Gary Stuart is a Phoenix lawyer and an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, where he also serves as the Senior Policy Advisor to the Office of the Dean. He is a former member of the Arizona Board of Regents and is a member of the Maricopa Bar Association's Hall of Fame. He has published scores of law review articles, op-ed pieces, essays, magazine articles, short stories, CLE booklets, and eighteen books. He blogs about the ethics of writing at The Ethics of Writing. He's also written westerns and mystery novels, including his latest works, a duology featuring Dr. Lisbeth Socorro: Hide and Be and its immediate sequel My Brother, Myself.
Dr. Lisbeth Socorro is a prison shrink who specializes in twins. She's also an expert consultant for the FBI, who calls her in when there appears to be a serial killer on the loose targeting twins. Twin brothers Arthur and Martin suffered horrible abuse as children, forcing them to survive by seamlessly assuming each other’s identities. Living each other’s lives provides protection from the trauma of their past. But when tragedy strikes, one of the brothers plummets into a dissociative crisis that leads him down a murderous path. As the body count rises, two cases end up in the courtroom, where judges, lawyers, and psychiatrists try to piece together which twin is the suspect and which is the victim. Everyone in the courtroom strives to bring the victims to justice, but how can justice be served when no one is sure who the defendant truly is?
Gary Stuart stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R on researching and writing the books:
Let’s say you want to write a novel about a serial killer who murders his victims because they are identical twins who don’t love one another as much as he loved his dead twin brother. Your draft novel-in-progress is a thriller featuring made up characters existing only in your mind, with psychological flaws, trauma, and drama. You might start by understanding how the mirror of fiction works when an author tries to tell a made up story. Especially one that reflects life and the deeper selves that exist in made up characters. You can blend real life problems with deep seated fictional challenges. You might start that first draft by digging into The Emotional Wound Thesaurus—A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma.[1]
Then, as you work your way through emotional wounds in singletons, you might dig into twins—monozygotic, mirror twins. They are rare. So is your idea about a book where the protagonist is an identical twin living his dead twin brothers’ life because he thinks he killed his twin. At the planning and plotting stage you might catch up on the basics of identical twins by checking out Science Direct, a highly reliable source for the medical world and the writing world.
Your book must be credible. You’re writing fiction, right? The twins in your book not only look the same, but they also think alike. Is that possible? Psychic twins are a common movie trope, but sometimes there is truth in fantasy. It’s a highly accepted scientific fact that the genes we inherit from our parents influence our psychological features – things like our intelligence and memory ability – and our chances of developing conditions that affect the way we think, such as autism and schizophrenia. Identical twins – who share all the same genes – think more alike than unrelated people or even non-identical twins and other siblings. Check this site out.
In your book, twins are both killer and victim. How could that be? Is there scientific research on crime by twins? Visual differences are often difficult to pinpoint in criminal cases. Identical twins are from the same fertilized egg. They have the same DNA. Many times, one twin will commit a crime and blame it on the other. Twins can commit crimes “because” they are twins. Check this site out to find out why.
Life is painful for some, especially twins who suffered emotional trauma that cannot be dispelled or forgotten. Your book could feature dialogue murmured in the dark of night and then only to themselves. Your story will develop slowly, as the characters discover trauma they tried unsuccessfully to forget. Characters, like real people, are products of their past. That means you have to tell a back story as you blend in the real story in a way that isn’t real. But your readers don’t know that at first, and are locked into it once they discover what they, at first, think, until you feint, then change direction. That happens as you expand your narrative arc out past suspicion, to bad memory, fear of recurrence, revelation and finally to retribution.
As you draft your emotional trauma novel, you might consider The Psychology Workbook For Writers.[2] It will remind you that writing is a form of psychology because “Writers, the good ones anyway, are keen observers of human nature, and they capture it in their characters and storytelling. They show the behaviors, the thought processes, and the ways people make meaning out of their experiences and events and turn them into provoking entertainment.[3]
Maybe your book is also about serial murderers. That’s a common crime fiction theme. The federal government defines “serial” murders. Generally , serial murders include one or more offenders, two or more murdered victims, the murders occur in separate events, at different times, and the period between murders separates serial murder from mass murder. There is a lot more to this that you get in media reports. So, check this site out. If the FBI is in your book, this site fits. It’s a way to show, not just tell.
My soon-to-be-released novels, Hide & Be, and My Brother, Myself, are about trauma wounds experienced by identical twin characters. Which twin is a killer? Which a victim? Both? Neither? One of them is charged in court but denies he’s the right twin—the one that committed a crime. The court of profoundly befuddled because there is no convincing evidence of identity. As a famous English barrister once said, “Ye gads, your honor, they have the wrong bloke in the dock.” My characters, traumatically wounded twin brothers suffer deep and relentless trauma following death of one and rejection by the survivor. Through both books, the characters refocus and reinvent their realities. In places, one or the other takes count of life’s worst days. They experience terror and loss no one else could ever understand. Moral codes haunt some characters, while others exhibit sociopathic behaviors that harm. The pace of the story stokes tension in a way I hope keeps readers hoping for the best while suspecting the worst. What’s gonna happen next is the tension that keeps readers turning pages.
Throughout both books, my readers will wonder about what motivates different characters to do unspeakable things in ways they deny and exist in places they never visited. Some of my characters live a lie. Others deny it. Two dig deeply into the lie, but miss the truth the lie hides. And still others sense the lie and eventually uncover it only to find psychological wounds that cannot be treated, especially not in courtrooms. I spent an earlier lifetime in courtrooms. I write crime fiction because I like making things up and explaining the law enforcement and judicial entanglements that grip an unexplainable world. My books find purchase in a world only the law could invent.
[1] Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, The Emotional Wound Theasus, Writers Helping Writers (2017).
[2] Darian Smith, The Psychology Workbook For Writers—Tools For Creating Realistic Characters and Conflict In Fiction. (2015).
[3] Ibid at page 1.
You can learn more about Gary Stuart and his writing via his website and also follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Hide and Be and My Brother, Myself are now available via all major booksellers.
