My husband and I were out for breakfast when the seed for my third novel was planted. We had an agenda for this meal: he was going to help me title my work-in-progress, the name of which had eluded me for months already. Over syrupy pancakes and a cheesy omelet, he offered me suggestions I batted away like flies buzzing around our food.
“I want something that conveys the family aspect of the story,” I told him.
He bit into a piece of bacon. “The Family Plot?” he tried.
I straightened, the shaky diner chair creaking beneath me. “No. That doesn’t work at all. But that’s a great title.”
So great that I couldn’t get it out of my head. For the next few days, it haunted me, those three words looping like a warped record, something dark and foggy in its notes. I attempted to ignore it, intent on continuing the project that, in addition to remaining untitled, now felt uninteresting to me, as well. It didn’t matter, though. Far better, I figured, to have a story without a title than a title without a story.
But then that story arrived, quick as the snap of someone’s fingers. The premise announced itself one morning, fully formed, elevator-pitch ready, and I burst into the bathroom where my husband was brushing his teeth to share it with him: “A family of adult siblings gathers for the first time in years to bury their patriarch, but when they dig up his grave, they discover the body of their long-missing brother already there.”
My husband stared at me, the toothbrush stalled in his mouth. “What?”
I left him to wonder. Running to my laptop to record the idea, images of the story’s setting burst through my mind: a rocky secluded island, a creepy stone mansion, an ivy-choked shed. And over the next few days, the characters introduced themselves to me, a family who—through their homeschooling, their dinner conversations, their traditions—had always immersed themselves in stories of true crime.
There was the matriarch, who responds to the revelation of her son’s murder by feverishly baking cookies. There was the eldest daughter, who channels her grief into art, creating a diorama of her brother’s murder scene. And the eldest son, who throws himself into curating a museum that features artifacts of their family’s true crime obsession. Then, finally, the novel’s protagonist, who is baffled and appalled by her family’s behavior and vows to discover who buried her twin brother in their father’s grave.
Oh, and there was a serial killer, too. One who’d terrorized the island for decades—and had never been caught.
When it came time to name the siblings in that family, I turned to the stories I’d already decided they grew up learning, ones that their mother would surely turn to herself as a way of honoring victims of murder: Dahlia, after the Black Dahlia; Tate, after Sharon Tate; and Charlie, after the Lindbergh baby. And just like that, I had created a family that was dark and dysfunctional and deliciously inspiring.
Our brainstorming breakfast cost my husband and I less than twenty dollars. But with The Family Plot launching this month, it turned out to be a much better deal than I ever could have imagined.
Megan Collins is the author of The Family Plot, Behind the Red Door, and The Winter Sister. She has taught creative writing for many years at both the high school and college level and is the managing editor of 3Elements Literary Review. She lives in Connecticut.
