KN Magazine: Interviews
Clay Stafford talks with Heather Graham on “The Business of Writing”
Heather Graham interviewed by Clay Stafford
Author Heather Graham is incredible in many ways: her prolific and stellar writing style and habits, her support and encouragement of other authors, and her inspiration and support of many beyond the writing field. I know of few authors who view writing and attention to their readers, as does Heather Graham. It was a pleasure catching up with Heather when she was in New York City during one of her busy tour schedules. Since she is so prolific, I thought I’d ask her about business, a subject that many writers view through a fog. “So, Heather, let’s jump right in and ask, what’s the biggest financial mistake you see new writers making early in their careers, and how can they avoid that?”
“I am horrible with finances, so I don't know if I'm the one to ask.”
I laugh aloud. “Okay, with that build-up, you crack me up. Can you speak from experience, then?”
“People come at writing from so many different venues. Some are keeping day jobs and writing on the side. They have their day job, so they don't have to worry about finances too much. And, of course, publishing is ever-changing. But always ensure you have your next project ready to go, and then don't be as bad with money as I am. I don't know what to say because you never know. Do you want to go traditional? Are you going to get a multi-book contract? Are they buying a one-off project? Are you collaborating with Amazon? It depends so much on what you're doing. One of the main things you must learn—that I'm still working on—is that when you're on contract, you'll get so much and then so much later on publication. And then the problem is, of course, it's never guaranteed income. You have to learn to watch the future more than anything else.”
“There are writers I speak with who have things they want to write, but frankly, we know that some of those are not commercial. How do you balance your creative freedom with what the market wants?”
“That's one thing I tell people to be careful about. If you are putting up on Amazon, you can be fast. You can catch the trend. But if you're writing for one of the traditional publishers or a small press, it's usually going to be a year before your work comes out. You want to be careful about writing to trends because that trend could be gone by the time something comes out. My thought is, if it's something you love, do it. Otherwise, be careful. You always have to write what you love. What makes you happy, too, because your excitement comes out on the page.”
“What are some of the common pitfalls that you might see that writers don't think about and should have been aware of, even with representation—things that could lead to mistakes?”
“First of all, you need to do your homework. Doing your research for beginning writers is one of the most important things you can do. Find out what agents enjoy what you're doing. Find out what houses are buying what you're doing. I think that's one of the best things. Somebody just spoke at World Fantasy who is an editor, but her husband is an agent. He has out there that he does not handle young adult, and he'll get a million young adult things anyway. The most important thing, I think, is to be savvy about what's going on. I didn't know any agents or editors when I started, but I can't recommend groups and conventions enough because you meet others. You're always going to hear more stories. You're going to hear what's happened. You're going to be introduced to editors and agents, and you're going to hear from friends, ‘Oh, my gosh, yes, that's exactly what they're looking for.’ Because I have covered my bases, I belong to HWA, MWA, International Thrillers, and RWA, and I have never met such a nice group of people. It's like nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine out of a thousand are great, and everybody shares. The good majority are supportive.”
“Because time is finite and money is finite, for a beginning author, where should authors focus their promotional and marketing strategies? And where should they not because they should be writing instead of doing that?”
“I'll tell you something I'm not very good at, but I have learned that TikTok and BookTok are some of the biggest ways you can do things now. Social media is free. When you're on a budget, using social media is great. I have been traditionally published for a long time, and they have publicity departments and marketing departments. More so today, even in the traditional houses, they want you to do a lot of your own promotions. I think for many of us, it is hard because the concentration is more on what I'm writing. It's a good thing to try to get out there and learn. And I am still working on this: learning how to be good on social media.”
“And technology changes.”
“Yes. Constantly.”
“New opportunities open up.”
“Yeah, that's just it. You have to be ready for change.”
“What are some red flags to look out for when you're getting an agent or signing a contract with a publisher?”
“Again, I've been lucky. I didn't start out with an agent and really had no idea what I was doing, but I sold a short horror story to Twilight Zone, and then Dell opened a category line, and I sold to Dell. But they were contemporary, and I had always wanted to write historical novels, and I had a couple in a drawer. I always remember when I sold because I stopped working with my third child and had my first contract with my fourth child. There’s just that year and a half, or whatever was in there, but when I had the historicals, and nobody wanted to see them, there was a woman in the romance community who had a magazine called Romantic Times, and she came to Florida with one of her early magazines. It had an ad that said Liza Dawson at Pinnacle Books was looking for historical novels, and I'm like, ‘Let me try. Let me try, please.’ They did buy the historical, but at the time, everybody was very proprietary about names, so Shannon Drake came into it. I was doing historicals under Shannon Drake, but the vampire series wound up coming under that name, too. It just depends on what you're doing. There are two lines of thought. One is that you need to brand yourself. You need to be mystery, paranormal mystery, sci-fi. You need to brand yourself as something. That’s one idea that can be very good, but I also loved reading everything. There are many, many different things that I have always wanted to write. I have been lucky; I have done it. Whether it was a smart thing or not, I don't know. I can very gratefully say that I have kept a career, and I have been able to do a lot of the things I've wanted to do.”
“When the boilerplate comes, it says they want all rights for everything. What rights should a writer retain?”
“When this whole thing happened where I was selling to a second company, that's when I got an agent. And again, we're looking at the same thing. Study what the agents are handling, what they're doing, and who they have. When we’ve done negotiations, I've usually been asked to leave because I am not a good negotiator. You need to listen to your agent and the agent's advice. Now the agent, a lot of the time is going to know, ‘No, no, no, we have to keep the film rights. They never do anything with them,’ or ‘No, let them have them because they just might use it.’ An agent is going to know these things better because they do it on a daily basis. And then the other thing is, your agent gets you paid. Instead of you having to use your editorial time talking to somebody saying like, ‘Could you please send that check?’ the agent will do that for you.”
“Let's go back a minute. You talked about social media. What kind of mistakes do you see writers making on social media? I can think of a few, but what are your thoughts?”
“I'll tell you what gets me, and this is purely as a reader, and I will be a reader till the day I die. I love books. I want people to read, too. As a reader, though, when I'm on social media, don't, don't, don't put out there, ‘Oh, you've got to read…’ or ‘This is the best book ever,’ because to me that means no. It's going to be my decision as a reader whether it's the best book ever. Just say, ‘I hope you'll enjoy this,’ or ‘This is about…’ or ‘I'm very excited about…’ or whatever. You don't want to say, ‘Gee! This may be pure crap, but buy it anyway.’ You can tell people what something is about, why you're excited about it, and you hope they'll enjoy it. But this is more my opinion as a reader than as a writer. Don't tell me, ‘It's the best thing ever. You're going to love it.’ Let me make that decision.”
“You talked about conferences and networking. What are some common mistakes that writers make when it comes to their professional development? Where are they lacking? What do you see value in?”
“Again, I think conferences and conventions are some of the most important things you can do. It helps if you want to volunteer and help get people going. That way, you meet more people, and you can interact more with those running the conferences, who have probably been around for a while and have some good advice. One of the worst things you can do is spend a lot of time whining or complaining about things that can't be helped. Things do happen sometimes. Books don't arrive, or the seller didn't come through. Don't make life miserable for other people. I'm not saying you shouldn't fix something if you can, but sometimes things can't be fixed, and then you have to let it go. And there are different types of conventions. You have Thriller Writers, Bouchercon, Killer Nashville. You have the Bram Stoker Awards, which are relatively big. We have something down in Florida called Sleuthfest. I love Sleuthfest, and it's very easy. It's good to get involved. It's an investment in your future. I know I was looking for money to pay the Chinese restaurant when I first started out, so sometimes you just don't have it when you're beginning your career. And that's why you try to do the things that are closest to you. Just become involved with a group that maybe meets at a library. Anything like that. There are online groups these days. The very best perk we get out of it is our communities.”
“What advice would you give people? Maybe, ‘I wish I had known this when I started out…’”
“I wish I had known what an amazing community the writing community was and to get involved, and therefore, I would have learned so many things I didn't know. I have two lines of advice. One, sit down and do it. Be dedicated to yourself. Be dedicated to your craft. And then, get involved. Find like-minded people because they will be wonderfully helpful and encouraging.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
Heather Graham is the NYT and USA Today bestselling author of over two hundred novels, including suspense, paranormal, historical, and mainstream Christmas fare. She is also the CEO of Slush Pile Productions, a recording company and production house for various charity events. Look her up at https://www.theoriginalheathergraham.com/.
Clay Stafford talks with Abbott Kahler “Advice for Writing True Crime”
Abbott Kahler interviewed by Clay Stafford
I love nonfiction and fiction, and I had an opportunity to read Abbott Kahler’s new upcoming book, Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia, at the Dawn of World War II. Great title, of course; pulls everyone in. The amount of research Abbott put into this nonfiction book intrigued me, so I had to speak with her from her home in New York about how she put it all together. “So, Abbott, you've got all this research coming in. How do you make it useful and organize it rather than just putting it in a big Word document full of notes? I love research, probably too much, and my notes become a glorious mess that I must always go back and untangle. What's your organizational process? Anything you can share with me to make my process go smoother and more time-efficient?”
“I'm a big believer in outlining. I think it's essential. I use a tool called Scrivener that helps outline.”
“I’ve got it. I use it. But I’m not sure I use it well.”
“It allows you to move sections around, and it's searchable to find sources there. If there's a quote you want to remember, you can make sure it's in there, and you can find it just by searching. I think the outline for this book was 130,000 words…”
“The outline was 130,000 words?”
“Much longer than the finished book. The finished book is about 85,000 words, so I over-outline. I think it helps get a sense of narrative. I do a chronological outline, and I can see where I might want to move information and where I might want to describe someone differently. I think outlining extensively lets you see the story, making it much less daunting. Here you are with all this information, but if you have it formatted and organized, it will be much easier to tackle it piece by piece. You know, bird by bird, as Anne Lamott says. I highly recommend outlining for anybody who will tackle a big nonfiction project.”
“Well, even in fiction, there can also be a great amount of research depending upon the topic, setting, or even the personalities or careers of characters. Compare and contrast the writing of a nonfiction book versus that of a novel because you’ve done both.”
“Writing fiction was a surprise to me. I thought it was going to be easy. I thought, ‘Look at all this freedom I have. I can make my characters say and do whatever they want. If I want somebody to murder someone, goddammit, I am going to let them murder someone.’ You can't do that in nonfiction. That freedom was a lot of fun, and it was exhilarating, but it was also terrifying. I was always second-guessing my plot points. Does this twist work? Should there be another twist here? Is it too obvious? Do I have too many red herrings? Do I not have enough red herrings? And in nonfiction, you don't have those issues. What issue you have in nonfiction is that I am dumping information.”
“Of course, writers do that maybe too much sometimes in fiction, too.”
“One of the things I talk about with fellow nonfiction writers is how you can integrate backstory and history. You always have to give context. How do you integrate that context and still keep the momentum going forward, still keep the narrative moving, and still keep people invested in your story when you have to explain who Darwin was and what he did, you have to explain who William Beebe was and what he did, you have to explain what the Galapagos are, and what the history of the Galapagos is before you get into what happened there with these crazy characters. It’s different approaches and different skill sets.”
“I can see parallels, though, in both fiction and nonfiction here. Which do you like best?”
“It’s fun to go back and forth, and I think writing fiction teaches me a lot about nonfiction. You know, what you can get away with in nonfiction while still sticking to nonfiction. It allows you to be a little bit more inventive with your process in a way that's a lot of fun.”
“Interesting. Returning to Scrivener, do you start in Scrivener right from the beginning and start putting your notes in there?”
“I'll open Scrivener, and I'll start organizing by source. Say, I have Friedrich Ritter, a character in the book, and here's everything I know about Friedrich Ritter. I'll have a Friedrich Ritter file. Then I'll have a Baroness file and a Dore Strauch file, just getting into the characters in these separate ways. Their files are always accessible, and I can refer to them easily when I want to. ‘Oh, wait a minute. What did Dore say at that time? Oh, here it's in my Scrivener file on Dore.’ I draft in Word. I'm just an old-school person who uses Word to draft. I don't like Google Docs. I don't like drafting in Scrivener. I like Word because it lets you see the page count and feel like you're gaining momentum because the file is growing. It's a satisfaction that I think I—and probably many other people—need to see as they go through a big project like that.”
“I started with a typewriter, so for me, it seems to make sense.”
“I get you. I started with the word processor, which I don't even know if they make anymore. But you know, word processors were the rage back in college.”
“The narrative of a nonfiction book, then, is pretty much the same as that of a fiction book, in that you've got a traditional beginning, middle, and an end with all the conflicts, arcs, etc., that you find in fiction manuscript, correct?”
“For nonfiction writers, one of the greatest compliments we receive is that ‘it reads like fiction.’ That's something a lot of nonfiction writers strive for. They want to write something so immersive that you forget you're reading facts. It probably goes back to the fact that history is boring if you had a bad history teacher. A lot of people grow up thinking history is boring. It's irrelevant and boring. I'm here to try to tell you that history is fascinating. History is full of blood and guts and death and murder and striving and ambition and pathos and all kinds of interesting interactions between people. You must tell the story so people can relate to it. That's the challenge with nonfiction and what many of us go for.”
“My wife asked, ‘How is this book?’ And I'm like, ‘Well, if I wrote it in a story, no one would believe it.’ But these are real people.”
“It’s so funny you say that. I call it stranger than fiction. And I once proposed to one of my old editors who turned down this book, ‘Well, why don't I write this book as fiction if the publishers are not going to let me do it as nonfiction?’ And they're like, ‘Nobody would believe it.’”
“With nonfiction, you can't put words in their mouth. You can't change the characters’ life trajectory. How many creative liberties can you take in a book of true nonfiction? Are there liberties?”
“I wouldn't say liberties. I would say techniques. You can use foreshadowing, and I was fortunate in the sense that Dore Strauch, one of my main characters, not only wrote an incredible memoir in which she was very free about her feelings and her thoughts—so I was able to include feelings and thoughts authentically because they were documented in her memoir—but she always had a sense of foreboding. You know, she said things like, ‘I had a great ominous feeling that murder was just around the corner.’ She said these things constantly because that island was creepy and bad things were happening, and I don't blame her. There was a sense of foreboding.”
“Pirate ghosts everywhere.”
“She was the pirate ghost, and so it was great because sometimes it can feel heavy-handed if a nonfiction author tries to make too much sense of foreboding and foreshadowing, and all this ominous, you know, ‘Wait till you see what comes next.’ It could feel a little forced and strained, but I had a character doing it for me here. And it was so much that my editor said, ‘I think you can cut about fifty percent of the foreshadowing,’ which I didn't even take insult to because it wasn't me doing it. It was the character doing it.”
“The real person.”
“Yes. So, you can do foreshadowing. You can do cliffhangers. You cut off a chapter when a lot of suspense is going on, and then you cut it off when you might find out what happens, and you go to another point of view and pick up that point of suspense in a later chapter. You can use techniques, but you really can't make up anything. You can't make up even gestures. You can't make up the way somebody looks. You can't make up feelings. All those things must come from sources.”
“Very interesting. From the acknowledgments at the back of the book, there seem to be several people who've helped edit, verify, and vet. You're the person with all the information there in Scrivener. How involved can they be in transforming and vetting what you write?”
“They don't have any say one way or the other, but in the interests of accuracy, I wanted to reach out to people who knew this story or the character, who knew Galapagos in particular, especially in the chapter about Galapagos history. I contacted Galapagos specialists, people who live there, work there, and conservation efforts. People have been there helping me with this book the whole time. Old sources aren't always accurate. There are probably ten different accounts of how many islands are in the Galapagos Archipelago. For things like that, you must double-check. Also, a lot of those people were translators. I got French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, and a lot of Spanish documents. My rusty Spanish wasn't good enough to do it independently, so I had many translators helping me out. A lot of those people are from that. Whenever I could have gotten something wrong, I had to check with somebody else.”
“I saw one thing you did; you'd say they wrote this in one person's diary. In another person's diary, they wrote that. And they were conflicting in their points of view.”
“That was a challenge because I didn't want to give credence to one diary. I had suspicions about who was lying and when, but I also think that what people choose to lie about and omit is just as important sometimes as the truth, and I thought it was interesting. When you're dealing with a murder mystery, people will be lying.”
