edited all three of my books for Mantle Rock Publishing. We call her the Grammar Queen! You can find her on Facebook, or on her blog, Life As I Know It!

Today she talks a little bit about her own writing journey! Welcome, Pam!

People often ask me where I get the ideas for my writing. My answer? I have more ideas than I have time to write!

Not that I’ve written that much. I just completed my fifth book and am going through the tedious process of preparing it for submission to a publishing company. It’s complicated, believe me.

But my ideas are in the hundreds, if not the thousands. A writer can get an idea from a simple comment overheard at the grocery store or an event featured on the news. The sources are endless.

When I first started writing stories as a young girl, I wrote horse stories and mysteries, because that’s what I loved to read. In high school, I wrote tragic stories of love lost and death (teenagers are very morbid––I taught them for 32 years, so believe me, they love the morbid). In college, I focused on news writing and editorials, but fiction was my first love.

One thing, though, that all of my writing attempts had in common was that they were always about what interested me or prompted by what had happened to me. I wrote about horses because I wanted a horse. I wrote those teen angst stories when I was feeling down, insecure, abandoned by that cute guy that didn’t know or care that I existed.

It’s no surprise, then, that my first completed book that was published was a mystery with a twelve-year-old girl as the heroine. That book was published in 2015. I was 59 years old.

The way the book came about is nothing unusual. As an Elvis fan (yes, I admit it, but not an Elvis fanatic, meaning I recognize his flaws and don’t have velvet paintings of him on my walls), I had been to Graceland a few times. One day I drove on the street behind the mansion and wondered about the people living there. Ordinary houses, most built in the 1960s. An ordinary neighborhood. And I wondered: Can they see and hear things that are going on over the white fence, on Graceland’s grounds?

And so, The Ghosts of Graceland was born. To be honest, the story line came easily. I never experienced one minute of writer’s block. Book 2 in the series, Music City Mayhem, was more challenging. My heart just wasn’t in that one like it was the first.

My target audience for those books was girls ages eight to 12. In 2013, I had started a book for adult women, a western historical romance set in Arizona. I didn’t finish it until 2015, and it wasn’t published until 2017. Entitled Aimee in honor of my niece who lives in Arizona, the idea formed while visiting the oldest standing school house in Arizona. I loved writing that book because while I was writing it, I was “there,” in my mind, visiting a place I loved. I lived in Arizona growing up and get to visit occasionally. So, like in my youth, I wrote what was interesting to me.

The fourth book was a novella, “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” in a two-novella volume entitled Smoky Mountain Brides. Notice the Elvis connection yet again? And I love the Smokies.

My fifth book was prompted by a visit to the Outer Banks (the locals call them the OBX) of North Carolina. If you’ve seen Nights in Rodanthe, you’ve seen the Outer Banks. I even used the vacation rental we stayed in as the house in the opening scene.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that everything that I see or experience can be a catalyst for a story. If I live to be 100, I won’t have enough time to write them all. Maybe someday I’ll learn how to write a depressing book that has no connection to me (like The Hunger Games or The Girl on the Train), but until then, I’ll continue to find my ideas in my world around me.

Thanks, Pam!! Now, readers, if you were to write about anything in the world, what would it be? Tell us in the comments below! Have a great Wednesday!

P.S. Pam’s Amazon Author page is HERE!