A Book(ish) Life: Marlene Anne Bumgarner
Switching Genres: Writing a Cozy Mystery after a Lifetime of Nonfiction
Welcome to A Book(ish) Life, where I showcase a range of voices of readers and writers from around the internet. Today’s guest is Marlene Bumgarner, an author and fellow member of Sisters in Crime. We’re a few days late today (spring break threw off my schedule!) but I’m so pleased to share Marlene’s thoughts with you.
Happy April!
Jenny
Switching Genres: Writing a Cozy Mystery after a Lifetime of Nonfiction
Marlene Anne Bumgarner
Writing is my happy place. All my life I have written daily, even when I am not under contract to produce a specific product. Journaling, writing personal letters and essays, contributing to newsletters, magazines, and anthologies are some of the ways I keep myself in practice between books. Like my neighbor who chases a runner’s high, for me the act of sitting down at the keyboard has always activated the release of feel-good endorphins and kept me there until I completed my self-appointed task.
So imagine my surprise and disappointment when sitting at the keyboard began setting off negative vibes.
I was halfway through my first attempt to write a cozy mystery. It had started as a fun project during the Covid lockdown. I was stuck at home with nothing but my keyboard to keep me occupied, so I constructed a fantasy world in which 60-year-old Harriet Palmer, a retired schoolteacher who had recently left her English village for a condominium in Los Angeles, would be my sleuth. I gave her two sons and twin grandsons, and set her off to solve a murder that had occurred on her very doorstep. Developing the characters had been fun, and I followed Save The Cat’s guidelines for structure and plot points. My critique partners loved Harriet, and couldn’t wait for the next chapter. But now I was in the muddy middle, and I didn’t have a clue what to write next.
For several days I avoided my laptop, deciding that it was time to rearrange my closet and transplant some vegetables. I folded laundry, emptied the dishwasher and filled it again. Anything to keep me from staring at that proverbial blank page.
When I write nonfiction, I develop an outline first, then I start researching my topics and writing about them. It’s like filling in the blanks. My job is to explain, describe, clarify for the reader whatever topic it is that I am addressing. Now, as the creator of a cozy mystery, I needed to obfuscate, confuse, muddle and befog the reader, send her down irrelevant pathways searching for red herrings, try to convince her that what she believes is right when it is actually wrong. It went against everything I had been doing for my entire career.
Fortunately, while I had been avoiding writing, my brain was at work. Why not treat the murders as the topic of a nonfiction article? I returned to my desk and developed an outline for the next part of the book. I imagined three different murder scenarios, each different from the actual one, and wrote a short non-fiction piece describing the causes, events and suspects for each scenario, as if I was writing a newspaper article. Then I imagined Harriet reading each article, following the trail of events, and discovering the erroneous information in each one. I still needed to create investigations and interviews so Harriet could eliminate each wrong theory, but the stalemate was broken, and I was able to write on to the end.
About Marlene
Marlene Bumgarner is the author of Back to the Land in Silicon Valley (Paper Angel Press, 2020). She blogs at https://marlenebumgarner.com about gardening, natural foods, grandparenting and more. Most recently, Marlene taught undergraduate courses on developmental psychology and educational theory at Gavilan College in Gilroy. She is currently at work on her first novel, as well as a book about 21st century grandparenting. She is releasing an updated and revised edition of her second book, Organic Cooking for (Not-So-Organic) Parents, to be published by Paper Angel Press in 2026. A long-time resident of the Bay Area, she now lives in Calabasas, CA, with her Border Collie, Kismet and enjoys spending time in her organic garden, when she is not helping to care for her grandchildren.