Polly French Finds Out . A story starts for me with an emotional charge about one person. Before going to sleep at night, I hold the story I'm working on in my mind and order my unconscious to think about it. Ditto pen and paper in my handbag, for ideas or scraps of dialogue that occur during the day. I start by writing a biography and character study for each character.
Plot grows out of character and the character's relationships.
She was the seventh of ten children, and both her father and paternal grandfather were army generals. After high school, she had planned to attend Columbia School of Journalism but instead took a job as the assistant society editor of the New York Evening Post in 1926. After she left the Post , she married Charles Tatham. She later returned to the Post , then worked as a secretary, a hotel hostess, and the head of her own literary agency. She wrote the Trixie Belden and Ginny Gordon series, under the name Julie Campbell, eventually becoming a full-time writer.