“Even a nonfiction murder mystery.”
“It's part of the genre. It's part of the game. And I wanted people to have their debate about it. Who do they think is lying? I had to include all those conflicting accounts to do that.”
“Do you have thoughts, recommendations, or advice for those thinking about writing their first nonfiction book?”
“Find something you're passionate about and willing to sit with for years. Look for primary source materials. Do they exist in a way that will allow you to tell the book the way you want to tell it? You need details if you want to write nonfiction that reads like fiction. I think that's the most important thing. And then I would say, sit your butt in the chair. The most important thing about writing anything is sitting your butt in a chair, making your fingers move, and getting the words down on the page. Everybody writes bad first drafts. Everybody writes bad third, fourth, fifth drafts. You keep honing and rewriting. Rewriting is probably the most important thing you can do. And make sure you have people around you who believe in what you're doing. Find a writing group where you think the people there are better than you. Always surround yourself with people you can aspire to.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
Abbott Kahler, formerly writing as Karen Abbott, is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; and The Ghosts of Eden Park. She is also the host of Remus: The Mad Bootleg King, a podcast about legendary Jazz Age bootlegger George Remus. A native of Philadelphia, she lives in New York City and Greenport, New York. https://www.abbottkahler.com/eden-undone
Clay Stafford Interviews… Sara Paretsky: “Making A Difference”
Sara Paretsky interviewed by Clay Stafford
Don Henley sang about wanting to get “to the heart of the matter.” In this interview, I did. Sara Paretsky is a legend in detective fiction but also a champion for the rights of those who don’t have a voice. I spoke with her and found her as compassionate and passionate as my impressions of her were before we met. What struck me the most before the interview was her concern for others. How people incorporate that concern to make the world truly a better place without the preachiness that sometimes comes from pedantic writing is what I sought to investigate with her.
“Sara, it's not difficult to read your work and see where you might stand on things. Do you think it is necessary or even an obligation for writers to include social issues in their work?”
“I think writers should write what is in them to write. I don't sit down wanting to tackle social issues.”
“They’re there, though, so they just come out?”
“It's just they inform my experience and how I think. And it's not even what I most want to read. I most want to read someone who writes a perfect English sentence with an exciting story. That's what I care about. You read things you're in the mood to read, which changes at different points in your life. When I was about ten, my parents gave me Mark Twain's recollections of Joan of Arc to read. My parents felt that I had too intense a personality and that I was always going to suffer in life unless I dialed it back. They wanted me to see the fate that awaited too fierce girls. They get burned at the stake. So, I read this book, and it did not make me wish to dial back my intensity. It made me wish I could have a vision worth being burned at the stake for. That is just my personality, and that's why these issues keep cropping up in my books.”
“I don't know if it's even true, but one of my favorite Joan of Arc stories is that she went to those in charge and wanted the army to go, and they said, ‘They won't follow you. You're a woman,’ and she said, ‘Well, I won't know because I won't be looking back.’”
“Oh, God! I love it!”
“I think that's incredible. And, of course, they still burned her at the stake. That was a fantastic way of looking at that vision, which sounds like what you were talking about.”
“I’ve got hearing aids, and I keep hoping to get messages. I hope St. Catherine and St. Michael will start telling me what to do.”
“Some people are putting tin foil over their heads to stop the messages from coming in. You're hoping they will arrive.”
“You heard it here first when you want to come see me in the locked ward.”
“You said you wanted to write your first book, if I've got this right, to change the way women are portrayed in detective literature, and the gamut of portrayal at the time ran from sex objects to victims of formidable forces, women who must be judged because of their moral bankruptcy, or those who needed to be rescued by Harrison Ford. Do you feel you achieved that regarding how women are portrayed today?”
“Oh, I think not. What I think changed is that the roles for women became much more diverse, reflecting how society was changing. When Sue Grafton and I started, we were on the crest of a wave of the world looking at women differently. Lillian O'Donnell was in a previous generation of women writers, and she had a woman who was a New York City transit police officer solving crimes. But she was writing at a time when people weren't ready to see women taking on these more public roles. I published my first book the year Chicago let women be regular police officers instead of just matrons at the Women's Lockup and the Juvie Lockup. People don't remember this, but there were not exactly riots, but wives of patrol officers were storming the precincts, demanding that women not be allowed in patrol cars with their husbands because they knew that either they would seduce their husbands, or they weren't strong enough to provide backup for their husbands. We don't remember that struggle because we take it for granted now. But I was publishing my first book when all those items were in the stew. Can women do this? Should women do this? And now, there's still a lot of pushback, but nobody questions whether a woman should be in the operating room, or on the Supreme Court, or doing these kinds of things. So, in that way, I was part of a change, for what I think is a change for good. At the same time, I can't speak to why, but I feel like there's a lot of contemporary crime fiction where people are almost in a one-downmanship struggle to use the most graphic, grotesque violence. I know it's unfair to pick on the dead rather than on the living: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I'm, of course, honored that Stieg Larsson considered me an influence on him. Still, every detail of the sexual assault and abuse committed on Lisbeth Salander is described in exquisite detail. Then, when she seeks revenge, all of that is described in exquisite detail. The use of violence has become almost pornographic. But also, you know, V.I. and Kinsey Millhone became detectives out of a sense of possibility, joy, and problem-solving. But there's a tremendous amount of victimization of women, and it's acceptable for them to take an active role in fighting back against being victims. But we're not seeing a lot of women going into this work just because they want to. There is always a reason, and it must be a victim reason, in way too much fiction as I'm reading it, and I find that depressing and disturbing.”
“But when you started writing, and tell me if I'm misquoting you, you said you wanted to change the narrative about women in fiction.”
“Right.”
“I noted you didn't say detective fiction, but you said, ‘I want to change the narrative about women in fiction,’ and some would say you did achieve that.”
“I think that does me more honor than I deserve. I was one of the voices that helped make that happen, and I think we did.”
“This is a difficult question and something I always tell my children. I was like, ‘Okay, to argue a point, you must be able to argue both sides equally well. And then you know the issues.’”
“Great advice. I wonder if I could do that?”
“It's worked well for the kids. But this is a difficult question for those with strong opinions. At this moment, we humans seem to be a bit divided. How do you feel about authors taking social stands on issues with the opposite allegiance to where you or I might stand?”
“I think they should be boiled and oiled and have their carcass– No.”
“I don't think that's true. I don't think you believe that at all.”
“I don’t believe it. I'm wading into controversial waters here, but I'm a Jew. Since October seventh, I feel like my brain has been split, not just in half, but maybe in six or seven pieces because I'm totally against the violence against Palestinians in Gaza. I'm totally against the relief and joy that some Americans expressed watching live streaming of Israeli women being raped and mutilated. I'm totally for some things and totally against some things, and there are like maybe eight different ways you could segment yourself on Israel, Hamas, Palestine, Gaza, West Bank Settlers, and U.S. policy. That's an issue where everyone has a strong opinion, except for someone like me, who is fragmented in the middle. And so, I'm listening to all of these, and I think writers who want to hold forth on this are bolder and braver than I am, but it also is an opportunity for me to get exposed to many different viewpoints. And in that sense, yeah. Great, everyone who feels they know enough to speak about it, or even if they don't know enough, is speaking about it. I know that I would not be a person who could write an empathic, believable story about someone who was opposed to women's access to reproductive health. But if that's where your head is, you should write it, and maybe you can create a sympathetic character that would help me understand why you have those views that are so repugnant to me.”
“Regardless of the perspective of one, literature is a powerful sword, as we know, and people read things and, maybe like your parents were talking about with your Joan of Arc, it's going to subdue you a bit. But no, it made you blossom. And so, you never know which way literature will lead you to look at something and then go, ‘Wait, let me think about this a little more.’ I think differing opinions do tend to do that.”
“Yes, and if you have one monolithic opinion, you are doomed. You need to hear many voices of a story. It's only tangentially connected to this, but Enrico Fermi, the giant physicist of the 20th century, was the person who brought my husband to the University of Chicago. My husband was quite a bit older than me, and he died five years ago, and I still miss him every day. But that's beside the point. When Fermi was dying, he died of esophageal cancer around 1955. A young intern came into his hospital room and tried to talk to him cheerfully about his prospects and the future. And Fermi said, ‘I'm dying, and what you need to learn as a young doctor is how to talk to people about the fact that they're dying.’ This is all in this doctor's memoir. This doctor published this six or seven years ago, at the end of his career, and he had asked Fermi how he could have such a stoical outlook. Fermi was reading Tolstoy's short stories, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and other stories, and Fermi said, ‘You go home and read “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and you will learn how to talk to your patients about death and dying.’ The doctor said, ‘Yes, I went and did that, and it was the most important part of my medical education.’”
“Literature is powerful. So why did you lead the charge – and I think I know this, but I'm asking – why did you lead the charge to create Sisters in Crime. How did that come about?”
“In March of 1986, Hunter College convened what I think was the first-ever conference on women in the mystery field: writers, readers, publishers, editors. I had published two books, and they asked me to speak, which was exciting. I was on panels with people I'd been reading for a long time, including Dorothy Salisbury Davis, who became a close friend. Because I lacked impulse control, I made some strong statements. These generated a lot of discussion, and I started hearing from other women around the country. Sue Grafton and I were fat, dumb, and happy. We published our books. We got a lot of great reviews. We didn't understand the industry, or I didn't. Maybe Sue did. She was smarter than me in many ways. But women who were being asked questions like, ‘What do you do when your kitty cat gets on your keyboard,’ or ‘Isn't it nice that you have a hobby so that you're not bothering your husband when he comes home from a hard day's work?’ You know, just lots of ugly stuff. The great civil rights lawyer, Flo Kennedy, said, ‘Don't agonize, organize.’ So, at the Bouchercon in Baltimore in October of 1986, I sent letters to everyone I had heard from and the women I knew, twenty-six people, to see if women wanted to get together to form an advocacy organization. I said, ‘If you do, we’ll work; if you don't, we'll shut up and stop crying about it.’ Everybody was on board with it, and our first project was our book review monitoring project because Sue and I were getting all these reviews. Most women were not getting reviewed at all. Sue and I were getting reviewed because we were doing something that was being perceived as male. We had privatized. We were doing something in that Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John MacDonald tradition. And so, we connected with male readers and reviewers. But women who are doing things outside that: cops, so-called cozies, domestic crime. They were not getting reviewed. Our first project was to get numbers on that. Because if you're not getting reviewed, libraries will not buy you. And they were, in those days, the biggest buyer of midlist books. And bookstores don't know you exist. So, with the help of Jim Wang at the Jude Review, we got a list of 1,100 crime thriller mystery books published in 1986 and then worked hard. We looked at two hundred newspapers and magazines and looked at the reviews, and we found that a book by a man was seven times more likely to be reviewed than a book by a woman. We figured, ‘God. Maybe men write twice as well as we do, but not seven times as well.’ So, we started just going to bookstores and libraries. Sharon McCrumb, Carolyn Hart, and Linda Grant, I think it was, put together books in print by women writers. We didn't want to go headlong against the industry because we needed the industry. We wanted to educate people. Sisters grew out of that and has been essential as a place of support. Of course, some men belong, and it's been a template. Writers of Color—I don't have the exact name right—are advocating, so you're starting to see many more mysteries by writers of color than you would have seen ten years ago. This advocacy makes a difference, and it makes a difference not by being confrontational but by being educational and showing publishers, booksellers, and so on that there's a market for these characters. People want to read about them. We were going back to your previous question about regional characters. Now, we're down at the grassroots of where stories come from. And we see that a story speaks to people regardless of race, creed, or place of national origin. Some days, I feel so much despair I can hardly get out of bed, but when I think of the possibility that readers and writers have of exploring so many different voices and places, it's like, yeah, this is a brave new world.”
“What advice do you have for writers of today?”
“If you're writing for the market, you may hit it lucky, but the market is such a fickle place that by the time you finish your book, it will be interested in something else. You write what's in you to say and do it the best way you can. One thing I don't have that I wish I had in my own life is that I don't have a reading group, and I don't have a first reader now that my husband is gone. I have not found the right person, or maybe I haven't even looked. But you need a sounding board, even if it's just one person. Your head is an echo chamber, so get feedback but also stay true to your voice and vision. Balance the two. It's like you were saying, can you have a sympathetic voice opposite your position? You may love your prose so much that you don't want to alter one word. There's one important writer you're not allowed to edit today, and I'm like, ‘Oh, sweetheart, I'd read you more often if you'd let someone cut about 30% of that deathless prose.’”
“You've been called ‘the definition of perfection’ by the Washington Post.”
“Yeah, right.”
“And ‘a legend’ by people such as Harlan Coben, and for your work ‘the best on the beat’ by the Chicago Tribune and others, and the list goes on and on and on. How does that make you feel? How does it feel to be labeled as ‘perfection’?”
“That's an impossible bar to reach and go over.”
“But you have that reputation.”
“Yeah, well, you know…”
“And you've bumbled well into it, right? Let me ask you this. Other people think of you as a legend for numerous reasons. Whether it's Sisters in Crime, your advocacy in your personal life, your writing, or the influence your writing has had, what would Sarah Paretsky like to be remembered for?”
“I'd like to be remembered for telling stories that cheered people up.”
“That's a wonderful thing.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world with her gritty detective V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only, followed by twenty V.I. novels, her memoir, two stand-alone novels, and short stories. She created Sisters in Crime, earning Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year. She received the British Crime Writers’ Cartier Diamond Dagger and Gold Dagger. https://saraparetsky.com/
Clay Stafford talks with Andrews & Wilson “On Collaborating”
Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson interviewed by Clay Stafford
I was excited to sit down and talk with Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson, the acclaimed co-authors of the #1 international bestselling author team of Andrews & Wilson, who are unparalleled in action thrillers. I wasn’t disappointed. Their mastery of the genre, evident in their numerous bestsellers, makes them the perfect tour guides for those of us who aspire to craft compelling action scenes, but also their collaboration style is something to be envied. Moreover, their approachability and wealth of knowledge make them a team you can comfortably learn from without feeling intimidated.
Clay: “Brian and Jeffrey, you’re a writing team, but before you became that, can you tell us a little about your solo careers before your very successful collaboration?”
Brian: “I have a psychology degree from Vanderbilt.”
Clay: “Very helpful for a writer.”
Brian: “Very. I was always interested in the mind and how people think. I think that helps inform my interest in character and human dynamics. Then, I made a hard pivot when I went into the military, became a nuclear engineer, and was a submarine officer. That informed me of my interest in mechanical things and engineering and how things work. Living on a submarine is obviously like the ultimate Skinner Box. It's a human experiment. You shove a hundred people into this machine that has a nuclear reactor and can carry nuclear weapons, and you put it underwater where you're driving around, and you can't see where you're going; everybody's trapped inside, breathing recycled air, and eating three-month-old food. That's the perfect platform for me to think about microcosms. And every story is a microcosm. I lived in the microcosm of a submarine.”
Clay: “And that makes me think you're living the dream, the way you described that one.”
Brian: “Living the dream. Now they let me out, which is great. And make sure you put in the interview somewhere that there's a great irony that a submarine officer who was reading Hunt for Red October on a submarine chasing Russians around has an opportunity, twenty-plus years later, to write on the 40th anniversary of Hunt for Red October, a submarine novel about a submarine chasing Russians around. So that's a cool full-circle element. When you're out there serving, you're away from your family, you're away from your friends, you're bonding with the other servicemen and women in your community. One way you bond is to share stories, tell stories, and talk about what matters to you and what you're afraid of. It's how we digest and connect with people through storytelling and listening to stories. I think that military service helped weave this into my DNA. That storytelling is an important part of our community, and getting stories out there about the men and women they're serving, what they're going through, and what it feels like is important for the rest of the nation. The people who are not serving and maybe aren't familiar with military service or the sacrifices men and women make to keep the nation safe. What inspired me to want to be a storyteller is how story time was part of the community I lived in.”
Clay: “How about you, Jeff? Your solo career before you got into this partnership?”
Jeffrey: “Mine is the complete one-eighty-degree opposite of Brian's. Brian came into storytelling after all his experiences. And I had all these experiences because I'm still that nine-year-old with a rifle or the fire hat or whatever. My bio reads like someone who never grew up, which might be partly true.”
