Angela Greenman is an internationally recognized communications professional. Her career has spanned the spectrum from community relations in Chicago to US and world governments’ public communications on nuclear power. She has been an expert and lecturer with the International Atomic Energy Agency for over a decade, a spokesperson for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a press officer for the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, the City's civil rights department. After traveling to twenty-one countries for work and pleasure, she decided it was time to seriously pursue her love of writing. She wants to share the exciting places she has visited, and the richness of the cultures she has experienced.
In Greenman's debut novel, The Child Riddler, Zoe Lorel has reached a good place in her life. She has her dream job as an elite operative in an international spy agency and she’s found her one true love. Her world is mostly perfect—until she is sent to abduct a nine-year-old girl. The girl is the only one who knows the riddle that holds the code to unleash the most lethal weapon on earth—the first ever "invisibility" nanoweapon. But Zoe’s agency isn’t the only one after the child, and when enemies reveal the weapon’s existence to underground arms dealers, every government and terrorist organization in the world want to find that little girl. Zoe races to save not only the child she has grown to care about, but also herself. The agency-prescribed pills—the ones that transform her into the icy killer she must become to survive—are threatening her engagement to the one person who brings her happiness. Can she protect the young girl and still protect the one thing she cares more about than anything else?
Today Angela stops by In Reference to Murder for Author R&R about writing and researching.
My approach to research is the same as my approach to life: find the truth. Is that deal really good, or are there hidden charges? Can I trust what this person is saying? What really happened between them? Is this news report factual?
For me, life always seems to involve a quest for truth. So, when I sat down to seriously write The Child Riddler, I realized my research required more than just a technical search to find the correct facts and descriptions. It also involved seeking the truth in a character’s sensory and emotional moments. When I say “truth,” I mean a truth in life—what the description or event needs to be believable. Belief requires a commonality in feeling or experience. If readers believe what I write, they will connect to it and respond.
For example, when I write about a character walking on the beach, I want readers to feel as if they are on the beach too, hearing the waves crashing, smelling the salt water, feeling the grainy particles between their toes as their feet sink into the sand.
Creating a sensory immersion requires collecting the textures, colors, and scents of all that surrounds me. It’s building a giant mental toolbox so I can select that exact truth, the one that brings the scene alive as readers experience what the character’s senses are sharing.
Because I’ve been fortunate to have traveled extensively internationally, my sensory toolbox is stocked with many rich experiences. Here are two passages from The Child Riddler to illustrate what I mean by sensory immersion.
In this first passage, a character is in Vienna, Austria, touring the Habsburg Historic Staterooms in the Albertina Museum:
“His leather loafers silent on the exquisite rose and ebony inlaid parquet floor, Xavier strolled through the deserted staterooms. Greeted by brilliant turquoise, bright canary, and rich burgundy silk wallpaper, under grand chandeliers, surrounded by exquisite furniture and shiny gilded ornaments, he breathed in opulence. This was where he belonged.”
In this second passage, the same character is visiting a home in Petrich, Bulgaria.
“They entered a large garden. Wooden trellises, draped with gnarled grapevines that looked to be more than a century old, stood tall at the entrance. Plump, deep-red grape clusters hung from the thick vines. Red and pink rose bushes, apple and peach trees, and assorted vegetables—cabbage, tomatoes, beans, potatoes, and peppers—lined the neatly planted garden.
Xavier took a deep breath. The roses’ sweet fragrance, used in the specialty essential oil and perfume of Bulgaria, floated in the light breeze, a pleasurable incense after being in the stuffy car.
Folk music played in the background. He scanned the garden but didn’t see a speaker or sound system.”
To research emotional immersion—really diving into the soul of a character—I like to ask lots of questions. Why do people make the choices they do? Why do they hold certain attitudes? Why did something happen to them?
From these questions, I learn about the reactive forces in people’s relationships. Reactive forces are all the varied roles we play. Our roles in the different environments we inhabit make us respond to a particular situation in a certain way. These life dynamics shape our psyche and mold our emotional core.
Understanding the threads woven into the individual tapestries of our lives helps to weave an emotional scene. Readers respond to this scene because of its truth—they too have kicked a chair in anger at betrayal by a friend or lover. The truth can also be a sweet gesture or an emotional trigger that touches our heart—as when your dog, knowing you’re sad, comes to you and licks the tears from your face.
Here are three passages from The Child Riddler where I sought to convey emotional truth in actions and feelings.
“The video went black. Zoe raised her hands and pressed her heels down on the floor, violently pushing herself away from the computer with her feet. Revulsion crawled over her. She didn’t want to touch anything related to that vile scene she’d just witnessed.”
Further down the page:
“Her heaves subsiding, her gaze bored into the blackness of the computer screen, its darkness deepening with every second.”
Another passage:
“Warmth spread through Zoe. A special warmth, a deep tenderness that seeped into her every pore. Now she knew what it felt like when someone said their heart melted.”
Delving into the sensory and emotional constructs of writing may be fun, but you can’t escape the dog work of technical research. Identifying the “most lethal weapon on earth” for my book took considerable investigation. Fascinated by the future technology of warfare, I chose a cloaking spider bot. Cloaking technology has elements of nanotechnology—the manipulation of matter on an atomic scale—and this is the future of warfare. Countries are already spending billions on researching cloaking and nanotechnology.
My career with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency gave me knowledge of technical organizations and sources. Even so, I still spent half the time it took to craft my book on research. I scoured the internet for articles and technical pieces that I found through keyword searches.
But to research character development, there is nothing like studying real people. In The Child Riddler, the director of the spy agency, Easton, is a strong manager. To make sure I’d captured the true essence of a tough senior manager, I asked a former high-level executive from a major government organization to review my Easton passages. This beta read was well worthwhile as his critique gave me great insight in writing realistic “Easton” dialogue.
For the character of the gifted child, nine-year-old Leah, I found internet videos of genius children who had won spelling contests. I studied personal interviews that followed their win, paying particular attention to how they spoke and the words they used.
Now as I write my second book, a sequel—where I’m striving to make Zoe even more human, more flawed—I recognize that all my research for The Child Riddler was technical. I may have divided it into categories, like sensory and emotional, to create a plot and believable characters. Devising a plot that the reader connects to because of its truths requires accuracy—not only in data and location but also in describing the human experience. This is where we grow and change, adapting all the while.
You can learn more about Angela and her books via her website. You can also connect with Angela on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The Child Riddler is available in digital, print, and audiobook formats via Bella Books and all major booksellers.
