Diana Renn, creator and author of Rambling Roads Mysteries, a full-cast audio drama
I live in a quaint historic New England town with layers of history and mystery, and where walking tours sometimes take over the sidewalks. Tourists follow guides over the uneven grounds of the cemetery, picking their way over crumbling headstones. The tour guides do it all backwards, narrating stories of deceased residents and battlegrounds while managing not to trip. During spooky season, guides and tourists turn into silhouettes, slipping into the shadows of alleys, ducking into our haunted hotel. There are also numerous specialized tours on Indigenous history, Black history, womenโs history, literary history, and more.
Iโve gone on quite a few of these tours, in part because Iโm married to a tour guide. My husband, a history buff, took a class during the pandemic and got licensed. He compiled a thick binder of information, maps, and other visual aids, which he still always reviews before a tour. Though heโs so far only given tours for friends and connections, heโll customize tours for particular interests. One tour he gave to a group of physicists in town for a reunion had a science emphasis, and a plethora of physics puns.
Testing out routes with him, listening to him talk with other guides, at some point I became more fascinated by the tour guide job itself. My mystery antenna went up, as it occurred to me that a walking tour company offered the perfect infrastructure for sleuthing. Guides with unique skill sets and personalities could cover a wide territory, comparing notes, observing. Tourists too might observe anomalies or even participate in crimes โ or be victims of them. I began taking notes, creating a binder of my own. I knew I wanted to write about a woman who moves to a small town for a fresh start, who eventually joins a group of sleuths to use a walking tour company as cover. They would investigate ecological mysteries and conservation crimes. It would be a fun novel to write โ or a whole series!
Except . . . it wasnโt. It was neither a novel nor fun. Notes and ideas piled up, but not pages. I couldnโt find my way into the story. I couldnโt figure out how to translate the charactersโ passion for walking to the page. Even my husband looked skeptical when I eventually shared my premise. โPeople will sign up for a tour for thirty minutes, or an hour,โ he observed, โbut do they really want to be in the walking tour world for hundreds of pages?โ
I wasnโt sure either. Of course, my characters would be doing interesting things outside of tours, but I did want walking to be central to the story. They walked and they walked . . . then they walked some more. No. I slammed the binder shut. Another year went by, and the walking tour mystery novel didnโt get written.
I love walking. And like many people, I often walk while listening to a book or a podcast. I donโt know why it took me so long to stumble across this solution. What if I walked and simply tried to listen to the characters Iโd come up with? The walking tour guides with their specialized interests, and the lead character, Evelyn โ the journalist-turned-dogwalker who was new to town?
For a few weeks, on every walk, I imagined one of my characters accompanying me. I finally began to hear their voices. I was hearing my way into the story. I fell into a rhythm of walking and listening. As I looked around me, I populated a fictional town, Turners Grove, with a colonial history and an abundance of nature. Sometimes I dictated ideas into my phone. Then, back home, I wrote.
At first, it was snatches of dialogue, people giving or attending tours. No descriptions. I did, however, jot down sounds, like the birds I heard, or the spring peepers, or the whine of distant chainsaws. Those saws began to invade my listening space and eventually the story, as I realized the central crime had to do with a network of illegal tree work.
Suddenly I was writing sound effects. I was writing a script.
Wouldnโt audio drama be the perfect format for walking, talking, and listening? What if the episodes were about the length of a tour, or the amount of time someone might comfortably go for a walk, thirty to forty-five minutes?
Instead of Word, where I write all my novels, I opened up a screenwriting program, Final Draft, which Iโd used years before for a screenwriting project. Galvanized, I began writing a scene or two a day, a brisk pace I seldom kept up with when I was writing novels.
There were structural elements that didnโt map neatly from novel to audio. For example, episodes didnโt quite function like chapters. The story was serialized, building toward the big revelations and a showdown, as well as the solution. But each episode had to stand on its own, drawing the listeners in right away, building toward a mini-climax, and ending with a cliffhanger. I overcame those challenges by listening to numerous audio dramas and studying their structure. Some scenes were long, while others were less than a page. That flexibility excited me, as my novel chapters are typically at a predictable length and pace.
Other aspects of script writing felt freeing. Evelyn could have voiceovers as well as her in-scene dialogue. Her voiceovers provided interiority for pacing and insight and moved the story along. I also came to love writing sound effects and planting clues within the soundscape for listeners to encounter alongside the sleuths.
The collaborative process with a production crew began sooner than I expected. Nora Shalaway Carpenter and I connected through a mutual friend. Nora is a fellow eco-focused childrenโs book author. Sheโs also an audiobook narrator, with connections to a professional recording studio and team in Morganton, North Carolina. We jumped on a call. She was excited about the project. She had access to a studio, a sound designer, and voice talent she could gather in a room over a two-day recording session. She could play Evelyn. She could also work within my budget for a small independent production. She began assembling the cast of twelve voice actors while I was still drafting a seven-episode Season One.
One day, while I was midway through revising Episode Four and hitting a speed bump, Nora emailed me a promotional graphic sheโd created with the actorsโ headshots. But because Iโm a mystery writer, they presented themselves to me more as mug shots. Iโd suspected I needed more suspects and red herrings. Suddenly the actorsโ faces inspired fresh ideas and backstory. I even came up with two significant plot twists after studying them! To my surprise, because the production process was underway while I was writing, it influenced the story development. The voices in my head became faces in my inbox. My solitary imagination, with ideas coaxed forward on walks, had turned into a full-cast production, and was taking on a life of its own. It also lit a fire under me to hit my deadlines. People were gathering to read my words. Booking airplane tickets. I had to finish on time!
My real-life cast continues to spark my imagination even now that Season One is out. As I contemplate a Season Two, I already know these actorsโ specific vocal skills, their timing, and their chemistry. I love what they did with the material and canโt wait to give them more words.
And I know just where Iโll find those words. Time to lace up my shoes and head out for a walk
Diana Renn is the author of five novels for young readers, including the middle grade eco-mysteries Trouble at Turtle Pond and The Owl Prowl Mystery (Fitzroy Books / Regal House) as well as three YA mysteries published by Penguin Random House: Tokyo Heist, Latitude Zero, and Blue Voyage. Her books have been honored by the Green Earth Book Awards and the Massachusetts Book Awards. Her essays have appeared in Flyway Journal of Writing and Environment, WBURโs Cognoscenti, Pangyrus, The Huffington Post, Writerโs Digest, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she now lives in Concord, Massachusetts, where she is active in local conservation groups. She also works as a book coach and editor specializing in the mystery genre. Rambling Roads Mysteries reflects her love of place-based storytelling and her interest in mysteries rooted in community, conservation, and local history. Learn more about Diana at dianarennbooks.com and the show at ramblingroadsmysteries.com