Clay: “We'll ask your wife.”
Jeffrey: “Right. No, I know better than that. Writing is the one great constant in my life. When I've done all these other things, being a pilot, being in the teams, being a doctor, and a firefighter, and all the things I've done, I always wrote. I started writing when I was probably my daughter's age, which is eight. I would write fan fiction for my favorite shows and published my first short story when I was 13 or 14. I've literally always had storytelling as part of my life. At times in my life, it was my catharsis; at times in my life, it was my creative outlet, and at times in my life, it was a passion that I wanted to turn into a career, which I've been blessed to do now. It's kind of the opposite of Brian. The writing was always there, and then I lived all these other lives that slowly informed that craft and helped me develop it differently. When Brian and I met, I believe he had two novels out. I had two out and a third about to come out. We were both writing individually, and this partnership grew out of friendship rather than necessity. We were writing, and we connected at ThrillerFest in New York. Because of my social paralysis, I'm uncomfortable in big groups of people, and my wife laughs about it because I do well. I think I look okay socially, but I don't like it. I was sitting in the hotel room looking through all the pictures of the people I might meet at this opening meeting during our debut author year when Brian and I were both debut authors. I was finding all the military people. I was like, ‘Okay, I can talk to those guys. We'll have something in common.’ Brian happened to be one of them, and I was burning the pictures into my head so I would recognize them at the cocktail party. And sure enough, I saw Brian there and said, ‘Hi.’ He was alone because he was a submariner, so he was crying in his beer, and I felt sorry for him. The partnership part of it came much, much later. But the history was there for both of us. I think that made it work.”
Clay: “How did the collaboration start?”
Jeffrey: “He stalked me like a little girl. It was weird.”
Brian: “Now remember he just explained how he stalked me.”
Jeffrey: “I think I said I felt sorry for you.”
Brian: “I think you stalked me. I believe what you just described is the definition of stalking. No, I think he charmed me.”
Clay: “This sounds like me telling how my wife and I met and got together, and mine is all lies.”
Jeffrey: “It's very uncomfortable, isn't it?
Clay: “But between all the stalking and the give-and-take and the ‘I don't want to see you anymore,’ how did it eventually work out?”
Brian: “All kidding aside, we met at ThrillerFest at the cocktail party and became fast friends. Our family values are similar. We have the same sort of world outlook, and we're both driven and intellectually curious people. We joke about Jeff’s bio all the time. Also, I have a variety of experiences, and we're both intellectually curious people who are interested in this world that we live in and in storytelling. If you put all those things together, it does make sense that we would become friends. Every year, we look forward to catching up at ThrillerFest, and I think during our third year there, I was thinking about my next project, and the idea just popped into my head. I said, ‘You know, we should do a SEALS and Subs book because combining those two communities in the story would be cool.’ And he's like, ‘That does sound interesting. I don't know how that would work, you know. I don't understand. You know, writing is a very individual thing. How could we possibly make this work?’ and I didn't have a perfect answer. I said, ‘Well, we could just try dividing the chapters and see what would happen.’ I think Jeff was like, you know, in his mind, he's thinking, ‘I don't see this happening.’ So, he was like, ‘I'll help. It sounds like a cool idea. I'll be your subject matter expert. I'll help you with whatever you need from naval special warfare, that sort of thing.’ The same advice he was giving earlier. He said, ‘I'll offer to be that resource for you. And I said, ‘Okay,’ and then I said, ‘Well, why don't you look at this chapter? And maybe you could help write it.’ Then he started getting into it because he's a storyteller and couldn't help himself.”
Jeffrey: “He manipulated me with his psychology degree. The story's true ending is that I did go into it thinking I have no idea how I've been writing my whole life. I don't know how two people write together. You do the nouns; I do the verbs? What are you even talking about? And I did want to help him because he was a good friend. The story became increasingly developed because we were brainstorming, which turned into a really good story. He asked me two more times after the first time, ‘Why don't we take a crack at writing it together?’ I said, ‘No, no. Again, I don't know how we would do it.’ This was a great book, and I was jealous. He said, ‘Look, let's do this. Let's write five chapters. We'll divide them up. You write some. I'll write some. We'll talk about it. We'll try it out, and if it's working, we'll keep going. If it's not working, you can have the story because I don't think I can write it without you.’ And I was like, ‘Sweet. I gotta have this story to be my story.’ And so, we sat down, started writing the chapters, and as I recall, we just kept going. We never even brought it up again. It worked so well that it didn't even occur to us to have the conversation again. I think Tier One, the first book we wrote together, was done in four and a half months. We crushed it. Outside of interviews, we've never talked about it again. It's a given that this is how we do it. It's efficient. It's so much more fun. I'm sure if your writing partnership isn't what ours is, it would be horrible if you weren't getting along. We never argue about anything. It's enjoyable. I get to do the job I love with my best friend. There's no downside to it, and we're incredibly efficient. As you know, we release three or four books a year. So, we turn a book in about every fourteen or fifteen weeks. We couldn't do it alone. But it's just so enjoyable. And there's no writer's block. You get on the phone like, ‘I'm not sure what to do.’ You get on the phone, and five minutes later, the idea is better than anything you would have come up with individually. It's been a real joy. At first, I didn't see how it could work, and now I can't even imagine doing it any other way.”
Clay: “You guys live in different cities, too.”
Jeffrey: “Thank God, because we are good friends. We’d get nothing done.”
Brian: “We'd watch Jim Gaffigan and drink Bourbon every day, and we'd have no books.”
Clay: “So that's a good thing. How do you plan your stories? Because you've got two brains here trying to work independently but together. How do you plan the stories out?”
Brian: “Do we have two brains, Jeff?”
Jeffrey: “I think we used to. He's making a joke, Clay, because, for the last couple of years, we've realized that we've hybridized into a single organism to the extent where I'll have a brilliant idea like, ‘Oh, my gosh! I know how to solve that problem we were talking about this morning,’ and I'll get on the phone with him. I'll say, ‘Hey, I want to tell you something,’ and he’ll go, ‘Hold on!’ and he'll tell me exactly what I'm about to say. It's bizarre.”
Clay: “Twin telepathy, right?”
Brian: “Yes.”
Jeffrey: “It’s weird, man. It's a real thing. But anyway, Brian, what were you going to say?”
There’s a pause.
Clay: “Jeff, with twin telepathy, you should know.” I laugh.
Brian: “That’s what I was going to say.” I laugh again. “It's a funny joke, but I feel like there is some of that now that we've written so many books together, where it's like two dozen novels we've penned together that we start to anticipate. And you know, we have a method, but I think, as far as an individual, we're not plotters, and we don't outline the entire novel as some people do. We're in the pantser category. But we do have structure to our approach. We write in the three-act structure. Our books are written from multiple points of view in third person. So, we sort of approach this as, like any good group project, which is at the beginning of every novel, we sit down and talk about the story's themes and objectives. In broad strokes, where do we think we want to end up? And then we start division of labor. Because we write multiple point-of-view novels, we can each take different characters and write a single point-of-view per chapter. We divide the chapters between us, and it's just the first couple because we're not sure exactly where we will go. So maybe Jeff will take chapters one, three, four, six. I'll take two, five, and eight, and we start writing and write in parallel. We write simultaneously, and the key to our success, and I would say, our superpower, is that throughout this process, we're always talking and giving each other free reign to edit each other's work. Would you agree with that?”
Jeffrey: “I think that is the key—every few chapters, we swap. If I finish a chapter, I send it to Brian. When he finishes his, he sends it to me. So, it doesn't go into “The Manuscript,” our master file, until I've written it and he's edited it, and vice versa. So even though we're writing in tandem and writing different chapters, both of us have touched every chapter before it goes into the master file, which is a little weird but is our superpower because it gives us that unified voice. Sometimes, you can tell when something's co-authored because you can say, ‘Okay, that clearly is a different voice.’ We don't have that problem. But the other thing is, we're editing as we're going. We're also stimulating each other as we're going. I'll send him a chapter. He'll send me one. I'll read his and be like, ‘Oh, my God! I know what we can do with this!’ Now I'm off to the races writing something else because we have that sort of logarithmic increase in creativity. After all, we're both seeing it. So yeah, I do think that's the superpower. We did that from the very first book. We've never not done it that way. I don't think it would work any other way.”
Brian: “Clay, you said something early on that guided our partnership. Jeff was like, look, we need to approach this as a business. This is a business, and the book is our product. It's not about who wrote what chapter or who thought of what idea on what page. In an interview, you’ll never see us saying, ‘Well, I wrote this, and then Jeff wrote that.’ That's not how it works. This book is like a kid to us, you know. It's like anybody who's a parent understands that you can't take credit. These books are like our kids, and we both try to put the best guidance and put our all into making the book as exciting, informative, and suspenseful as possible. And it's between the two of us and our little additions all through this process to the point where you can't name who did what, on what day, and what page. It's just an Andrews & Wilson book, and once it's out there, that's the thing we're proud of. We're not proud of, ‘Oh, well, I thought of this great thing on page thirty-seven.’ That's not how we work.”
Jeffrey: “Literally, it's not how we work like there are times when my wife will read a book, and she'll be like, ‘Oh, chapter 17, that was you,” and she thinks I'm making it up when I swear I don't know if I wrote that first or second. I remember that chapter. I had something to do with it, but by the time it gets into a book you're reading, one of us wrote it, the other rewrote it, then it all got edited, then it went to DE, then it got edited again. That lack of ego is the key, and that's from the military background because it's part of your DNA. If you spend significant time in the service, the team and the mission are before you. It's more than a bumper sticker. It becomes who you are. It's all about the team. It's all about the mission. It's not about credit. It's not about who did what. You can't drive an eight-billion-dollar submarine by yourself, and one dude doesn't fast rope in and get Bin Laden, right? It's all team before self with our backgrounds. That's what made it so easy, and it is, I guess, the best way to say it. It made it easy because it's who we are.”
Clay Stafford: “Did you guys draw up a contract? If somebody's going to start collaborating with somebody else, how involved should the legalities get?”
Jeffrey: There should be something. I think how detailed it needs to be depends on your business relationship. Don't ever sacrifice a personal relationship. How many friendships have been ruined over a business deal, right? There should be a discussion about what you want to do, even outside the contract. That was the key to our success. From day one, we talked about what we were trying to achieve. What was our goal? We were on the same page, not just on the creative side but the business side. I don't think I’ve thought about it in years until you just brought it up. I'm sure it's invalid now, but we had a document when we started, but it was super simple. Whatever comes out of anything we ever write as Andrews & Wilson is fifty percent yours and fifty percent mine. Every bit of responsibility, every bit of liability, every bit of financial success, is split down the middle fifty-fifty. Ours was a one-page document we wrote and then gave to our agent. I think there should be something. It would be a mistake not to have something to point to if there were ever conflicts. But even more important than the legal document is that conversation of: what do you want to get out of this? What do I want to get out of this? Are we on the same page? Are we on the same page creatively? Are we on the same page business-wise? That's very, very important.”
Brian: “The exercise of addressing these questions and drafting something forces you to have a conversation that might be uncomfortable or feel awkward otherwise, and you might just sort of kick that can down the road. You may not be on the same road if you kick it down too far. I think that, more than anything, the business discussion is super important. As we discussed, we try to give back to the community because the community has given so much to us. One of the things that I always ask aspiring authors when they ask for help is, ‘Well, what do you want to get out of your writing career? Do you want to have a book out there that everybody can read? Is it that simple? Is it that you want to say I'm a New York Times bestselling author? Do you want to be rich and famous? Do you want to have your book adapted into a movie?’ It can be all those things, or it can be one of those things. But if your writing partner has different aspirations than you, then that's important to establish upfront because you will be rowing in this same boat and must be rowing in the same direction at the same pace. It’s difficult to make a living in this business. It's competitive. And for most people—and there's no shame in saying this—writing is a side gig, and it takes a long time until you make enough money to call it a career and write full-time. And if you're two, you're splitting all that money. It might be a situation where one person's financial needs differ from the others, and they say, ‘You know what, we’re not making enough money for me to continue this. I have to work on the side. I have to have my day job.’ Okay, is it a situation where one person works eight hours a day and the other works two? Are you guys okay with that? How does that look? These logistical questions are important, so everybody's expectations are on the same page at the beginning of the partnership.”
Clay: “We talked about all the good things and the symbiotic relationship you guys have. What are the challenges of team writing?”
Brian: “The challenge is we're producing so much content right now. How do we keep it fresh? How do we stay motivated? How do we ensure the other guy gets time with his family? We spend a lot of time ensuring that our family needs are met, our financial needs are both met, and we're still having fun. And so, there are conversations about, ‘I'm going to be going on vacation now,’ or ‘This book is gonna be due then,’ and ‘Okay, I got a family thing.’ And so we do a lot of planning and communication constantly to make sure the other guy’s emotionally, professionally, and financially okay. And that's been something that we've done from the very beginning. As Jeff said, we're best friends and business partners, so we must ensure that both elements are taken care of.”
Clay: “It’s that team spirit you discussed earlier.”
Jeffrey: “Yeah, one hundred percent. We've been writing together creeping up on a decade in a couple of years, and I'm not saying we always agree. But we've never argued. I don't think there's ever been a conflict. We're both faith, family, country. Those are all more important than what we're doing as long as our financial needs are met. And so, Brian calls and says, ‘Hey, I'm not going to be able to do this thing that we just got asked to do because Larkin's got something going on,’ no problem. I'll take care of it, and vice versa. We've always been team before self. On the creative side, it's the same thing again. It's not that we're always one hundred percent on the same page, but we have that team dynamic. Let's say there's something, and Brian calls up and says, ‘Well, you know, I don't know about this. I think maybe we go in this other direction.’ That has only happened a few times, but our sort of unspoken rule—it's been spoken about in interviews, but I don't think we ever planned it out—has always been we talk about the pros and cons of your idea versus my idea, and we tend to defer to whoever has the most passion for it. I might think his ideas aren't as good as mine, but he feels very strongly about it. Let's try it because it's writing; you can always change it, right? When we've trusted the other guy's passion, it's never been like, ‘I told you, I knew that wasn't going to work.’ It's always worked. And so there hasn't been any real conflict because we're proactive and team before self in our approach.”
Clay: “And all that would sound great to somebody reading this. Any advice for those thinking about collaborating with another author?”
Jeffrey: “I mean just the advice we've given, I think, which is, vet the relationship, and I don't mean vet it in a cold, clinical way. I mean, make sure that it will work not just for you but for the other person, and have those big upfront conversations. If you have a real conversation about expectations, goals, craft, business, all those things, you'll know if it will work. There’s not a huge number of collaborators, but the people who have conflict have conflict because of unspoken expectations and unmet needs. And so, if you can be upfront about those things and decide at the beginning that you're on the same page, you shouldn't have insurmountable conflict. Maybe I'm naive, but it seems like it would be true.”
Brian: “And I think you have to be honest with yourself about the needs of your ego. Why are you doing this? Is it because you want to say you wrote this book? For us, it's about the books and the brand. And so, if you think about it like a rock band, a lot of rock bands, just the lead singer is considered the band, and everybody else is sort of baggage along for the ride. For other bands, it's not that way. Everybody's sharing equally in this. So, in your partnership, is it about you, or is it about the team? Liv Constantine and her sister do a great job with this. It's about the two of them. But they're sisters, right? They're another enduring co-author team; if you talk to them, you can tell it's not about their egos. It's about them together.”
Jeffrey: And I will say, though, as a caveat to that, that doesn't mean that's the only model that works. It's what works for us. Catherine Coulter wrote with J.T. Ellison for a time. That relationship wasn't our relationship. Kathy was ginormous, and J.T. was breaking out. Theirs was more a mentor/mentee co-authoring relationship, which worked great. The books were good. Those relationships are all different. We're not saying it must be team admission before self, 50/50, or it can't work. We're saying, make sure you know what it is and what it looks like. There's nothing wrong with saying, ‘My goal is to write with somebody who has a following and get my name out there and have that association,’ as long as you both understand that's what you're doing and are both okay with it. That can still be a great model, but not talking about it and making sure you're on the same page is the death of the relationship.”
