Mystery novelist Mary Higgins Clark says she was always "yearning, churning, burning to learn how to be a professional writer," but considers her success a sort of luck of the draw.

"It's decided for you," she told the roughly 1,000 people in the Mainstage Theatre in the Center for the Arts who came to hear her speak Nov. 16-perhaps to take some of the mystery out of the woman known the world over as "the Queen of Suspense."

"I do believe that at our cradles, the legendary godmothers come and they give us a gift. Now, some people get so many they don't know what to do. And others get just one."

	Higgins Clark

Despite years of rejection and criticism from publishers and editors, including one memorable slam that her writing was "light, slight and trite," Higgins Clark kept on.

"I've been writing since I could hold a pencil," said the diminutive, elegantly dressed author, the second speaker in UB's Distinguished Speakers Series. She couldn't sing, couldn't dance and certainly couldn't sew, she said, recalling with wry humor her daughters' school uniforms, the hems of which were fastened with Scotch tape. "But the one godmother who showed up said, 'You shall be a storyteller.'"

And so it was for Higgins Clark, who began writing short stories.

"The writer has the need to get it down on paper," she said. "You observe something, you feel it and it's something that you must let out."

A self-proclaimed, natural-born storyteller-the gift, she said, of her Irish heritage-Higgins Clark left little to her audience's imagination as she wove together tales of her childhood and adult life that provided fodder for her writing.

A writer for whom the hunting and gathering of life experience is essential, Higgins Clark literally jumped on board the first opportunity she had to bear witness to the world-as a Pan American flight hostess.

The first salable short story she ever wrote-finally published after six years-was inspired by her journey into Prague aboard the last flight to fly into Czechoslovakia before the Iron Curtain fell.

Landing at the airport there to pick up seven Americans during a Soviet air show, Higgins Clark was struck by the incredible dynamic.

"One of the men was weeping. He said, 'There's no one in that crowd who would not give half of the rest of his life to be on this plane.'"

The wheels of a suspense story turning, Higgins Clark said she began plotting: "Suppose the flight hostess gets back to the plane first. Suppose there's an 18-year-old kid trying to hide; he's a member of the underground." With search crews nearby and headed toward the plane, he begs for her help.

"And she knows she has to," Higgins Clark said of her self-inspired character.

The best advice she ever received-from a professor at New York University-was to "always use your background" and to ask just two questions to put a fictive spin on a situation: "Suppose?" and "What if?"

"I've been doing that ever since," she said.

Finished with her latest project, "Deck the Halls"-a novel co-authored with her daughter, Carol, also a mystery writer-Higgins Clark is penning her next book, "On The Street Where You Live," due out in April 2001. The book, she said, was inspired by a home she recently purchased in Spring Lake, N.J.