Kelley Kaye is one of life’s funny ladies. She wants to make people laugh, a desire she found difficult to follow during her twenty-year tenure as an English and Drama teacher in high schools. A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 1994 eventually took Kaye out of the role of teacher, but her desire to make others laugh never wavered. Now, as the author of Death by Diploma, Kaye has begun a journey which will let her reach out to people she’s never met before.
Ultimately, Death by Diploma came about because Kaye’s father gave her one of Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar mysteries. After reading one of those novels, she knew how she wanted to write. “I wanted to tell a fun story where the reader either A) didn’t want it to end, or B) was so satisfied with the ending she put the book down and spent the rest of the day feeling fantastic, or C) both.”
So, about that Myron Bolitar mystery. The conversation goes something like this—
—I resisted this series for a while.
—Why?
—Because Myron is a failed professional basketball player and sports agent. And I don’t like sports. I consider myself too artsy to care.
—So you didn’t like it?
—I’m now married to a baseball coach and have two sports-obsessed sons.
And this is why we always say truth is stranger than fiction. In fact, when Kaye read that book she said she was hooked. I couldn’t figure out the ending right away, I loved Myron and Win, it was suspenseful and fun and I laughed all the way through it. I loved it! And I wanted to do it! I immediately wanted to tell a story that did all those things. So I emailed Harlan. I emailed Harlan, told him how much I loved his book and how much I wanted to write one.
Believe it or not, he wrote me right back! His advice was to ‘just do it’ and he gave me the title of Anne Lamott’s fantastic book on writing “Bird by Bird.” So I did. I mean, it’s not like I sat down the next day and then three months later I had a book. I had the main characters vis-à-vis my life and the failed screenplay, and I knew who got killed and basically why he was killed and who killed him, but the rest happened in the story as it appeared.”
Kaye attributes Death by Diploma to her teaching job, Myron Bolitar, and her dad, who gave her that first book. In writing parlance, Kaye is a pantser—someone who writes without plot or outline. In other words, she writes by the seat of her pants. The truth is, she did, at one point, try to raise her level of writing organization.
“I bought a beautiful pink three-ring binder, complete with pockets for each of my characters, with the intention of filling the pages with information on each character, journals from each point of view, and the pockets with pictures from magazines representing setting, characters or story ideas. The binder is still sitting, empty and pristine, next to my printer. So there you go.”
On a serious note, Kaye talked about how MS has changed her life. “I’ve been dealing with the disease almost half my life, and it has both challenged and uplifted me, as chronic illness often does. My first doors to publication were opened due to the disease, when I was a local speaker at an MS Luncheon.”
I wasted a lot of time waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it did…it made me stronger.
As a result of that luncheon, Kaye was asked to write a story, which was featured in “Teachers With the Courage to Give,” which led to publication in other non-fiction pieces, including a Simon and Schuster series. Kaye said, “I feel dealing with this illness has made me a better person and consequently a better writer.”
Kaye said she spent a lot of time in her younger days worrying. “I wasted a lot of time waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it did, in the form of a terrifying and unpredictable disease which didn’t kill me, it made me stronger. I think I am much more dialed in to this world than I was before I was diagnosed, and the increased information and perspective is making me a better writer and human.”
Learn more about Kelley Kaye at www.kelleykaybowles.com.