Clay: “So there’s many ways to structure it. Excellent advice for those thinking about a collaborative relationship.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
Brian Andrews is a US Navy veteran, Park Leadership Fellow, and former submarine officer with a psychology degree from Vanderbilt and a business master's from Cornell University. Brian is also a principal contributor at Career Authors, a site dedicated to advancing the careers of aspiring and published writers. https://www.andrews-wilson.com/
Jeffrey Wilson has worked as an actor, firefighter, paramedic, jet pilot, diving instructor, and vascular and trauma surgeon. He served in the US Navy for fourteen years and made multiple deployments as a combat surgeon with an East Coast-based SEAL Team. He lives in Southwest Florida. https://www.andrews-wilson.com/
Clay Stafford talks with Author Tom Mead on “Writing Locked Room Mysteries”
Tom Mead interviewed by Clay Stafford
I stumbled upon Tom Mead’s latest locked-room mystery from my friend Otto Penzler and immediately loved it. I knew I had to talk to Tom about it, as it was probably one of the best I’ve read in a long while. Tom and I got together electronically, me from Tennessee, U.S., and him from Derbyshire, U.K. The modern age of technology is not just fantastic for meetings such as this, but it also fosters a sense of global community, allowing us to get to know others face-to-face across continents. I was curious to know how, in the modern age, technology has affected what is known as the locked room mystery simply because these types of mysteries are fascinating intellectual puzzles, and modern forensics are straightforward (and often more quickly derived) facts. This interview ran long. Part of it has previously appeared in my monthly Writer’s Digest column, but the full interview, about four times the length of the Writer’s Digest version, constitutes our entire conversation. I learned so much from Tom that I felt other mystery writers might gain the same things I did by hearing Tom’s conversation in full. “Tom, for those unfamiliar with a locked room mystery, can you explain that to us?”
“Yes, absolutely. The term refers to a sub-genre of the classic puzzle mystery, or the whodunnit, emphasizing a seemingly impossible crime. So, in other words, a crime that physically could not have taken place. Hence, the imagery of the locked room. Locked room mysteries are a rarefied sub-genre because, by their nature, they are complex and convoluted creations. They’re structured like a puzzle, but there’s also an emphasis on the atmosphere and a kind of eeriness about them because there’s the appearance of something supernatural having taken place. But, of course, the solution is always rational and earthly. The locked room mystery became popular during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the World Wars. Many great authors tackled the genre, but my favorite is John Dickson Carr, the acknowledged master of the locked room mystery. I started writing locked rooms as a kind of tribute to him, and I look at them as a kind of literary magic trick, if you like. It’s all about misdirection and creating the appearance of the impossible.”
“Well, you had me trying to beat you at this mystery, and I have to say I did not.”
“Well, that’s good. That’s part of the fun, of course. A great thing about Golden Age detective fiction—something that appeals to me as a reader—is this idea of the intellectual game and the challenge to the reader. Ellery Queen was particularly good at that sort of thing and would often include a literal challenge to the reader, wherein the author would sort of step in, address the reader directly, and say, “All the clues are there. They’ve been hidden throughout the text for you to spot. Can you solve the mystery before the detective?” And so, I thought it would be fun to incorporate a literal challenge to the reader into my Spector mysteries. So again, it’s all part of the tribute to the Golden Age, but also having a bit of fun with the reader, and just playing up that puzzle aspect of the mystery.”
“Well, my wife said, ‘How is it?’ because I read a lot of books, and I said, ‘This is very good, but I am not sure how he’s going to pull this off,’ and I’m not giving anything away, because we’ve got a picture on the cover here, how did this person get in this boat? And that was the one that kept throwing me. And you don’t reveal until the very end, almost, how that happened. And so, I’m going, ‘Is he going to play fair? Is he going to answer how this boat shows up in here?’ So anyway, you did well in wrapping everything up.”
“Thank you very much. And yes, thank you for saying that about the boat puzzle. That was the one that I had the most fun with. It’s the most elaborate. In that respect, it’s a tribute to the Japanese locked room mystery or traditional Japanese mystery because there’s been a recent glut of translations of classic Japanese mysteries. I’ve had great fun delving into them. They are remarkably complex, even by the standards of Golden Age detective fiction, and some of the clever devices, techniques, tricks, and gimmicks that writers like Seishi Yokomizo have come up with are great and help to stimulate my imagination as a writer as well as a reader. I think that’s also partially a tribute to the Japanese mystery tradition.”
“You’ve been citing different cultures and countries. Locked room is global in every type of culture.”
“Yeah, I mean, the appeal of mystery fiction generally is universal, I think, and there have been numerous anthologies and collections of stories from all over the world that deal with this idea of the impossible crime. But there’s a concentration within Japan. The Japanese traditional mystery is known as Honkaku, which is a term that means Orthodox Mystery. So, in other words, a mystery with a fair puzzle that plays by the rules. And these days, there’s been a kind of resurgence in Honkaku mysteries, known as Shin Honkaku, or the New Orthodox. The popularity in Japan is massive, and several of these books are being translated into English. As someone who loves puzzle mysteries, I’ve enjoyed delving into the past and reading the classic Golden Age authors. My favorites are Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Frederic Brown, Helen McCloy, names like that, and people from the ‘30s to about the ‘50s. Also, alongside those authors, I’ve been reading classic Japanese and contemporary Japanese mysteries, which play by the same rule book where the focus is on a puzzle. It’s on identifying whodunnit, but also howdunnit. How could this impossible thing have occurred? As a writer, I think it’s all grist to the mill. I like to seek out these more diverse, perhaps unorthodox, or obscure, titles, and it’s a real joy to me as a reader and a writer.”
“You’re going to roll your eyes at this, but how in the world does one write a locked-room mystery? I don’t think I have the intelligence for it. Where do you start? Is it the ending, and you go backward? How does it work?”
“Now, that is a great question. To me, there’s no specific technique that I’ve hit upon. I’ve tried various approaches. But the idea is that you want every problem and every solution to be different. I should go about it differently each time. But I am a big fan of stage magic that I will come across in reading the book, hopefully, because my detective character—who’s very much a Golden Age pastiche of an amateur sleuth—is an old vaudevillian. I suppose he’s a retired conjurer from the London stage who has now turned his knack for unraveling impossible puzzles into the world of crime and detection. I grew up fascinated by stage magic, and I read a lot about magicians, how tricks are done, and the principles behind stage magic. So how, for instance, does a certain type of magic trick work on the brain, the part of the brain that is misdirected by a certain sleight of hand, and how does that sleight of hand work? I’ve read a few nonfiction works on that subject, and to be honest, the principles are very similar to mystery writing. I often liken writing mysteries to performing a magic show because, in both instances, you’ve got a performer guiding an audience's attention in a certain direction. In both instances, the trick's workings are in plain sight the whole time. But it’s about how you conceal them and ensure the audience doesn’t perceive them. In terms of plotting and writing, I suppose my general approach is the same as a magician’s. I will usually look at the effect that I want to achieve. It may be the case of coming up with an impossibility or a scenario that I think would be effective for the plot structure that I’ve got. Then, in some cases, it’s a question of working backward: how that trick can be pulled off via earthly practical means. This is an old stage illusionist’s principle of creating a gimmick that will achieve this effect. Then, at the other end of the scale, sometimes I will stumble across something, whether it be a trick or an illusion, an optical illusion, a misheard quotation, or a line of dialogue from something. It will stimulate something that I will then decide to try and develop into an impossibility. I’ve approached it from different angles, I suppose. Sometimes, I start with the trick itself, and I think about how I can incorporate that into my plot, and other times, I will have an unanswered question that I’ll need to devise my answer to.”
“Is there a specific type of sleuth that works well with locked room mysteries?”
“I suppose locked room mysteries are heightened by their nature. They’re non-naturalistic. They’re surreal. And there’s an emphasis on atmosphere. And I’ve already mentioned a sense of the eerie, the uncanny. I think the detective needs to be suitably larger than life, flamboyant, you might say, and theatrical, and these are the elements that I’ve distilled into my detective character, Joseph Spector. I think the amateur sleuth is a classic trope of the Golden Age. And a decidedly unrealistic, non-naturalistic one. I think the detective needs to reflect on the puzzle that you’ve set. With an elaborate and ornately contrived locked room mystery, you need a detective capable of these great flights of fancy and an air of performance about them. John Dickson Carr’s great detective was Gideon Fell, a boisterous kind of Falstaffian figure based on the author G.K. Chesterton. Then his other great detective was Sir Henry Merrivale, who was, if anything, even more flamboyant than Fell with a distinctive white suit and a penchant for practical jokes and the like. So, it is an almost cartoonish figure, but a figure that suited the puzzle framework that Carr created. A match made in heaven, I suppose.”
“Do certain types of plots lend themselves to locked room mysteries?”
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I generally talk about the Golden Age mystery. The Golden Age usually refers to the decades between the World Wars, such as the ‘20s and ‘30s, when writers like Agatha Christie rose to prominence, and I’ve also talked about Ellery Queen. So, novels featuring a closed circle of suspects are often set in high society. So again, it’s quite a lofty scenario, not necessarily one that would be relatable to the average reader. Often with a country house setting like the one in Cabaret Macabre. The most important components would be the cast of suspects, the so-called closed circle of suspects. In other words, a set cast of characters whose identities are known from the outset so that you know that the murderer is lurking somewhere among that cast of characters. The setting is typically isolated. In Cabaret Macabre, it’s the House March Banks, which is a highly conventional English country seat. But if you think of Agatha Christie, for instance, you have the Orient Express, you have that kind of idea of a cast of characters in that single location, or Death on the Nile, of course, you have them on that river cruise. I think those kinds of scenarios are particularly appealing for creating locked room mysteries. My second book, The Murder Wheel, was set mainly in the backstage corridors of a fictional London theatre. For a locked room mystery, it’s fun to have it set within the constraints of a specific location for an impossibility. I think these are the kinds of ingredients that I like to employ.”
“When you’re talking about your study of conjuring, you tend to be the type who likes to look behind the scenes. How do you explain the popularity of locked-room mysteries? Is it the puzzle? Is it like the people who love crossword puzzles or someone trying to figure that out? You’ve got that specific demographic.”
“I think it is. Exactly as you say. The appeal lies within the puzzle first and foremost, but the Golden Age has an irresistible charm. I started trying to write Golden Age style, pastiche whodunnits as an exercise in escapism at the height of the Covid lockdowns here in the U.K. in 2020 and into 2021. So that was when I wrote Death in the Conjurer in draft, again, purely to keep myself entertained and amused by playing with the tropes and the conventions of the Golden Age mystery. However, regarding the puzzle and the locked room, I think the great writers of locked room mysteries had a great insight into human nature and human psychology, allowing them to play with the readers’ perceptions and expectations. As a reader, I appreciate an author who doesn’t dumb down the plot and who doesn’t simplify the plot. I like a very labyrinthine plot, which encourages you to play along and sets you an intellectual challenge. These are the things that I enjoy as a reader. I think, generally speaking, when I’m talking to people who are reading my books, and when I’m generally talking about locked rooms, it’s that sense of the writer having fun with you, the reader, and addressing ‘you, the reader’ directly and engaging you in this kind of elaborate performance.”
“Okay, let me ask you this. And no modesty here, okay? Why do more writers not write these? I have my suspicion, and I think I disclosed it at the beginning of this interview.”
“Locked room mysteries are, by their nature, complex undertakings. It would be best if you had a passion for the genre as a reader as well as a writer because it would be easy to set out and try and create a locked room mystery by numbers, but it wouldn’t have the same impact as a locked room that was constructed by somebody who knows the genre in and out. I think I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve had access to so many of the great titles from the past, and like I say, this influx of Japanese titles, translations of the French novels of Paul Halter—who’s another living legend of the locked room mystery. He’s a terrific writer and incredibly prolific. Speaking for myself, I’ve been able to read and distill all of that, generate my ideas from that, and combine it with the world of magic, which also fascinates me. But as to why more people don’t write the legitimate, locked room mystery style, I think other genres are perhaps less sophisticated in their construction and more commercially appealing—things like the conventional cozy mystery. Not to disparage the cozy mystery genre, but many titles are out there. There is a sheer glut of cozy mystery titles out there, and there are many recycled ideas out there. From a commercial perspective, selling a cozy mystery is easier because people know what to expect. They know how it will play out, whereas you are deliberately defying the genre's conventions with a mystery of the locked room. You are taking the established principles of the mystery, and you’re deliberately subverting them. And you’re making the work as unpredictable as possible because that’s the nature of it. I suppose that it’s more of a risk. It’s more of a balancing act because it can be a real disaster when it goes wrong. In a badly written locked room mystery, there’s much more to lose, whereas with cozy mysteries, there are many familiar elements for readers to latch onto. And there are so many long-running series out there that it’s perhaps easier to sell commercially. But again, not to disparage the cozy mystery because there are many cozy mysteries that incorporate locked room mystery elements. From a commercial point of view, I think the word cozy is a much easier sell than the locked room.”
“You’ve got to admit that writing and reading a locked room mystery take much more work because it’s not like you’re going to sit back in your leather chair and read this pleasurably. It’s like, okay, game on. Let’s go.”
“Exactly. I suppose it is perhaps more demanding, and therefore, the readers it will attract are those who love puzzles and trying to stay one step ahead of the detective or the author. The kinds of people who, like me, are fascinated by how tricks are done, who are, I suppose, as fascinated by that as they are by the tricks themselves. I mentioned a balancing act with locked room mysteries. It would be best if you had the reveal of the howdunnit to have a sense of satisfaction. You don’t want it to feel anti-climactic compared to the atmosphere and mystery you’ve constructed throughout the work. I suppose that’s what I mean when I say there’s more of a risk involved because you are essentially relying on this one gimmick to hold together the whole structure of the piece. You have to have faith that it will pay off, which is why I like to try different approaches within the same framework. I like to incorporate multiple puzzles, try to come up with puzzles that will complement each other and fit together rather like a kind of jigsaw, and try different types of illusions as well. You mentioned the boat illusion in Cabaret Macabre. There are conventional locked room mystery tricks, but then there are also identity tricks and things like that. There are tricks to do with alibis and what have you. I like to try to combine different types of things to maximize the satisfaction for the reader when all these tricks are unraveled. That’s the idea behind it.”
“As Spector would say, you’re building a house of cards.”
“Exactly.”
“For better or worse, it may turn out very well, or it may just completely collapse upon itself. You talked about the Golden Age quite a bit. Are locked-room mysteries era-dependent? Is it possible to write a locked-room mystery in today’s time with today’s forensic technology and law enforcement prowess?”
“Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t think they’re dependent at all. There are many great examples of the locked room mystery throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, such as the post-Golden Age. But again, you must be more innovative and inventive to pull it off because information is so much easier today. With the Golden Age—which is what I love—you can rely on eyewitness accounts of events and things like that. These days, you’ve got CCTV. You’ve got an individual’s digital footprint to consider, and there are so many ways that the truth can be traced. In contrast, in the era that I write about, you were relying, I suppose, more on individual perception of an event or of an individual’s appearance—that kind of thing. To me, it’s closer to the principles of stage magic in that respect because when you’re in the audience at a magic show, you must rely on your own eyes and your perception of what’s happening around you. So that’s why I focus on that era. I’ve read many great works set far in the future, also some set in ancient Egypt or medieval times. Adam Roberts is an author who’s written some fascinating science fiction locked-room mysteries. They are fair playroom mysteries but set within this futuristic world he created. They’re quite a remarkable achievement, I would say. Likewise, I recently finished reading a Paul Doherty title. Paul Doherty writes historical mysteries, and he’s got a fantastic series set in the reign of King Richard II here in England. I think the principles are the same across the board, but I think if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the most fun and entertaining titles are the ones that are not afraid to break the rules or reinvent the rules of the genre.”
“As a wonderful writer of locked-room mysteries, what advice do you have for readers who wish to follow in your footsteps?”
“From my own experience, it was something that I did purely for my entertainment, and at the time I started writing, I was my audience, so I wasn’t writing for anybody else. If people want to write locked room mysteries, the same advice goes across the board. It’s to write the type of novel you enjoy reading, write the genre you like, write the period that most appeals to you, and create characters you enjoy reading and writing about. Those are the guiding principles that I’ve learned to live by. I think if people are looking to write murder mysteries, the best thing is to read a lot of murder mysteries, to focus on the type of mystery they love, to look at what makes it work, and to try and adapt those principles themselves.”
