Apr 22, 2024

From Playwright to Author

I have always loved writing and storytelling, but I wasn't always an author. In fact, my writing career took many twists and unexpected turns, carrying me from New Hampshire to upstate New York to Brooklyn to Los Angeles and back again. Ironically, a lot of my "success" as a writer stemmed from believing some of my specific shortcomings were insurmountable instead of temporary. With the aim of inspiring other authors and writers, I decided to put together this short blog article about how I got started as a professional writer.

When I was a little girl growing up, I was blown away by certain fiction authors, who I affectionately assumed were "grocery store authors" since I could always find their books in the grocery store. As it turned out, my favorite "grocery store authors" were New York Times bestselling fiction writers. At least I had good taste and was exposed to great storytelling from Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Dan Brown, James Patterson, Lisa Gardner, and others. Andrew Klavan was my absolute favorite. I'm sure I read The Animal Hour at least three times.

In elementary school, I tried my hand at writing fiction, short stories, and even "books", my longest being about 30k words. Not too shabby for a fifth grader! I loved reading the young adult mystery novel The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney, and tried to emulate that style in a couple "novels" that I couldn't quite get off the ground.

I lived life with a burning desire to write a great mystery! But I seriously struggled with grammar. I had several English teachers in elementary school, middle school, and high school, who consistently pointed out my grammatical errors but somehow never really got through to me despite how hard they tried. Unfortunately, my perception was that I wouldn't be able to be an author since I wasn't very good at grammar.

Rather than dwell on the loss, though my failure was mostly a figment of my own imagination since I could've simply worked harder and forced myself to learn how to perfectly write the English language, I came up with what I assumed was an ingenious solution.

I would become a screenwriter.

Ah, a brilliant loophole! Dialogue didn't have to be grammatically correct since people rarely spoke in perfect, grammatically correct, fully formed English sentences!

I began stumbling through writing screenplays. There were virtually zero resources at my disposal to educate myself, but I didn't let that stop me. And I also didn't have the luxury of taking screenwriting or filmmaking classes, because my school didn't have any. Finally, I could write freely. Or so I thought…

I had a few years of screenwriting under my belt, and I had even registered all of my screenplays with the Writers Guild of America - East since my mother assumed with terror in her heart that my screenplays were so whip-smart that someone would surely steal them and make millions of dollars, and I would be left to starve in the streets. One day, my hyper-realist dad bluntly informed me that I would not make it as a screenwriter since filmmaking on the whole is very expensive, and we didn't have any money.

I believed him.

Once again, rather than dwell on the "fact" that I wouldn't be able to proceed with that form of writing, either, I adapted quickly. Filmmaking was very expensive, but playwriting, its ancestor, wasn't. Voila! I would become a playwright. I determined this career path right before going to college where I was able to major in theater, playwriting specifically. I spent four years writing and producing my own plays. I even graduated, moved to New York City, and continued writing and producing plays. It wasn't free and it wasn't cheap, but it wasn't impossible to accomplish.

However, it was impossible to "make a living" as a playwright. Never-the-less, I persisted for a decade, and I loved my years writing plays and collaborating with directors, actors, and other playwrights.

Then in 2012, I decided it was time to take a stab at writing and producing a film. Many of my playwright friends had done the same and had great experiences. So, I set out to scrape the funding together, and a year later, I had written, directed, and produced Warfield, a feature-length family drama starring David Michael Kirby, Gayle Rankin and my twin sister, Kara Gibson.

Warfield premiered at the Manhattan Film Festival, screened at several film festivals around NYC, and also screened at the Tribeca Grand Hotel (now the Roxy) as part of a new film series the hotel had launched in the summer of 2013.

Film still from Warfield (Dir. Mira Gibson) featuring David Michael Kirby, Kara Gibson, and Gayle Rankin in Prospect Park Brooklyn flying a rainbow kite. — Film still from Warfield (Dir. Mira Gibson) featuring David Michael Kirby, Kara Gibson, and Gayle Rankin

(Read to the very end of this blog to see production stills from the film shoot!)

With Warfield under my belt, I was determined to live my screenwriting dream. I moved to Los Angeles, CA, with plans to continue screenwriting since networking in L.A. would be at my fingertips.

Throughout all this time, there came a whisper from the back of my mind that reminded me how much I had once wanted to be an author. I had never stopped reading my favorite mystery authors. And I started to wonder how I might be able to author a book.

Then, one evening in May of 2014, nearly ten years ago, I accidentally drank too much wine while watching the movie Young Adult starring Charlize Theron. A hairbrained idea slammed into my mind, and as I fell asleep, that wine having caught up to me, I made a firm mental note to become a fiction ghostwriter when I woke up.

I didn't become a ghostwriter the very next day. It took a couple weeks, but I found a website called Elance (now it's Upwork) that had countless ghostwriting opportunities.

I was thrilled.

As it turned out, after reading fiction for so many years, I was basically a grammar expert. Long gone were the days of fearing the English language and its many "exceptions to the rules". Plus, as a ghostwriter, I wasn't responsible for professionally editing, I soon learned.

Through Elance, I applied to a number of companies that needed ghostwriters, and by June I was hired at one of them. Between June 2014 and August 2021, I authored over 80 novels as a ghostwriter. I wrote in the genres of romance, paranormal romance, romantic suspense, cozy mystery, and detective mystery.

While I was ghostwriting, I found the time to also author mystery novels in my own name. I wrote The New Hampshire Mysteries, a three novel series (Daddy Soda, Rock Spider, and Tar Heart). And I began the now-highly-popular hard-boiled detective series The Kensington Killers by authoring Lunatic and Cold Dark Fear.

Since 2021, I've discontinued ghostwriting, even though I loved it, in order to focus on authoring my own mysteries. I write dark mysteries as Mira Gibson and light-hearted cozy mysteries as Catherine Gibson that fall within the Christian & Catholic sub-genre of cozies.

These days, I continue to write full time, now publishing under my imprint, Mystery Royalty. And I often feel nostalgic for my playwriting years. Luckily, I still write screenplays, but instead of original stories, I adapt Mystery Royalty's mystery novels into screenplays for the production companies that have contacted me. This has been a very exciting development for my writing career as well as for my aim of putting Mystery Royalty on the map as the #1 imprint for film industry professionals to find the most adaptable mysteries to produce as movies. Sign up for my newsletter if you want to stay in the know about film industry developments!

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