Guest Blogger ~ Susan Sleeman

We are very fortunate to have Susan Sleeman guest blogging with us today. Susan is a best-selling author of inspirational romantic suspense and mystery novels. Her first romantic suspense title, High-Stakes Inheritance earned a spot on the ECPA bestseller list and her Garden Gate Mystery series, which features Nipped in the Bud, and Read Between the Tines has enjoyed time on Amazon bestseller lists as well. And The Christmas Witness was named a finalist in the 2011 Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense. In addition to writing, Susan hosts the popular internet website TheSuspenseZone.com. She currently lives in Florida, but has had the pleasure of living in nine states. Her husband is a church music director and they have two beautiful daughters, a very special son-in-law, and an adorable grandson. 

Inspiration – It’s All Around You by Susan Sleeman

 If you’re a writer you know it’s sometimes hard to come up with fresh plot ideas. After all, there are only so many plots out there and to stand out we need to put a fresh spin on things that have been done before.

So where do I go for story ideas? I’m constantly asking what if about everything around me. I look at everything I do hoping to find a story idea with a twist. I mean everything. I look at news stories, magazine and television ads, other people, the Bible, science and technology magazines or articles, real crimes, interesting photographs, and on and on.

Let me share a couple of examples in my own writing where I’ve taken something I’ve seen and twisted it.

People around me -

I recently sold a new five book series to Love Inspired. If you read romantic suspense you know there are many series where former law enforcement professionals work in a private investigations agency. Though these series abound, I love writing law enforcement professionals and wanted to do something different. So I started by asking myself what if all the investigators were members of the same family? Different right? But it still didn’t have the unique twist I was looking for. So I kept pondering and one day when I was talking to my daughter about the process she was going through to adopt a child, a bell went off in my head. I could suddenly see the interesting family dynamics that could come from five children who’d experienced unique and wildly different difficulties in childhood coming together to form a strong family unit. It intrigued me so much, I created The Justice Agency.

In the news –

I was reading Yahoo news one day and an article sparked my creativity. The story talked about people (mostly women) who keep cell phone accounts active for loved ones who had died so they can call the loved one’s voicemail to hear their voice. As usual, my mind took a weird twist and I asked the question, what if when the grieving loved one called the phone number someone answered the phone? In Dead Wrong, Kat Justice’s friend does just that. Mourning the loss of her brother who committed suicide, she calls the voice mail and a man answers. She knows it’s not her brother on the end of the line, but she’s long thought her brother wouldn’t end his own life, and she’s now certain that the man who answered the phone is her brother’s killer. She hires the Justice Agency to find the man who possesses her brother’s phone.

Now your turn. Where do you find your story ideas and can you share an example?

More on Dead Wrong by Susan Sleeman

A KILLER’S CLOSING IN…

When her client and old college friend is murdered, P.I. Kat Justice knows the killer will come for her next. Her survival depends on finding her unknown enemy first…and working with homicide detective Mitch Elliot, her onetime crush. 

It’ll take all her professional skills to ignore the sparks between them, but Kat can’t allow the handsome cop to get close. She’s seen too many people she loves die, so she vows just to do her job without getting emotionally involved. Yet keeping her distance may not be the best way to protect her heart—or their lives.