“Do what you love.”
“Precisely. It’s as simple as that.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference.
https://claystafford.com/
Tom Mead is a UK-based crime fiction author, including the Joseph Spector mystery series and numerous short stories. His debut novel, Death and the Conjuror, was selected as one of the top ten best mysteries of the year by Publishers Weekly. He lives in Derbyshire.
https://tommeadauthor.com/
Clay Stafford Interviews Cindy Dees: “You Can Write Espionage”
Cindy Dees interviewed by Clay Stafford
As a fan of Cindy Dees' espionage novels, I've always been drawn to their realism, pace, and relatable characters. So, when the opportunity to discuss her work arose, I eagerly seized it. A former spy, Cindy brings unique and unparalleled authenticity to her espionage novels. Her firsthand experiences in the field make her one of the best in the genre. “Cindy, let’s delve into the art of writing espionage thrillers.”
“Yay, I love those. I love a good spy thriller. Always have.”
“Tell us a little bit about your background.”
“I was a Russian and East European studies major in college. I came to that because I had studied several languages in elementary school, junior high, and high school, and I needed to take a language class at my university. I didn't want to study languages I was already familiar with, so I decided to try a new language. I randomly picked Russian because it doesn't seem to be a language many Americans study. My teacher was a spy who had gotten caught, and he had to leave the business. For lack of anything else to do, he became an instructor of Russian at a university. He could manage to get through grammar for about three-quarters of a class, and then he would get so bored he couldn't stand it anymore because he wasn't a teacher at heart. He would turn a chair around backward, sit it down in front of the class, and tell us war stories about being a spy in the Eastern Bloc. It was a fascinatingly different culture. And I just got interested. And so, hence my degree. Once I left college, I went to pilot training in the Air Force and showed up at my first base of assignment after pilot training. After pilot training, I flew a business jet that flew generals to their business meetings. One of the other pilots in my squadron was a native-born Russian speaker, and he introduced me to a program that the United States had at that time where U.S. pilots escorted, at the time, it was Soviet flights, then later became Russian flights into and out of U.S. airspace. He recruited me for the program, and I was eligible because I was both a pilot and a Russian speaker. We figured out very quickly that the Russian crews I flew with didn't think I was a pilot. I was a, you know, 23-year-old blonde, and they didn't take me terribly seriously. If I acted dumb enough and blonde enough, they would tell me anything I wanted to know. I could walk right up to them and ask them about information that they no-way-no-how should have told me, and they didn't think I would understand it, and not only did they think I didn’t have the Russian language for it, but they didn't think I had the technical understanding. I became a very effective gatherer of information. Most of my intelligence career boiled down to me walking up to Russians and going, ‘Oh! Look at all those dials! I can’t remember what they all do. How can you possibly remember all these dials and switches?’ And then they would go, ‘Oh, well, I remember all of them.’ ‘Really, what does that one do?’ And I could point at something that I knew very well to be something classified, and they would go. ‘Oh, well, it does this,’ and then, ‘What does that do?’ ‘Oh, it does that.’ And they would tell me everything I wanted to know. It was insane. And so, I laugh about how my job was to be the dumbest spy on the planet and then come home and write reports and tell people what I heard.”
“It's incredible how the pretty girl thing will work for you. Philip Marlowe found that often.”
“I don't know how pretty I was. I was just young and blonde, and they were old and grizzled, and it works. But yes.”
“You’ve started writing a nonfiction series on tropes. What are the tropes associated with the espionage thriller?”
“I would have to pull up the whole list to give you all of them.”
“But just in general.”
“The nuclear threat, the spy defects, the piece of information that is fake, like fake intelligence. In a book like Gorky Park, which is an old espionage classic, the low-level spies must save the world from the high-level politicians. The search for the mole. The double agent. I could go on and on. I mean, there will be dozens of traditional espionage-style stories.”
“And for someone such as myself who has never interacted with any Russian dignitary or anything, how would I ever go about researching to write this? Or is it even possible for me to write this realistically?”
“There are any number of terrific books written by former spies, some of which will have terrific war stories. And it depends on the time you want to write about. What's fascinating to me is what's old is new again. Right now, we're in a period of heavy Russian espionage so that you can go back to the espionage of the war stories and the ex-spies like the Seventies, the Eighties, and the early Nineties. And a lot of those stories are going to apply to today. There's then a whole other class of manuals and books that are how-tos of tradecraft, and government agencies put some of them out. Former spies themselves put some of them out. Some are put out by wannabes and aren't all that good. But if you read enough of them, you'll get a relatively good overview of what the actual tradecraft would look like. If you're reading a book by a spy, and it reads as if about 90% of the job is tedium and silent stress while nothing happens, and about 10% of it is running for your life and maybe being interrogated and having to dodge questions and fearing for your life, that's about the right percentage of it. That's probably somebody who did the job because the vast majority of the job is stressing over getting caught, not getting caught, and very tedious, very time-consuming collection of mostly useless information, mostly just trying to get to know sources trying to gain their trust, doing nothing of great value for a very long time punctuated by individual moments of a single critical piece of information coming across your feed, or getting a tidbit of information from somebody that's incredibly important, or then having some unpleasant run-in with a foreign government. So those are the people that when I read a book, and it reads like that, I'm like, ‘Okay, this person is real. I'm going to pay attention to how they described it.’”
“I don't think I'm doing a Barbara Walters or Geraldo Rivera reveal like I'm outing you here. Is there any danger in the fact that you go around saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I was a former spy’?”
“No. So there’s kind of a code, a gentleman's code in the community that people who are out of the business, they and their families are left to their old age and their retirement and, you know, whatever guilt they have for whatever bad things they might have done during their life. It's not unusual for people who are retired from the business to mention that they were in the business at some point. And yes, there are some things that I was involved with that I don't feel at liberty to talk about: individual situations or individual pieces of information I might have brought back. There might still be people in the business that might be put in danger, so sure, I stay away from that stuff. But in general, it was known that their guys would try to collect information because they had pilots on our diplomatic flights. It was a known thing that we would try to get information from them. So, it's not anybody's big secret. What would be secretive is some of the information I managed to get that I'm a bit stingy about talking about. But the fact that I was running around with Russian air crews, the Russian government knew that. That was not secret to them. In fact, and again, I won't tell you a lengthy war story, but I did have a flight where the Russians did not think the Americans had time to get pilots to the airplane. It was a very last-minute flight that was ginned up. We had about an hour's notice. It just so happened that I lived close to the airport that plane came into, and you know, my people were able to call me and say, ‘Hey, are you home today? Can you get to that airport fast and jump on that plane?’ And so, when we landed in Moscow, the Russians didn't expect there to be an American on the plane, and the KGB detained me. I was hauled over to KGB headquarters, and it was very pleasant. They generally knew about the pilots; they didn't realize I was there, and I didn't have a visa to come to Moscow because there hadn't been time to generate one. They let me call the American Embassy, and the American Embassy was going to drive somebody over to pick me up, and it was all pretty pleasant. But while we sat there—because it was rush hour—for the hour plus waiting for somebody to come pick me up, the officer minding me got bored. He'd already given me a cup of tea, and he asked me if I'd like to see my KGB file. I, of course, said yes, so I got to see my KGB file, and there was a lot of wrong information in it. There was some information in it that led to somebody inside the U.S. having some problems with the U.S. government because there was some information in the file that could have only come from one source, and that source got tracked down. It turned out to be very interesting. But, you know, they were casual about me, and again, within the business, it's understood. I think that code may be changing some. I believe that is something that has happened in the last decade. I think gentlemanly understanding is becoming less the case and becoming more violent and dangerous to be human intelligence. They call it HUMINT, which is human intelligence, human gathered intelligence. That's becoming much more dangerous, and because of that, the intelligence services rely a lot more heavily on technology now—spy satellites and listening devices and hacking computers—to get information than they would from people. The problem is people are incredibly valuable sources of intelligence. It's becoming more and more challenging to do human intelligence, but that is where you get just that ineffable: somebody has a Spidey sense that something isn't right, or somebody has a Spidey sense that something might be about to happen, or that you know, for example, right now, if there were human intelligence, if I were in the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, I would be very interested in which high-level generals inside the Russian military are acting nervous. Because just about a week ago now, the number two guy in the Russian army was abruptly arrested and charged with an $11,000 bribe. In terms of corruption in Russia, that's pennies on the dollar of what they do on a day-in and day-out basis in corruption. It was a warning shot across the bow by somebody to people inside the Russian military to stop doing something. If I were in Russia right now, I would want to know what my human sources are saying about the high-level people inside the Russian military, their thinking and feelings, and how nervous they are. And have they gone into a bunker? Have they quit talking to anybody? Who are they talking to in private? That would all be incredibly important, and the only way to gather it would be with human intelligence.”
“So, if you're sitting there drinking tea and see these inaccuracies in your dossier, do you correct them?”
“Oh, oh, no, I'm the world's best dumb blonde, like, ‘Oh, look at that! That's so cool!’ You know, give them a little giggle, and you move on. I've had a couple of situations more recently in my life since I left the military, where I had an opportunity not to do any intelligence work, but I was in a situation where I was around some security people, and I needed not to acknowledge their presence. After the situation ended, the only debrief I got was they could not believe how good I was at looking one of them right in the eye, acting as if I had no recognition of them whatsoever and had no idea they were there, and just went on, you know, with my dingbat life. I was like welcome to the dumb blonde act. I refined it over many decades.”
“For the readers, do you think someone can write a plausible espionage if they do the research?”
“Absolutely. You know I was not—well, I was chased a few times—but it was not the norm in my career to be running around making deaddrops and assassinating people because I've never killed anybody. I’ve never dropped sarin poison in somebody's coffee. I didn't do any of that, but I can certainly write about it just as a function of the widely available research materials. And yes, I have the advantage of there being a few people I could maybe pick up the phone and ask for a little bit further information, but I try not to bother those contacts with stuff that I can find out by doing my own research.”
“And there does seem to be a good bit of material going on right now in our present-day society from which you can pull things.”
“Yes, I'm a little cautious of Reddit feeds and the internet, just in general. Try to go to a primary source. I want to get a book published by somebody or an interview where I know the interviewer and who was interviewed. Occasionally, somebody will be on YouTube, someone I know is a reputable source. But honestly, the vast majority of it you can get in print. I will look for other primary sources if I find something interesting online. I may look for footnotes or citations and look those up to verify something. I try to be cautious in verifying if I hear something that doesn't sound logical or reasonable.”
“And between your experience and research methods, that’s why your espionage tales ring so true. You’ve inspired me. I might even give it a try. Do you think there is hope?”
She laughs. “I think there is hope.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
NYT and USA Today bestselling author Cindy Dees is the author of 100+ novels. A former U. S. Air Force pilot and part-time spy, she writes thrillers, military romance, and bestselling non-fiction, writing how-to series using tropes. www.cindydees.com
Clay Stafford Interviews Reviewer Maureen Corrigan: “I Want Good Books”
Maureen Corrigan interviewed by Clay Stafford
Maureen Corrigan, the esteemed reviewing voice for NPR’s Fresh Air, is a figure whose influence I’ve admired for years. It was a true honor to present her with the John Seigenthaler Legends Award at the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. Her book-lined office in Washington, D.C., where we had the privilege of conversing, is a testament to her influence. She receives over two hundred books per week for review, a staggering number that underscores the weight of her opinions and influence.
“Maureen, all of us would like more reviews. I think like a writer. I think like a storyteller. I think the way that my brain works. But how can a writer step out of themselves and start thinking like a reviewer to get more of their books covered?”
“I don’t think a writer should think like a reviewer. I don’t think a writer should be thinking about reception.”
“Not at all?”
“I think a writer’s job is to be as loyal to the work at hand as possible, and that is where your focus should be. And thinking about reception is, in my mind, a killer. When I’m having trouble with a review—just writing because reviewing is writing—I don’t think, ‘Oh, I’d better write it this way because I know that’s gotten a good response,’ like jokes or some witticisms from Fresh Air audiences, or whatever. What I say to myself is, ‘Pretend you’re writing this for the Village Voice.’ That’s where I started out as a reviewer. Voice was the greatest independent newspaper ever in America. There’s a new anthology out of Village Voice writing that I’m very excited about. The Voice would let you do anything, and be as outrageous, or even offensive, or funny, or heartfelt, as you wanted it to be. If they felt like you were writing from an authentic place, if you had something interesting to say, let it rip. I need to give myself permission to really think about what I think of a work and write in the way that I think is appropriate to my sensibility. I cannot think about whoever is hearing it, or reading it, or how they may feel about what I’m writing.”
“This leads to my next question. You are a professor as well as a reviewer, and what do you think a writer should do to have a writer’s education?”
“For me, it’s still the traditional wisdom: read, read, read, read, read, read.”
“And read what?”
“Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes. Read popular fiction. Absolutely read the canonical stuff. I mean, there’s a reason why we’re still talking about Hemingway, even though some of my students might roll their eyes and say, ‘Oh, you know, the deadest of the whitest, malest writers.’ Read him. Look at those Nick Adams stories. Hear that voice! Look at what he’s doing with those omissions, those spaces in his writing, and how he draws us in. You try to do it. See if you can do something like that. And, as a reviewer, to have a sense of the canon of Western civilization, you know, I wish I had absorbed more of it. I’m always trying to be able to make those connections to contemporary literature, or to even sometimes use an apt quote that opens out what a book might be trying to do. I’ve got some of that at my fingertips. So, I think being informed about the craft and the art that you’re working in is crucial. And I’ll tell you one other thing. I think the greatest advice is, ass in the chair. I am a little fed up with pre-writing. I think that the academy writing programs are way too invested in pre-writing exercises.”
“Can you define that?”
“I have an honor student right now who’s working on a thesis. And what that means at Georgetown is that she will have been in a yearlong class. All fall semester, she and her cohort were just talking about what they thought they wanted to do. That’s four months of talk, and then she would meet with me, and she’d say, ‘I think I want to do this and that.’ Being the sour puss that I am, I would say, ‘Well, I think I want to write a book about a whale and a ship. What do you think of that?’ But it’s not gonna be Moby Dick. Put it down on paper and see what it really is, and then we can work with this. I think that all these pre-writing exercises where students—they don’t even do drafts. They do outlines finally, but they’re theorizing their subject. And you know it’s just endless talking about what they think they might want to write. I think it amps up the anxiety of writing. Just sit down and write—as Anne Lamott says—the shitty first draft, and then the next one, and then the next one, and the next one. It is not fun. It’s hard to write. Keep doing it, keep at it, and maybe something will come of it. That’s the only way.”
“So, if a writer wanted to transcend just the normal, what would they do? How would they go about it?”
“They’d have to look inside themselves. They’d have to look inside themselves armed with all of that other language in those great books that I’m talking about, and they’d have to look inside themselves and say, ‘What’s my worldview? What’s the thing that when I think about it—an incident, a person, a situation—I get that charge of, ‘I want to get it down. I want I want to nail that.’ I think they have to start with wherever their creative spark is. That’s what they have to do.”
“Okay, last question. In your classes, teaching, and being around authors, your whole life, basically, even before you started a career, you were around authors your whole life. What do you wish that writers really knew? If you took a writer aside and said, ‘I just wish you knew this,’ what would that be?”
“Well, I hope they know that writing really changes people’s lives. I hear from listeners of Fresh Air who say, ‘I read this book or that book on your say so. It really touched me profoundly.’ My students still come in with Catcher in the Rye, and they want to talk about it. They feel such a strong connection with Holden. For many of us, those characters, those worlds that we meet on the pages of a book, they’re as real as anything that’s out there. I really do feel like there is a kind of sacred aspect to writing. So even if you’re writing—you know I love mysteries—even if you’re writing mysteries, my God! Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, that whole crew. I’m rereading the Spencer novels now, Robert B. Parker. I love those novels and I’m seeing the magic in them again—I haven’t read them in a long time—from back in the Seventies. Parker was writing from an authentic place. I think, late in the series he began to repeat himself and quote himself, but what a joy it is to read those novels and to enter that world! And I feel like you can feel that he’s having a blast himself being in that world. So, I don’t know. I think writers should know we’re all rooting for them. We want the magic to happen, too.”
