In Professional Secrets, French author and artist Jean Cocteau wrote, "Abandoning rhyme and fixed rules in favor of other intuitive rules brings us back to fixed rules and to rhyme with renewed respect." Eighty years after that book was published, mystery writer Nancy Pickard sits across from PW in a small diner called the Blue Moose discussing her own evolution as a writer. The author decided to switch the location of our interview from her tri-level home in Prairie Village, Kans., to the suburban eatery, because her collection of pet dogs and cats were too distracting. So we adjourned for lunch at the diner to discuss her writerly development and her latest novel, The Truth Hurts (Atria Books), the third in a mystery series featuring protagonist and crime fiction writer Marie Lightfoot. Dedicated mystery readers probably know that the Marie Lightfoot series began with a bang when The Whole Truth (Pocket Books, 2000) was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha and MacCavity Awards. The follow-up, Ring of Truth (Pocket Books, 2001), hit several bestseller lists around the country last year.

"I'm sort of in the third stage of my novel writing career," says Pickard. "I wrote the first seven novels in my Jenny Cain series by the seat of my pants. There are a lot of [writers] who don't have a formal education in writing novels." But Pickard did graduate from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1967. Afterward, she began a short-lived career as a reporter for a local paper. Other jobs included a stint as a technical writer for Westinghouse, and 15 years as a freelance writer. In 1984, after a friend urged her to take the plunge, Pickard completed and published her first Jenny Cain mystery, A Generous Death (Pocket, 1984). Others followed at the steady stream of one per year. Several of them —Say No To Murder (Pocket, 1985), Marriage is Murder (Pocket, 1987), Bum Steer (Pocket, 1990) and I.O.U. (Pocket, 1991)—won various accolades for Pickard, including the Anthony, Agatha and MacCavity Awards. For a woman who says she didn't "have a clue about any formal technique for writing novels," Pickard did amazingly well. "Everything I knew essentially came from the hundreds of novels I'd read all my life," Pickard says. After all of that reading, she found she knew more than she thought "about how to structure novels." That intuitive, flying-by-the-seat of her pants writing style is what Pickard likes to think of as the first stage of her evolution as a writer.

Pickard then went through a second period of development that she describes as "existential doubt" about her actual abilities as a writer. "I no longer was sure if I was a real writer, or if I just wrote to pay the bills." She thought about quitting writing for good. Partly because of the changes taking place in the industry at that time, with corporations merging and publishing houses going through tremendous shake-ups. "I had been treated well," Pickard stresses, "but I was watching my editor friends lose their jobs and my writer friends lose their publishers. There were so many sad stories." So what happened? "I got over it," Pickard says with a laugh.

She got over her self-doubt as well. "I'd always heard and read about these writers who felt 'pulled' to write—a real, physical pull to sit down and start writing," Pickard says. "I wanted to find out if it was real. So I wouldn't let myself work on my next book until I felt something like that. And one afternoon I literally felt a tug in my solar plexus that pulled me over to the couch, and I sat down and wrote thirty-six pages in one day. That novel, Twilight (Pocket, 1995), turned out to be the swan song of her Jenny Cain series. "Since then, I have never doubted that I am meant to be a writer."

Another stage of Pickard's evolution began sometime within the last few years. "For the first time in my life," she says, "I'm starting to study formal techniques of writing fiction. I may or may not use any of these, but I want to have those tools at my disposal. When I started writing novels, I wasn't in a learning frame of mind. So I just wrote. Now, with all of that experience behind me, and a new-found confidence in myself as a writer, I feel the confidence to go back and study techniques. I'm trying to add to my understanding of what makes novels work or not work. In the beginning of my career, I might have found a scene or chapter that could be made stronger, but I didn't have a clue how to do so. Now I can analyze it and apply the techniques I've learned."

Appropriately, just as Pickard is entering this third stage, the third novel in her increasingly popular Marie Lightfoot series is being published. But what some readers may not know is that The Truth Hurts could be the last Marie Lightfoot novel Pickard will ever write. "I've always seen this as a trilogy, and I'd always wanted to explain [Marie's personal history] in the end." The Truth Hurts is certainly the most personal and revelatory volume, where Marie Lightfoot is concerned, of this mystery trilogy. It delves into a past that involves the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and parents whom Marie believes to have been racists. In the first two books, Pickard was less forthcoming about Lightfoot's history. She focused on the murder cases about which crime fiction author Marie Lightfoot wrote. "I always knew I would tell the whole truth regarding Marie's past. But I wanted readers to get to know her a little bit first—to be fond of her—before I plunged them into that much drama."

Part of the inspiration for the civil rights drama in The Truth Hurts came from the actions of Republican Presidential candidates in 1999. "I was reading the horrors that some of the people fighting for civil rights experienced," said Pickard, "and then I turned on the TV and saw some of the men who wanted to be President going to Bob Jones University and consorting with people who still believed in the separation of races. I was so offended by that! It was an affront to everything our country stands for, and an affront to the people who had fought for civil rights."

Her latest stage of evolution has involved Pickard in trying all sorts of new things. In addition to the stand-alone thriller she is working on, she has just co-authored a nonfiction book, with psychologist Lynn Abott, entitled Seven Steps on the Writer's Path (Ballantine, due out in 2003). "It basically covers seven steps that many people go through in their development as a writer," Pickard says. "I hope it will help others understand that we all go through the same process. Writer's generally relate to each other better than they relate to anybody else. Nobody except another writer knows what it's like to have to meet a deadline, or to have to make things up out of whole cloth. This book is about experiencing the creative life and not being afraid to just delve deeply into the whole process." An apt description of Pickard's own current stage of creative metamorphosis. As for the future, Pickard says, "I don't know what the next stage of my evolution as a writer will be, but I'm hoping that over a period of time in the next 30 years I'll get really good at it."