By Austin Mirmina.
Carole Knapp Johnson’s years long journey of publishing her first book started with a rhyme: Santa Ana.
“That was the first scene in my mind,” Johnson said, referring to the city in California.
After moving to Haddam Neck 25 years ago, Johnson said she started a writing group with a few of her peers. There were no bestsellers on their resumes – nor any college writing degrees, according to Johnson – just a handful of people who liked to write.
For one of the group’s first writing activities, Johnson said each member had to incorporate a specific word into their writing. Although she didn’t realize it then, Santa Ana would eventually set the opening scene for her new mystery adult novel, “Who Took Hannah.”
“It’s almost like you see a thread that’s loose and you pull on it,” Johnson said.
“Who Took Hannah,” which is available on Amazon for $10.99, eventually morphed from those two words into an exciting personal challenge. For Johnson, accomplishing her goal of writing her first book turned out to be another steppingstone toward a life of fulfillment.
Set in the 1980s, the novel focused on Mandy Rose Bokum, an attractive young woman who flees her family’s wealthy Louisiana home to escape the pain of losing her two-year-old daughter, Hannah, whose mysterious kidnapping prompted widespread rumors and gossip around town. Mandy Rose eventually grew tired with her aimless life in Santa Ana and returned to Louisiana to confront the reality of Hannah’s disappearance.
To learn more about the craft of writing, Johnson said she bought around 75 books, including one of her favorites, Stephen King’s, “On Writing.” She borrowed a term often associated with King, describing her style as a “seat of the pants” writer, or someone who writes whatever comes to mind without creating an outline.
Johnson cited one of her characters, Clyde Boudreaux, a charming, handsome black man with a colorful vocabulary and romantic ties to both Mandy Rose and her younger sister, Laura, as an example of the creative direction her writing took while using the seat of the pants method.
“Sometimes the character goes off into a different direction than you thought they were going to go into,” Johnson said. “There’s a lot of rewriting… It’s not as intuitive if you make an outline.”
Johnson said her time spent reading the Merck Manual as a child impelled her to write a medical thriller. “Who Took Hannah” eventually became a cross-genre book as a psychological thriller with a mysterious medical twist.
Another element of Johnson’s life that appeared in the book included her strong sense of spirituality, which Laura represented with her reliance upon a “Watcher” for guidance.
“The Watcher was always able to look at the facts, produce a plan that led to solutions…The Watcher had been with Laura since she was a little girl” (106).
One of most thought-provoking themes from “Who Took Hannah” included the complex nature of humans. Johnson pointed to Clyde and talk show host Johnny Talker, who struggled following the death of his wife and unborn child in a car accident, as examples of flawed characters with good intentions.
Johnson called the two years she spent writing her book a “lonely endeavor.” She said most of her sessions occurred in small workrooms at the Portland Library with some Pepsi and peanuts to keep her going.
Because publishing a book required extensive time, effort, and money, Johnson said she ultimately decided to self-publish, hiring two editors to review her work and a graphic design artist to format the front cover and text. She said she’s undecided about writing a sequel.
“If I don’t sell enough books, it’s going to seem like an awful lot of work… not to mention it’s expensive,” Johnson said.
Johnson seemed to recognize that the important thing about writing her first book was how much the experience has taught her – not how much it sells.
“I never feel like I like to necessarily compete with other people,” Johnson said. “I pretty much compete with myself to see what I can do.”