“You’re talking about characters. You’re still not over Gatsby.”
“Oh, how could you ever get over Gatsby? I was just in New York. I had the privilege of meeting with some of the folks involved in one of the two Gatsby musicals that are about to open. It was so much fun talking to creative people who were not, you know, academics. Yeah, who were musicians, who were producers, directors. What’s Gatsby about? What’s this about? People who are just as obsessed as I am with that novel. It has a hold on many of us, and it’s so wonderful to have Gatsby regarded that way, but also to think about why, what is the magic here? You know it hasn’t gone away in 100 years.”
“Was Fitzgerald telling an inward story, or was he trying to change a life, or what?”
“He was telling an inward story. He did both. He was also telling a story about America and the dream of American meritocracy, and how it lets us down. In that 185-page little novel, he managed to vacuum-pack his own story—a lot of it is about class anxiety and that’s Fitzgerald’s story—and it’s also the story about America and the promise of America.”
“So, it’s personal and bigger.”
“That’s right. And it’s hard to do that. And he managed to pull it off.”
“But that’s what we all should strive for. Thank you.”
“I’m flattered and honored that you want to talk to me. You’ve probably heard enough of my spiel about Gatsby and writing and everything else, but I really do believe all this stuff. I want the good books. I want the books that surprise me.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer and filmmaker and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. In 2019, Corrigan was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle; in 2023, she received the John Seigenthaler Legends Award from The Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. Her book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures, was published in 2014. https://maureencorrigan.com/
“Robert Mangeot: Short Stories and the Big Honking Moment”
Robert Mangeot interviewed by Clay Stafford
Since the inception of Killer Nashville, the name of Robert Mangeot has been a constant presence, a beacon of inspiration for aspiring short story authors. His literary prowess has been recognized in various anthologies and journals, including the prestigious Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine, Lowestoft Chronicle, Mystery Magazine, The Oddville Press, and in the print anthologies Die Laughing, Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War, Not So Fast, and the Anthony-winning Murder Under the Oaks. His work has been honored with the Claymore Award, and he is a three-time finalist for the Derringer Awards. He’s also emerged victorious in contests sponsored by the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild, On the Premises, and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. His pedigree in the realm of short stories is truly unparalleled.
“So, Bob, how are short stories different from novels other than the length?”
“They are entirely different organisms. Novels, done right, are interesting explorations of something: theme, a place, a premise. The novel will view things from multiple angles. Short stories may, too, but novels will explore connected subplots. They might have many points of view on the same crime or the same big event, or whatever the core thing of the story is so that you get an intense picture of the idea of what this author is trying to convey, even if it's just to have a good time. Novels are an exploration. And they will take their time. I'm not saying they're low on conflict, but they will take their time to develop the clues, develop characters, and introduce subplots. Potentially, none of that is in a short story, right? The short story is not a single-cell organism but a much smaller one in that everything is all part of the same idea.”
“How do you get it all in but make it shorter?”
“There aren't subplots. There are as few characters as you can get away with. Once you get those baseline things down, it’s about compression. No signs, no subplots. Just keep on that straight line between the beginning and ending. Once you've mastered that, there's a bazillion ways to go about it, but you must meet those baselines. Everything connects to the whole, and—I know I overuse this—but the construct that I always go back to is Edgar Allen Poe. He called it unity of effect. He often talked about emotion, so he wanted to create a sense of dread. Everything in the story was to build that up.”
“And that’s your basis?”
“For me, the whole unity is what the story tries to convey. It can be heavy-handed. It can be lighthearted. But the characters should reflect that idea by who they are, where they live, how old they are, whether they have family or not, what's the story's tone, what's the crime in the story, and what the murder weapon of the crime is. Everything connects to the whole. I can assess that in my own stories, if I introduce something—an object, a character, a place— I don't just use it once; I use it twice. And if I can't use it twice seamlessly, it's either not important, and thus I don't need to play it up, or it is important because now there's something to that, right? Then, you can begin to explore that. Some editing is for flow, but some ensure this whole thing comes together. Because, you know, readers are going to notice. Clay, you're a fast reader, but you won't read an 80,000-word novel in a night, right?”
“Not unless I have an interview or a story meeting the next day.”
“Right! You'll read that over several days, a week, or something like that.”
“Yes.”
“A short story is something you'll read in twenty minutes or fifteen minutes, and you’ll know if something is off about that story. That's part of the magic of the short story. You’re going to pull off that trick for the reader. You’ve got to grab them. You're not going to have to hold them for long, but any little slip and the magic is gone, and they're out of the story.”
“What unifies the short story? Is it a theme, or what?”
“I tend to think it would be thematic. It would almost have to be. It could be a place, but it must still be about something. Why did you pick the place?”
“Which seems thematic.”
“Yeah, right. You asked the question earlier about how I get started on a story. It’s not some abstract idea. It's not that I want to write about love or family. I think some of that comes out.”
“So what is it?”
“Voice. Voice means two different things. One of them is personal, and one is technical. In terms of your sense of voice, what choices do you make? What do you naturally write about even if you're unaware you're writing about it? What comes up repeatedly in my stories, and I don't intend to do it, is families. Even in stories when it's not necessarily a biological family. I don't know what that says about me. I have great parents. But that tends to be what it is. So, if people can step back in the story and say, ‘Oh, well, this was about love and the price of it,’ then I think I did it.”
“Do you have room in a short story for character arcs?”
“The characters must grow. They must be tested. The structure that I use in most of my stories—I hope it's not obvious, but probably is for people who understand structure—is the three-act structure. So, someone has a problem. That problem has changed their world. And then you get to try to solve the problem, and it gets worse, and it gets worse, and it gets worse. In short stories, it will be a problem you can resolve in 3,000 words, 5,000 words, or 1,000 words if you're writing short. There's going to be moments of conflict. And that's where characterization comes in. Of course, they can't win unless it's a happy story where they win. But how do those setbacks and their trials to set things right—even if it's the wrong decision—go back to the way things were, to embrace a change, and how do they think about that? That's what I like about writing. I think that's where the conflict comes from short stories. That's the story's core: how they will confront it. How does it change them? Does it leave them for the better or worse? And typically, in most of my stories, it’s for the better. Either way, throwing them more problems is the same arc, which'll keep making it more complicated.”
“It keeps building?”
“You can't let the reader rest in a short story, but you can give moments where the character has a little time to reflect. A paragraph, right? ‘Oh, my God, this has happened. Now, what am I going to do?’ So the readers can catch their breath there along with the character, and then back to a million miles an hour. I'll go back to voice. There's the personal side of voice. The words you choose, the topics you choose, even when unaware of those choices. That's your voice. And then there's what I would call narrative voice, which I think is underappreciated as a tool in the short story. The great writers all know how to do it, even if they don't know they're doing it that way. However, one way to achieve compression in a story is not by any of the events you have or don't have; it's how the narrator tells the story. Suppose the narrative voice carries a certain tone, a certain slant, and a certain kind of characterization. In that case, that's going to superpower compression throughout the whole story because people will get the angle that the story is coming from, and then you don't have to explain so much.”
“Easier said than done, of course. So, what are the advantages, if any, of writing short stories over longer forms?”
“They are a wonderful place to experiment. I've written a couple of novels. I would never try to sell them now because I wrote them when I first started writing, and they're not any good. I would have to rewrite them. If I dedicated all my writing to a novel, it’d take me a couple of years to write one. There's no guarantee it would be any good. If my goal is publication, there'd be no guarantee an agent would like it. Then there's no guarantee a publisher would take it or it would sell well; all of those have no guarantees, right? And so, you could get into this thing and have a lot of heartbreak. And then you say, well, I will try it again.”
“And maybe the same thing happens. Trunk novels.”
“With short stories, you can just try it. It's going to take you a few days to write it. I put a lot of angst into the editing bit. A lot of people are better at that than I am. And if it doesn't work, so what? You've talked to yourself a lot about writing. I’ve learned this sort of story isn’t for me, but I'm getting better at it, getting better at it, getting better at it. There's not a lot of money in this stuff. So why not have some fun? Why not experiment?”
“Do you think that writers of short stories have more flexibility in the types of things they can do? And I'm asking this because one of the things I've lamented about the literary industry is that you get known for a certain thing. However, a filmmaker, for example, can make any number of styles of movies, and nobody ever pays attention to the fact. They are usually just attracted to the stars or whoever is in the movie. However, the filmmaker and the writer can be diverse in whatever interests them. Do you think there's more flexibility in being a short story writer?”
“There is. A great example is Jeffrey Deaver.”
“My songwriting buddy.”
“Yes. When he's writing novels, he's Jeffrey Deaver, right? He's the brand and has to deliver a very certain thing. But read some of the short stories. They're terrific. And they're not some of these same characters.”
“Do you think it's difficult for a novelist to write a short story and a short story writer to write a novel? If somebody is used to writing long, can they cut it short? Or can they fill it in after writing short to make it long?”
“You know, people can't be great at everything. Some people are naturally better at short. I suspect I'm one of them. Some people are naturally better at long. But I would also say that if you know how to write, you’ll figure out either form. You can figure out poetry. You can figure out creative nonfiction. If you're a writer, you can write.”
“What’s the most important thing, the most important element, in a short story?”
“Endings are the most important at any length, but short stories are all they are. They exist to give you a big moment of catharsis, release, insight, whatever it is, that you get at the end of a perfect story. Anyone who's a big reader knows what I’m talking about. You get that thing at the end of the story. That's really all short stories are at the end of the day. That's what they're there to do. To produce that moment. And so, I always call it the big honking moment. You light the rocket right at the beginning, and that big honking moment is when the fireworks go off. And it exists to do that and to do it quickly. That's what the payoff and all this planning is about. And people do it in wonderful ways.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
Robert Mangeot’s short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine, Lowestoft Chronicle, Mystery Magazine, the MWA anthology Ice Cold, and Murder Under the Oaks. His work has been nominated three times for a Derringer Award and, in 2023, received a Killer Nashville Claymore Award. https://robertmangeot.com/
“Dean Koontz: The Secret of Selling 500 Million Books”
Dean Koontz interviewed by Clay Stafford
Dean Koontz is and always has been an incredibly prolific writer. He’s also an excellent writer, which explains why he’s had such phenomenal success. When I heard he and I were going to get to chat exclusively for Killer Nashville Magazine, I wanted to talk to him about how one man can author over one hundred and forty books, a gazillion short stories, have sixteen movies made from his books, and sell over five hundred million copies of his books in at least thirty-eight languages. It's no small feat, but surprisingly, one that Dean thinks we are all capable of. “So, Dean, how long should a wannabe writer give their career before they expect decent results?”
“Well, it varies for everybody. But six months is ridiculous. Yeah, it’s not going to be that fast unless you’re one of the very lucky ones who comes out, delivers a manuscript, and publishers want it. But you also have to keep in mind some key things. Publishers don’t always know what the public wants. In fact, you could argue that half the time, they have no idea. A perfect example of this is Harry Potter, which every publisher in New York turned down, and it went to this little Canadian Scholastic thing and became the biggest thing of its generation. So, you just don’t know. But you could struggle for a long time trying to break through, especially for doing anything a little bit different. And everybody says, ‘Well, this is different. Nobody wants something like this.’ And there are all those kinds of stories, so I can’t put a time frame on it. But I would say a minimum of a few years.”
“I usually tell everyone—people who come to Killer Nashville, groups I speak to—four years. Give it four years. Is that reasonable?”
“I think that's reasonable. If it isn’t working in four years, I wouldn’t rule it out altogether, but you’d better find a day job.”
“I was looking at your Facebook page, and it said on some of your books you would work fifty hours a week for x-amount of time, seventy hours a week for x-amount of time. How many hours a week do you actually work?”
“These days, I put in about sixty hours a week. And I’m seventy-eight.”
“Holy cow, you don’t look anywhere near seventy-eight.”
He shakes his head. “There’s no retiring in this. I love what I do, so I’ll keep doing it until I fall dead on the keyboard. There were years when I put in eighty-hour weeks. Now, that sounds grueling. Sixty hours these days probably sounds grueling to most people or to many people. But the fact is, I love what I do, and it’s fun. And if it’s fun, that doesn't mean it’s not hard work and it doesn’t take time, because it’s both fun and hard work, but because it is, the sixty hours fly by. I never feel like I’m in drudgery. So, it varies for everybody. But that’s the time that I put in. When people say, ‘Wow! You’ve written all these books; you must dash them off quickly.’ No, it’s exactly the opposite. But I just put a lot of hours in every week, and it’s that consistency week after week after week. I don’t take off a month for Bermuda. I don't like to travel, so that wouldn't come up anyway. When you do that, it’s kind of astonishing how much work piles up.”
“How is your work schedule divided? I assume you write every single day?”
“Pretty much. I will certainly write six days a week. I get up at 5:00. I used to be a night guy, but after I got married, I became a day guy because my wife is a day person. I’m up at 5:00, take the dog for a walk, feed the dog, shower, and am at my desk by 6:30, and I write straight through to dinner. I never eat lunch because eating lunch makes me foggy, and so I’m looking at ten hours a day, six days a week, and when it’s toward the last third of a book, it goes to seven days a week because the momentum is such that I don’t want to lose it. It usually takes me five months to six months to produce a novel that’s one hundred thousand words.”
“Does this include your editing, any kind of research you do, and all that? Is it in that time period?”
“Yeah, I have a weird way of writing; though, I’ve learned that certain other writers have it. I don’t write a first draft and go back. I polish a page twenty to thirty times, sometimes ten, but I don’t move on from that page until I feel it’s as perfect as I can make it. Then I go to the next page. And I sort of say, I build a book like coral reefs are built, all these little dead skeletons piling on top of each other, and at the end of a chapter, I go print it out because you see things printed out you don’t see on the screen. I do a couple of passes of each chapter that way and then move on. In the end, it’s had so many drafts before anyone else sees it that I generally never have to do much of anything else. I’ll always get editorial suggestions. I think since I started working this way, which was in the early days, my editorial suggestions take me never a lot more than a week, sometimes a couple of days. But when editors make good suggestions, you want to do it because the book does not say ‘By Dean Koontz with wonderful suggestions by…’ You get all the credit, so you might as well take any wonderful suggestion.”
“You get all the blame, too.”
“Yes, you do, although I refuse to accept it.”
“Do you work from an outline, then? Or do you just stream of consciousness?”
“I worked from outline for many years, but things were not succeeding, and so I finally said, you know, one of the problems is that I do an outline, the publisher sees it, says ‘Good. We’ll give you a contract,’ then I go and write the book and deliver it, and it’s not the same book. It’s very similar, but there are all kinds of things, I think, that became better in the writing, and publishers say, ‘Well, this isn’t quite the book we bought,’ and I became very frustrated with that. I also began to think, ‘This is not organic. I am deciding the entire novel before I start it.’ Writing from an outline might work and does for many writers, but I realized it didn’t work for me because I wasn’t getting an organic story. The characters weren’t as rich as I wanted because they were sort of set at the beginning. So, I started writing the first book I did without an outline called Strangers, which was over two hundred fifty thousand words. It was a long novel and had about twelve main characters. It was a big storyline, and I found that it all fell together perfectly well. It took me eleven months of sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, but the book came together, and that was my first hardcover bestseller. I’ve never used an outline since. I just begin with a premise, a character or two, and follow it all. It’s all about character, anyway. If the book is good, character is what drives it.”
“Is that the secret of it all? Putting in the time? Free-flowing thought? Characters?”
“I think there are several. It’s just willing to put in the time and think about what you’re doing, recognizing that characters are more important than anything else. If the characters work, the book will work. If the characters don’t, you may still be able to sell the book, but you’re not looking at long-term reader involvement. Readers like to fall in love with the characters. That doesn’t mean the characters all have to be wonderful angelic figures. They also like to fall in love with the villains, which means getting all those characters to be rich and different. I get asked often, ‘You have so many eccentric characters. The Odd Thomas books are filled with almost nothing else. How do you make them relatable?’ And I say, ‘Well, first, you need to realize every single human being on the planet is eccentric. You are as well.”
“Me?” I laugh. “You’re the first to point that out.”
