Photo courtesy Sandra Brown Photo courtesy Sandra Brown
Far left: Brown hosts the premiere of Murder by the Book, a national cable series. Inset: Trophies marking two of many The New York Times Best-Seller List appearances. Left: Sandra speaking in Tokyo in 2008. Above: Brown at former First Lady Barbara Bush’s Celebration of Reading Event with former President George H.W. Bush.
laughs. “Nobody told me that.” She wrote a few stories, getting her feet wet. Michael suggested his wife reach out to a friend, a local fiction author, for some tips. “The first thing she said to me was, ‘You have a very good voice. You just need to learn how to tell your stories in a way that is marketable.’” “At that point I thought, ‘You mean you have to figure out how to plot? It’s not enough just to sit down and start?’” Brown dug in even further. She did her homework, reading books on everything from character development to plotting. Soon, “…all the lights kind of came on,” she says. “I thought, I can take my material and put it in a way that kind of fits the framework of a novel.” Brown remains mindful of the woman’s words. “She was the first one to say that I had a very distinctive voice,” she says. “I like to think that it has improved, evolved and gotten even more distinctive and more mature. I mean, styles of writing have changed. I have gone from romances to suspense and thrillers. But the basic voice of
the writer is still there.” In fact, Brown says every now and then she’ll pick one of her earliest works off the shelf and start reading. “I’ll think, ‘You know, I could have written this yesterday.’ My style was always there.” “Listen, longevity in this business is something to be proud of…to keep an audience for as long as I have been a published writer, which is 32 years, that says something,” Brown says goodnaturedly. “There have been one- or twobook wonders that have come and gone, but I’m still here,” she smiles.
influenced me a lot because of her love of stories, books and novels,” she says. “I have four sisters, and she read to us from the time I can remember.” She credits the blending of her parents’ talents in influencing her career: her father’s selfdiscipline, her mother’s vivid imagination and what Brown calls her predisposition toward the romantic. “By romantic, I don’t mean amoré, just fantastic stories, adventure, lore and all the things that go into making a good story. It’s their fault,” she says. Brown freely admits that she hasn’t the faintest notion how she comes up with concepts for books. Nor does she seem to care.
STORYTELLER PROCESS She studied English at TCU near where her father “I like to think that my voice has spent years working at the newspaper. “He had improved, evolved and gotten even to write an editorial every more distinctive and more mature.” day” for the Fort Worth StarTelegram she says. “From my Dad, I guess I got some talent “It’s just all of the sudden there, or for putting words on paper, it will be a character that just walks even though it was a different out of my subconscious and says, kind of writing that he did.” ‘Write about me!’ Well why should Brown says her mother also I? ‘Well, I’m interesting.’ Why played a significant role in her are you interesting?” Brown says early development. “My mom characters reveal themselves to her DALLAS HOTEL MAGAZINE
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