ERICA SPINDLER

Inspiration comes in mysterious ways. New Orleans novelist Erica Spindler—the New York Times bestselling author of 30 titles, including January’s The Look-Alike—can pinpoint the exact moment a lifechanging creative epiphany literally fell into her hands.

- John B. Valeri

“I discovered romance by accident,” she says. “I caught a terrible cold and went to the drugstore for Kleenex and cold tablets. When I was checking out, the cashier dropped a free romance novel into my shopping bag. (A Nora Roberts!) I’d never read romances, but I read that one and was hooked. I went on a romance reading bender—and sometime during that frenzy, I decided I wanted to try my hand at writing one. Once I did, I knew I’d found my true calling.”

She traded paintbrush for pen and got to work. The result, Heaven Sent, was published in 1987; ten romances followed in the next eight years, each drawing upon her education in the field of visual arts as much as the intimacies of kiss and tell.

“I’ve always attributed my very visual writing style to my art training. After all, writing is just painting pictures with words,” says Spindler, who earned a BFA from Delta State University and an MFA from the University of New Orleans. “But my background as a studio artist influenced my writing in other ways as well. Studio artists are trained to understand the power of image, visually but also conceptually, as symbol and metaphor. An apple is a piece of fruit, to be eaten because a character is hungry. But it can also be a symbol for original sin and the fall of man. Used in another way it can be a metaphor for that which is ripe. Or potentially convey a number of other subtextual messages.”

Less than a decade later, in 1996, she crossed over to suspense with the aptly titled Forbidden Fruit—a transition that seemed natural, given the inherent commonalities between the genres.