He joins in. “It’s just a matter of recognizing that. And then, when you start looking for the characters’ eccentricities—which the character will start to express to you—you have to write them with respect and compassion. You don’t make fun of them, even if they are amusing, and you treat them as you would people: by the Golden Rule. And if you do, audiences fall in love with them, and they stay with you to see who you will write about next. And that’s about the best thing I can say. Don’t write a novel where the guy’s a CIA agent, and that’s it. Who is he? What is he other than that? And I never write about CIA agents, but I see there’s a tendency in that kind of fiction to just put the character out there. That’s who he is. Well, that isn’t who he is. He’s something, all of us are, something much more than our job.”
“What advice do you give to new writers who want to become the next Dean Koontz?”
“First of all, you can’t be me because I’m learning to clone myself, so I plan to be around for a long time. But, you know, everybody works a different way, so I’m always hesitant to give ironclad advice. But what I do say to many young writers who write to me, and they’ve got writer's block, is that I’ve never had it, but I know what it is. It’s always the same thing. It’s self-doubt. You get into a story. You start doubting that you can do this, that this works, that that works. It’s all self-doubt. I have more self-doubt than any writer I’ve ever known, and that’s why I came up with this thing of perfecting every page until I move to the next. Then, the self-doubt goes away because the page flows, and when I get to the next page, self-doubt returns. So, I will do it all again. When I’m done, the book works. Now, if that won’t work for everybody, I think it could work for most writers if they get used to it, and there are certain benefits to it. You do not have to write multiple drafts after you’ve written one. What happens with a lot of writers is they write that first draft—especially when they’re young or new—and now they have something, and they’re very reluctant to think, ‘Oh, this needs a lot of work’ because they’re looking at it as, ‘Oh, I have a novel-length manuscript.’ Well, that’s only the first part of the journey. And I just don’t want to get to that point and feel tempted to say, ‘This is good enough,’ because it almost never will be that way.”
“No,” I say, “it never will.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
Dean Koontz is the author of many #1 bestsellers. His books have sold over five hundred million copies in thirty-eight languages, and The Times (of London) has called him a “literary juggler.” He lives in Southern California with his wife Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their goldens Trixie and Anna. https://www.deankoontz.com/
“Bruce Robert Coffin: Using Your Life to Write a Police Procedural”
Bruce Robert Coffin interviewed by Clay Stafford
Bruce Robert Coffin has been coming to Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference every year since its early days, so it’s only fitting that we feature this incredibly talented writer as our cover story. To give a little backstory, Bruce wanted to be a writer, but after going to college and not necessarily receiving the encouragement or success he had hoped for, he chose a career in law enforcement. Little did he realize he was laying the foundation for the outstanding writing career that was to follow. I had a chance to speak with Bruce from his home in Maine. “Bruce, when you were a police officer, a detective, did you even think about writing again, or did you miss writing as you went through your regular job?”
“There’s nothing fun about writing in police work or detective work. Everything is bare bones. There’s not much room for adjectives or that type of stuff. It’s just the facts, ma’am. That’s what they expect out of you. So, everything is boilerplate. It’s very boring. You’re taking statements all the time. You’re writing. If there was one similar thing, and it certainly didn’t occur to me that there would ever be a time that I would write fiction again, but it did teach me to write cohesively. Everything that we did had to make sense. You know, you do one thing before you do the next. Building timelines for putting a case together, doing interviews with witnesses, and then figuring out how they all fit together, and making a cohesive story or narrative out of that to explain to a judge, a jury, or a prosecutor. As far as story building was concerned, I think that might have been something I was learning at that point because that’s exactly how a real case gets made. I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of writing later, but I think it’s something that helped me because I think my brain works that way now. I know how cases will work, I know how cases are solved, and I know why cases stall out. I think all those things really allow me to better describe what real police work is like in my fictional novels.”
“When you retired from detective work and started writing again, how much of the police work transferred over, and how much was fiction from your head?”
“I made a deal with myself when I started that I wouldn’t write anything based on a real case. I had had enough of true crime. I had seen what the real-life cases had done to people: the survivors, the victims, the families, and I didn’t want to do anything that would cause people pain by fictionalizing something that had been part of their lives. I made a deal with myself that I would write as realistically as possible, but I would never base any books on an actual case I had worked on. And I’ve so far, knock on wood, been able to stand by that. I think the only exception would be if it were something that had a reason. Maybe the family came to me and asked me to do that or something like that. There had to be a reason for it, though. And so, when I started writing, I could draw from a well of a million experiences, things that we tamp down deep inside, and you don’t think about how that affects who I am and how I see the world. And I think in my mind, I imagined I would be making up stuff, and that would be it. There’s nothing but my imagination. There would be nothing personal about what I was writing, and it would just be fun. And like everything you delve into that you don’t actually know, I had no idea I would be diving into the real stuff, like dipping the ladle into that emotional well and pulling out chunks of things from my past. There were scenes that I wrote that emotionally moved me as I was writing them. And it’s because what I’m writing is based on something that happened in real life. And I’m crafting it to fit into the narrative of the story I’m writing. But the goal of me doing that is really to evoke emotion from the reader, which I think is the most important thing any of us can do. You want the reader to feel something. You want them to be lost in your story. And I really didn’t think that was going to happen. But it’s amazing what I dredged up and continued to dredge up as I write these fictional police procedural stories.”
“Some of the writers I talk with view writing as therapy. Did you find it cathartic coming from your previous life?”
“I did. I think that was another shock. I didn’t think any catharsis was involved in what I was doing. But like I say, when you start delving back into things that you thought you had either forgotten about or thought were long past, it really allowed me to deal with things. It allowed me to deal with things I wasn’t happy about when I left the job. The things that I wish I could unsee or un-experience. As a writer, I was able to pull from those. I think you and I have talked about this in the past. I honestly think the best writing comes from adversity. Anything difficult that the writers have gone through in life translates well to the page. And I think that’s one of those things where, if you can insert those moments into your characters’ lives, your reader can’t help but identify with them. So, I just had the luxury of having the life we all have, the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the death and the love, and all those things we have to experience. But added to that, I had thirty years of a crazy front-row seat to the world as a law enforcement officer. So, using all of that, I think, has made my stories much more realistic and maybe more entertaining because it gives the reader a glimpse inside what that world is really like.”
“So, you have this front-row seat. And then we readers read that, and we want to write that. But we haven’t had that experience. Is it even possible for us to get to that point that we could write something like that?”
“It is. And I tell people that all the time. I say you have to channel your experiences differently, I think. Like I said, we all have experiences, things that are heart-wrenching, or things that are horrifying, or whatever it is in our lives. They just don’t happen with as great a frequency as they would happen for a police officer. And we all know what it’s like to be frustrated working for a business, being part of a dysfunctional family, or whatever it is. Everybody has something. And so, I tell people to use that. Use that in your stories and try to imagine. You know, you can learn the procedure. You might not have those real-world experiences, but you can learn the procedure, especially from reading other writers who do it well. But use your own experiences. Insert that in there. You know, one of the things that I think is the easiest for people to think about is how hard it is to try and hold down a job. Like, you go to work, and you may see the most horrific murder happen, and you’re dealing with the angst that the family or witness is suffering, and you’re carrying that with you. Then you come home and try to deal with a real-world where other people don’t see that stuff. Like your spouse is worried that the dishwasher is leaking water under the kitchen floor, and that’s the worst thing that’s happened all day, right? That the house is stressed out because of that. And it’s hard to come home. It’s almost like you have to lead a split personality. It’s hard to come home and show the empathy that your spouse needs for that particular tragedy when you’re carrying all those other tragedies from the day. And you won’t share those with them because you don’t want that darkness in your house. I tell people to try to envision what that would be like and then pull from their own life the adversity they’ve experienced or seen and use that to make the story and the characters real. You can steal the procedure from good books. Get to know your local law enforcement officer, somebody who’s actually squared away and will share that information with you. Don’t get it from television necessarily. Some of TV writing is laziness. Some of it’s because they have a very short time constraint to try and get the story told. So, they take huge liberties with reality. But if you can take that stuff and try to put yourself in the shoes of the detective and use your own experiences, you can bring a detective to life.”
“You think anybody can do it?”
“I do. I do think that you have to pull from the right parts of your life. And again, as I say, if you spend enough time with somebody who’s done the job and get them to tell you, it’s not just what we do. It’s how we feel. And the feeling, I think, is what’s missing from those stories many times. If you want to tell a real gritty police detective story, you have to have feeling in that. That’s the one thing we all pretend we don’t have. You know, we keep the stone face. We go to work, do our thing, and pretend to be the counselor or the person doing the interrogation. But at the end of the day, we’re still just human beings. And we’re absorbing all these things like everybody else does. So yeah, you have to see that. Get to hear that from somebody for real, and you’ll know what will make your detective tick.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
Bruce Robert Coffin is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. A retired detective sergeant, Bruce is the author of the Detective Byron Mysteries, co-author of the Turner and Mosley Files with LynDee Walker, and author of the forthcoming Detective Justice Mysteries. His short fiction has appeared in a dozen anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories, 2016. http://www.brucerobertcoffin.com/
“A Casual Conversation with Susan Isaacs”
Susan Isaacs interviewed by Clay Stafford
I had a wonderful opportunity to just chat with bestselling author and mystery legend, Susan Isaacs, as a follow-up to my interview with her for my monthly Writer’s Digest column. It was a wonderful conversation. I needed a break from writing. She needed a break from writing. Like a fly on the wall (and with Susan’s permission), I thought I’d share the highlights of our conversation here with you.
“Susan, I just finished Bad, Bad, Seymore Brown. I loved it. And I now have singer Jim Croce’s earworm in my head.”
“Me, too.” She laughed.
“I love your descriptions in your prose. Right on the mark. Not too much, not too little.”
“Description can be hard.”
“But you do it so well. Any tips?”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I do. Two things. First, I see it in my head. I’m looking at the draft, and I say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s nothing here.’”
I laugh. “So, what do you do?”
“Well in Bad, Bad, Seymore Brown, the character with the problem is a college professor, a really nice woman, who teaches film, and her area of specialization is big Hollywood Studio films. When she was five, her parents were murdered. It was an arson murder, and she was lucky enough to jump out of the window of the house and save herself. So, Corie, who’s my detective, a former FBI agent, is called on, but not through herself, but through her dad, who’s a retired NYPD detective. He was a detective twenty years earlier, interviewing this little girl, April is her name, and they kept up a kind of birthday-card-Christmas-card relationship.”
“And the plot is great.”
“Thanks, but in terms of description, there was nothing there. But there were so many things to work with. So, after I get that structure, I see it in my head, and I begin to type it in.”
“The description?”
“Plot, then description.”
“And you mentioned another thing you do?”
“Research. And you don’t always have to physically go somewhere to do it. I had a great time with this novel. For example, it was during COVID, and nobody was holding a gun to my head and saying ‘Write’ so I had the leisure time to look at real estate in New Brunswick online, and I found the house with pictures that I knew April should live in, and that’s simply it. And I used that house because now April is being threatened, someone is trying to kill her twenty years after her parent’s death. Though the local cops are convinced it had nothing to do with her parents’ murder, but that’s why Corie’s dad and Corie get pulled into it.”
“So basically, when you do description, you get the structure, the bones of your plot, and then you go back and both imagine and research, at your leisure, the details that really set your writing off. What’s the hardest thing for you as a writer?”
“You know, I think there are all sorts of things that are hard for writers. For me, it’s plot. I’ll spend much more time on plot, you know, working it out, both from the detective’s point-of-view and the killer’s point-of-view, just so it seems whole, and it seems that what I write could have happened. For me, I don’t want somebody clapping their palm to their forehead and saying, ‘Oh, please!’ So that’s the hard thing for me.”
“You’ve talked with me about how focused you get when you’re writing.”
“Oh, yes. When you’re writing, you’re really concentrating. We were having work done on the house once and they were trying to do something in the basement, I forget what it was. But there was this jackhammer going, and I was upstairs working. It was when my kids were really young and, you know, I had only a limited amount of time to write every day, and so I was writing and I didn’t even hear the jackhammer until, I don’t know, the dog put her nose or snout on my knee and I stopped writing for a moment and said, ‘What is that?’ and then I heard it.”
“But it took your dog to bring you out of your zone. Not the jackhammer.”
“You get really involved.”
“Sort of transcending into another universe.”
“The story pulls you in. The weird thing is that I have ADD, ADHD, whatever they call it. I know that now, but I didn’t know that then, back when the jackhammer was in the basement. In fact, I didn’t know there was a name for it. I just thought, ‘This is how I am.’ You know, I go from one thing to the next. But people with ADHD can’t use that as an excuse not to write because you hyper-focus.”
“That’s interesting.”
“You don’t hear the jackhammers.”
“So things just flow.”
“Well, it’s always better in your head than on the page,” she says, “as far as writing goes.”
“I’d love to see your stories in your head, then, because your writing is great. As far as plotting, the book moves along at a fast clip. I noticed, distinctly, that your writing style is high with active verbs. Is that intentional or is that something that just comes naturally from you?”
“I think for me it just happens. It’s part of the plotting.”
“Well, it certainly moves the story forward.”
“Yes, I can see it would. But, no, I don’t think ‘let me think of an active verb’. You know,” she laughs, “I don’t think it ever occurred to me to even think of an active verb.”
“That’s funny. We’re all made so differently. I find it fascinating that, after all you’ve published, your Corie Geller novel is going to be part of the first series you’ve ever written. Everything else has been standalones.”
“Yes. I’m already writing the next book. Look, for forty-five years, I did mysteries. I did sagas. I did espionage novels. I did, you know, just regular books about people’s lives. But I never wrote a series because I was afraid I after writing one successful mystery, that I would be stuck, and I’d be writing, you know, my character and compromising positions with, Judith Singer goes Hawaiian in the 25th sequel. I didn’t want that. I wanted to try things out. So now that I’ve long been in my career this long, I thought I would really like to do a series because I want a family, another family.”
“Another family?”
“I mean, I have a great family. I have a husband who’s still practicing law. I have children, I have grandchildren, but I’m ready for another family.”
“And this series is going to be it?”
“It’s not just a one-book deal. I wanted more. So, I made Corie as rich and as complicated and as believable as she could be. It’s one thing to have a housewife detective. It’s another to have someone who lives in the suburbs, but who’s a pro. And she’s helped by her father, who was in the NYPD, who has a different kind of experience.”
“And that gives you a lot to work with. And, in an interesting way, at this stage of your life, another family to explore and live with.” I look at the clock. “Well, I guess we both need to get back to work.”
“This has been great. When you work alone all day, it’s nice to be able to just mouth off to someone.”
We both laughed and we hung up. It was a break in the day. But a good break. I think Susan fed her ADHD a bit with the distraction, but for me, I learned a few things in just the passing conversation. Writers are wonderful. If you haven’t done it today, don’t text, don’t email, but pick up the phone and call a writer friend you know. I hung up the phone with Susan, invigorated, ready to get back to work. As she said, it’s nice to be able to just mouth off to someone. As I would say, it’s nice to talk to someone and remember that, as writers, we are not alone, and we all have so much to learn.
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer and filmmaker and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
Susan Isaacs is the author of fourteen novels, including Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, Takes One to Know One, As Husbands Go, Long Time No See, Any Place I Hang My Hat, and Compromising Positions. A recipient of the Writers for Writers Award and the John Steinbeck Award, Isaacs is a former chairman of the board of Poets & Writers, and a past president of Mystery Writers of America. Her fiction has been translated into thirty languages. She lives on Long Island with her husband. https://www.susanisaacs.com/
Author Amulya Malladi on “Research: Doing It, Loving It, Using It, and Leaving It Out”
Amulya Malladi interviewed by Clay Stafford
“I’m talking today with international bestselling author Amulya Malladi about her latest book A Death in Denmark. What I think is fascinating is your sense of endurance. This book—research and writing—took you ten years to write.”
She laughs. “You know, it was COVID. We all didn’t have anything better to do. I was working for a Life Sciences Company, a diagnostic company, so I was very busy. But you know, outside of reading papers about COVID, this was the outlet. And so that’s sort of how long it took to get the book done. I had the idea for a long time. I needed a pandemic to convince me that I could write a mystery.”
