Guest Appearance with author Elena Taylor

I am so excited to welcome Elena Taylor back to my blog today! With my review for Kill To Keep going up tomorrow, I wanted to give you a little something extra today. I asked Elena where her characters and storylines actually come from, and her answer took me somewhere I did not expect. Grab a coffee, this one is good.

Real life is definitely stranger than fiction! 

I get lots of inspiration from real people I know or read about. I like to listen to true crime podcasts for ideas and to learn more about how actual homicide or missing person cases get investigated.

Sometimes I’m inspired by a favorite character in a book, tv show, or movie as well as people in the real world, so my characters are often a combination of me, people I know, and fictional characters.

Most of the time, I’ll take a single personality quirk or a line of dialogue or an event and work that into a novel, so it’s less a picture of a real person, and more that I take something I experience in the real world, and use it to create an aspect of a character or a scene in a book.

For example, in A Cold, Cold World, there’s a chapter where Bet and Kane break up a bar fight. Something that happens to a character in that scene is something I witnessed several years ago when I was a bartender. In my head, as I imagined the bar fight, the real-life moment when I actually saw a person get hurt, easily fit into the scenario that I wanted for the book, so the real event filled out the details of my fictional actions.

In the same scene, the potential for Bet to be exposed to something from the other person’s blood through a cut on her hand, was inspired by another real-life event, which I learned about because it’s in the play The Laramie Project. So that’s triple real-world inspired moment. 

The Laramie Project was a play about a real event. Years ago, I was the assistant director on a production, so my inspiration came from remembering the actor I worked with performing the part of another actor, playing the role of a real person!

(For those of you unfamiliar with The Laramie Project, Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie, Wyoming, after the murder of Matthew Sheppard in 1998. They did over 200 interviews of people impacted by the event, along with transcriptions and other material, and wrote a verbatim play, in which the cast members play multiple roles of real people, speaking their actual words. The play has been performed over 3000 times.)

We are always surrounded by real stories, which seep into our subconscious as we move through the world. Sometimes I create stories and characters out of real people and events that I don’t even remember experiencing or hearing about.

Every once in a while, I’ll be reminded of something from the past, and realized it’s ended up in one of my novels. I’ll have a moment of … oh yeah! I forgot that was real. I’m sure there are plenty of moments that I’ve thought I invented, which are actually forgotten experiences.

I also think that writers tap into a larger cultural unconscious. I think that we find ways to translate true human experiences onto the page, even when we ourselves don’t know who or where an experience comes from.

I’ve had multiple times, especially when I was a playwright, where people would come up to me after a show and say they had experienced something I had written, even though I didn’t know them. That’s where I think the magic of storytelling happens. When writers take an idea out of the ether and form it into something singular and unique, and yet, it becomes universal because human beings experience so many of the same things.

The details may be different, but because the heart of the event is the same, people feel seen and understood.

That’s very powerful. And I’m grateful every day that I get to do this work. 

Even when I just make stuff up.

-Elena Taylor, author of Kill To Keep

Okay the layers in this answer. A real bar fight. A real medical detail from The Laramie Project. A play about a real murder, performed by an actor playing another actor playing a real person, and Elena remembering that moment years later without even realizing it had lodged itself somewhere in her mind until it showed up on the page. That is genuinely one of the most fascinating answers I have ever gotten to this question.

I love what she said about writers tapping into a larger cultural unconscious. That idea that the details can be completely different but the heart of an experience is the same, and that is exactly why people feel seen by fiction even when the writer had no idea they were writing about them. That is the whole magic of storytelling right there.

Thank you so much, Elena, for pulling back the curtain on this. My review for Kill To Keep goes up tomorrow and after reading this I am going to be looking for every one of these tiny real-world seeds hiding in the pages.

Shop The Book: Kill To Keep
Shop The Author: Elena Taylor
Shop My Stack: 2026 Books Read

Synopsis:

A Sheriff Bet Rivers Mystery

 

A female sheriff races against time to solve a murder at a carnival that puts her whole town at risk. Thrilling, romantic, and full of suspense!

Sheriff Bet Rivers’ inspection of the carnival grounds should have been routine. Murder is certainly the last thing on anyone’s mind. Then comes the sound of a gunshot. And a dead body with no signs of trauma, no witnesses and no obvious motive for the killing.

But solving the unexplained death is only part of the challenge. Bet is still grappling with her on-off relationship with town owner Rob Collier, while dealing with her feelings about her late father, the beloved town sheriff she had to replace.

As Bet launches her homicide investigation, she soon discovers the carnival is a place of whispers, rumours, resentments and lie after lie. And as the stakes build, it quickly becomes clear that protecting a deadly secret is something that someone is willing to kill to keep.

Fans of Julia Keller and Sheena Kamal will love this riveting suspense.

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