It’s the question every author dreads—and yet we can somehow never avoid it.
At just about every event and book signing, we can see it come like a locomotive bearing down on us as we’re tied to the tracks.
Where do you get your ideas?
We loathe it because, most of the time, we have no clue. Where do those voices come from? What caused that rogue thought to pop in our heads? Why does our imagined world revolve the way it does?
Except, every now and then, we know exactly where a book came from.
For me, The Boundaries We Cross is one of those books. I can even pinpoint the exact time when it happened, because it was Week 0 of the pandemic.
You probably remember Week 0—the name I’m giving it because none of us knew what was actually underway when it began.
As of that Monday, the thing we were still calling “the coronavirus,” was just a news item of primarily foreign concern, like a typhoon spinning through a distant ocean or a coup in a country we couldn’t place on a map.
We had heard about it, sure. But we didn’t think it was going to directly impact us. It certainly wasn’t dominating anyone’s attention.
(An actual headline from Page A8 of the New York Times that Monday read, “U.S. Health Experts Say Stricter Measures Are Required to Limit Coronavirus’s Spread” . . . which, in retrospect, feels like, “Sea Safety Experts Say Extra Lifeboats Are Required For HMS Titanic.”)
To be clear, The Boundaries We Cross isn’t a pandemic book. COVID isn’t even mentioned.
But that day, the Monday of Week 0, was when someone I love accused me of having done something terrible.
The details of the accusation aren’t important. What mattered is that I hadn’t done it.
I just couldn’t prove it.
And, ironically, the fact that I hadn’t done it made it almost impossible to do anything to establish my innocence.
It reminded me of Adnan from the famed Serial podcast. Why couldn’t he definitively say what he was doing on the afternoon of January 13?
Because, to him, January 13 wasn’t the day he committed a heinous murder. It was just another day.
What I was being accused of was a lot less serious than murder. But it was going to badly damage a relationship that was very important to me.
And so, as COVID descended on the nation like an existence-darkening curtain—and our lives as we knew them were systematically canceled—I was embroiled in another, much more private drama.
It was this sinking, awful, terrible feeling; this malign shadow that followed me everywhere I went. And, much as with COVID itself, I was helpless to stop it.
I was trying to prove a negative, an ontologically tricky proposition under the best of circumstances. And, in this case, it was basically impossible.
Yet there was no question the harm the accusation was doing to our relationship was very real.
How could I make this person see they were wrong?
How could I regain their trust when there was no basis for the assumption that had made them lose that trust in the first place?
It was maddening. And as the week progressed, I had made no progress. I worried the accusation was just going to turn into a zombie, neither alive nor dead, but eating our brains all the same.
Then, that next Monday, my loved one came across some new information that made them realized they were mistaken.
I hadn’t, in fact, done the thing they had accused me of.
They apologized. I accepted their apology.
We moved on. We didn’t even dwell on it much.
But that feeling—that awful, awful feeling of having been falsely accused—stayed with me.
Writers take anywhere from five minutes to five years to five decades to process the things that happen to them. Past events are always in our brains, steeping away like slow-brewed tea.
In my case, it took about three years. But there came a time when, as I pondered what book I wanted to write next, I returned to that terrible feeling. I wanted to explore it.
The sinking dread of the false accusation. The incredible frustration of being unable to produce exculpatory evidence. The pain it caused in my relationship.
It’s all there in The Boundaries We Cross, which tells the story of Charles Bliss, a boarding school teacher fired for having an inappropriate relationship with a student—an accusation he strongly denies.
Much like me once upon a time, he can’t prove it.
Unlike me, his situation doesn’t resolve itself in a week—because that would make for a lousy book.
As you’ll see, it only gets much, much worse . . . because, at least with crime fiction, that’s where all the best ideas lead.