“Which is interesting because you’d never written a mystery before. Having never worked in that genre, I’m sure there was a learning curve there for you.”
“A lot of research.”
“You love reading mysteries, so you already had a background in the structure of that, but what you’ve written in A Death in Denmark is a highly focused historical work. It’s the attention and knowledge of detail that really made the book jump for me. Unless you’re a history major with emphasis on the Holocaust and carrying all of that information around in your head, you’re going to have to find factual information somewhere. How did you do that?”
“Studies.”
“Studies?”
“You’ll need a lot of the studies that are available. Luckily, my husband’s doing a Ph.D. He has a student I.D., so I could download a lot of studies with it. Otherwise, I’d be paying for it. Also, I work in diagnostic companies. I read a lot of clinical studies. So these are all peer-reviewed papers that are based on historic research, and they are published, so that is a great source, a reference.”
“But what if you don’t have that access?”
“You can go to your library and get access to it as well. If you’re looking for that kind of historic research, this is the place to go.”
“Not the Internet? Or books, maybe?”
“Clinical studies and peer-reviewed papers, peer-reviewed clinical studies, they’re laborious.”
“And we’re talking, for this book, information directly related to the historical accuracy of the Holocaust and Denmark’s involvement in that history?”
“You have to read through a lot to get to it. And it’s not fiction. They’re just throwing the data out there. But it’s a good source, especially for writers because we need to know about two-hundred-percent to write five-percent.”
“The old Hemingway iceberg reference.”
“To feel comfortable writing that five, you need to know so much more. I could write actually a whole other book about everything that I learned at that time. And that is a good place to go. So I recommend going and doing, not just looking at, you know, Wikipedia, and all that good stuff, but actually going and looking at those papers.”
“Documents from that time period and documents covering that time period and the involvement of the various individuals and groups.”
“When you read a paper, you see like fifteen other sources for those papers, and then you can go into those sources and learn more.”
I laugh this time. “For me, research is like a series of rabbit holes that I find myself falling into. How do you know when to stop?”
“The way I was doing it is I research as I write, and I do it constantly. You know, simple things I’m writing, and I’m like, ‘Oh, he has to turn on this street. What street was that again? I can’t remember.’ I have Maps open constantly, and I know Copenhagen, the city, very well. But, you know, I’ll forget the street names. That sometimes takes work. I’m just writing the second book and I wanted Gabriel Præst, my main character and an ex-Copenhagen cop, to go into this café and it turned into a three-hour research session.”
“Okay. Sounds like a rabbit hole to me.”
“You’ve got to pull yourself out of that hole, because, literally, that was one paragraph, and I just spent three hours going into it. And now I know way too much about this café that I didn’t need to know about. Again, to write that five-percent, I needed to know two-hundred percent. I am curious. I like to know this. So suddenly, now I have that café on my list because we’re going to Copenhagen in a few weeks, and I’m like, ‘Oh, we need to go check that out.’”
“So you’re actually doing onsite research, as well?”
“Yes. I use it all. I think as you write you will see, ‘Okay, now I got all the information that I need.’
“And then you write. Research done?”
“No. I was editing and again I was like, ‘Is this really correct? Did I get this information correct? Let me go check again.’”
“Which is why, I guess, your writing rings so true.”
“I think it is healthy for writers to do that, especially if you’re going to write historical fiction or any kind of fiction that requires research. Here’s the important thing. I think with research, you have to kind of find the source always. You know? It’s tempting to just end up in Wikipedia because it’s easy. You get there. But you know, Wikipedia has done a pretty decent job of asking for sources, and I always go into the source. You know you can keep going in and find the truth. I read Exodus while I lived in India. One million years ago, I was a teenager, and I don’t know if you’ve read Leon Uris’s Exodus, but there’s this famous story in that book about the Danish King. When the Germans came, they said, ‘Oh, they’re going to ask the Jews to wear the Star of David,’ and the story goes, based on Exodus, that the king rode the streets with the Star of David. I thought that was an amazing story. That was my first introduction to Denmark, like hundreds of years before I met my husband, and that story stayed with me. And then I find out it’s not a true story. You know? You know, Marie Antoinette never said ‘Let them eat cake.’ And so it was like, ‘Oh.’”
“Washington did not chop down the cherry tree.”
“No, and the apple didn’t fall. I mean, it’s simple things we do that with, right? With Casablanca, it’s like you said, you know, ‘Play it again, Sam.’ And she never said that. She said, ‘Play it.’ And you realize these become part of the story.”
“Secondary sources then, if I get what you’re saying, are suspect.”
“Research helps you figure out, ‘Okay, that never happened.’”
“When you say that you’re writing, and you’re incorporating the research into your writing sometimes you can’t, you’re not in a spot where the research goes into it. So, how do you organize your research that you’re not immediately using?”
“I don’t do that. I’m sure there are people who do that well. I’m sure there are people who are more disciplined than I am. I’m barely able to block my life. I mean, it’s hard enough, so you know if I do some research, I know there are people who take notes. I have notes, but those are the basics. ‘Oh, this guy’s name is this, his wife is this, he’s this old, please don’t say he’s from this street, he’s living on this street…’ Some basics I’ll have, so I can go back and look. But a lot of the times I’m like, ‘What was this guy’s husband doing again?’ I have to go find it. I won’t read the notes in all honesty, even if I make them. So for me, it’s important to go in and look at that point.”
“And this is why you write and research at the same time.”
“And this is why maybe it’s not the best way to do the research. It takes longer, like I said, you spend three hours doing something that is not important, but hey, that was kind of fun for me. I was curious to remember about Dan Turéll’s books, because I hadn’t read them for a while.”
“Some writers don’t like research. You like research. And for historicals, there’s really no way around it, is there?”
“I take my time and I think I really like the research. I have fun doing it.”
“Does it hurt to leave some of the research out?”
“Oh, my God, yes. My editor said, ‘You know, Amulya, we need the World War II stuff more.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, really? Watch me.’ So I spend all this time and I basically wrote the book that my character, the dead politician, writes.”
“This is an integral part of the story, for those who haven’t read the book.”
“I wrote a large part of that book that she is supposed to have written and put it in this book. I put in footnotes.”
“Footnotes?”
“My editor calls me and she’s like, ‘I don’t think we can have footnotes and fiction.’ I’m like, ‘Really?’ And she goes, ‘You know, you can make a list of all of this and put it in the back of the book. We’ll be happy to do that. But you can’t have footnotes.’ I felt so bad taking it out because this was really good stuff. You know, these were important stories.”
“So it does hurt to leave these things out.”
“I did all kinds of research. I read the secret reports, the daily reports that the Germans wrote, because you can find pictures of that. I kind of went in and did all of that to kind of make this as authentic as possible, and then she said, ‘Could you please, like make it part of the book, and not as…’ She’s like ‘People are going to lose interest.’ So yeah, it does hurt. It really didn’t make me happy to do that.”
“You reference real companies, use real restaurants, use real clothing, use real drinks. You use real foods. Do you have some sort of legal counsel that has looked over this to make sure nobody is going to sue you for anything you write? Or how do you protect yourself in your research?”
“When I’m being not-so-nice about something, I am careful. I have not heard anything from legal. Maybe I should ask tomorrow. I think Robert B. Parker said this in an interview once: ‘If I’m going to say something bad about a restaurant, I make the name up.’”
“Circling back, you do onsite research, as well.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve been to Berlin several times, so I know the streets of Berlin. I know this process. I know what they feel like. It’s easier to write about places you’ve been to, but the details you will forget. Even though I know Copenhagen very well, I still forget the details. ‘What is that place called again? What was that restaurant I used to go to?’ And then I have to go look in Maps, and find, ‘Ah, that’s what it’s called here. How do they spell this again?’ But I think, yes, from a research perspective, if you are wanting to set a whole set of books somewhere, and if you have a chance to go there, go. Unless you’re setting a book in Afghanistan, or you know, Iraq, then don’t go. Because I did set a book partly in Afghanistan and I remember I talked to a friend of mine. She’s a journalist for AP and she said, ‘Oh, you should come to Kabul.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I don’t think so, just tell me what you know so I can learn from that and write it.’ She’s like, ‘You’ll have a great time on it.’ And I said, ‘I will not have a great time. No, not doing that.’ But I think, yes…”
“When it comes to perceived safety, you’re like me, an armchair researcher. Right?”
“Give me a book. Give me a clinical study. Give me a peer-reviewed paper, I’ll be good.”
“What advice do you have for new writers?”
“Edit. Edit all the time. I’ve met writers, especially when they are new, they say things like, ‘Oh, my God! If I edit too much, it takes the essence away. I always say, ‘No, it just takes the garbage away.’ Edit. Edit, until you are so sick of that book. Because, trust me, when the book is finished and you read it, you’ll want to edit it again because you missed a few things. I tell everybody, ‘Edit, edit, edit. And don’t fall in love with anything you write while you’re writing it because you may have to delete it.’ You know, you may write one-hundred pages and realize, I went on the wrong track and now I have to go delete it.”
“And take out the footnotes.”
“Yeah, and take out the footnotes.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, literary theorist, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
Clay’s book links: https://linktr.ee/claystafford
Amulya Malladi is the bestselling author of eight novels. Her books have been translated into several languages. She won a screenwriting award for her work on Ø (Island), a Danish series that aired on Amazon Prime Global and Studio Canal+. https://www.amulyamalladi.com/
Amulya’s book link: https://linktr.ee/amulyamalladi
Author Chris Grabenstein on “Switching Genres and James Patterson’s Advice on How to Make a Million Dollars”
Chris Grabenstein interviewed by Clay Stafford
Author Chris Grabenstein grew up outside Chattanooga, Tennessee. So did I. But we didn’t know each other until we met one year at Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. We quickly learned we had much in common, including a sense of twelve-year-old-boy humor. Chris was learning his craft and making his way writing for grown-ups when I met him then. Really funny stuff. It was the John Ceepak mystery series with such delightful titles as Whack a Mole, Tilt a Whirl, and Mind Scrambler. I liked him so much and he was such a personable guy, I brought him back several years later as a Guest of Honor at Killer Nashville and he had, not surprisingly, changed audiences on me. He was now a multiple award-winning #1 New York Times bestselling children’s author. We sat down together to talk about co-writing with James Patterson, his transition from writing for adults to middle-grade readers, daily word counts and revising schedule, what’s important for him, his advice for writers, and James Patterson’s advice on how to make a million dollars.
“Chris, you’ve got this great series going for adults, and suddenly you write for kids. What caused you to switch, or were you writing both at the same time?”
“It was actually a major switch. I have like twenty-four nieces and nephews, and at the time they were all under the age of eighteen, and they said, ‘Uncle Chris, can we read your books?’ No, no, there’s a few f-bombs being thrown around, there’s a lot of adult situations. There was an editor who was looking for ghost stories for middle grade readers, kids ages eight to twelve. The third book I wrote had gotten rejected by everybody. It was a ghost story. So my agent said, ‘Well, Chris wrote a ghost story, but it’s not for middle grade readers,’ and the editor said, ‘Well, if the story is any good we can turn it into one.’”
“That’s kind of a novel approach. And certainly serendipitous.”
“Yes. And so he read my third book, which was 110,000 words long, and said, ‘This would be a great book for middle-grade readers. You just have to get rid of the adult situations, the adult language, and cut it down to like fifty-thousand words.’”
“And that’s how you switched from adult to children’s books?”
“My agent said, ‘Do you want to do that?’”
“That’s like cutting sixty-thousand words out.”
“By the time I wrote that third book, I’d already spent a year working on it, so I knew I was going to have to spend another year on it. But my nieces and nephews, they really wanted to read something, so I said, ‘I’m going to do it.’”
“There’s certainly more to it than just cutting words.”
“I always recommend if you’re going to try a new category, get to know it a little bit, read a bunch of books. So I started reading a lot of books for eight-to-twelve-year-olds. I said, ‘Maybe I can do this’ and I put in a couple of fart jokes.”
“There’s got to be more than that.”
Chris laughs. “The kids have got to be in charge of the story. They’ve got to be the one solving whatever the mystery is. Carl Hiaasen wrote for that age group, Hoot, and there’s a great book called Holes by Lois Sachar. I read those, and they helped me get the sense of writing for children in that age group. And as I wrote, I was tapping back into that Mad Magazine twelve-year-old kid that I used to be, and I was having such a blast, too, and I said maybe I should be doing this.”
“So not only were you saving the manuscript, you were having fun.”
“I wrote it. We turned it into that editor who was looking for middle grade books, but his boss no longer was looking for ghost stories.”
“You’re kidding.”
“So it died once again. My wife and I don’t have any kids, but we borrowed two from our friends, Kath and Dave, who had kids who were like nine and ten, and they loved this book. They read the manuscript, you know the draft of it, and they were running around their church going, ‘We read the best book. We read the best book.’”
“Sounds like they were telling God.”
“It turns out a member of their congregation happens to be the head of the children’s department at Harper Collins, and she hears these two kids raving about some new book. My buddy Dave is a fire chief here in New York City, and he’s rather gregarious and not shy. In fact, he was one of the inspirations for Ceepac, the character of Ceepac. He said, ‘Oh, yeah, my buddy Chris wrote the best book. The kids love it more than anything they’ve ever read.’ And so the president of Harper Collins Children interviewed the two kids.”
“What?”
“Yes. She wanted to talk to me about it. My agent then called up one of his friends he knew at Random House who does children’s books and says, ‘You know, Harper Collins is interested in this thing my guy, Chris, wrote,’ and we got an offer from both houses, and Random House had a two-book offer.”
“And that’s how you started writing for kids.”
“That’s how I started writing for kids. Then, Harper Collins, that editor who we weren’t able to work with, liked it so much said, ‘Could you do something for me?’”
“You’re kidding.”
“That’s how my series, Riley Mack and the Other Troublemakers started was with her, and I did four ghost stories for Random House.”
“Ghost stories again. Full circle. So how did you get involved co-writing with James Patterson? You had previously worked in advertising with him. Was that how you had the connection?”
“Not exactly. I went down to teach at his son’s school. And if you’re writing for kids, you want to do a lot of school visits. It helps book sales and also helps you keep in touch with the kids who are going to be in your audience. And so the Palm Beach Day Academy, where James Patterson’s son was going to school, wanted me to come because they had heard that I used improvisational comedy, and their kids at the Palm Beach Day Academy were so success-oriented, they wanted them to loosen up a little bit. So they had me come in and do my improv show, and I think Jack Patterson went home and said to Jim—I call him Jim, because that’s what we called him in advertising—that guy Chris Grabenstein is pretty funny.”
“Interesting.”
“And they just happened to have their book fair the same night that I was there, so they invited me to come. James Patterson was the guest speaker. I sat down in the front row with his wife, Sue, who used to work at J. Walter Thompson, too. I think Jim remembered, ‘Oh, yeah, Chris was a pretty decent guy. He was pretty talented, and he was easy to work with’ because that’s Jim’s criteria.”
“Nice criteria. I use it in my own company. Makes the days go better.”
“It’s like life’s too short. Advertising was such a royal pain and publishing can sometimes be that. He just wanted co-authors who are good at what they did and were not prima donnas, and were not divas, and just did it for fun. We have a good time, and we’ll do the next one. So that’s how I got started writing books for James Patterson. He had me audition on the fifth book in one of his other series, and that went well, and then we did, I Funny, and we did six books in that. While we were working on I Funny the Treasure Hunters thing came up. We did nine books, and we’ve done three dozen books together.”
“How do you find the time? And when you say you wrote these books, we’re talking multiple drafts of each book, not just a first manuscript.”
“It’s that old advertising discipline. People get shocked when I tell them every commercial you saw of mine that made it to air, I probably wrote between one hundred and three hundred scripts that died. Either my social creative director, my creative director, my executive creative director, the marketing people, the account people, the salespeople; somebody killed it. It could have been the president of Miller Brewing Company. Somebody killed it, and you just get used to ‘All right. There’s another idea. There’s another idea,’ and you develop a discipline.”
“And a thick skin.”
“The Brits call it bum glue, where you sit down every day for a prescribed period of time, and you write, and I do that every day. I try to write two-thousand new words every day, and I start the day going over the two-thousand words I wrote the day before, basically to get back into the zone. Doing a little bit light editing on those helps me to say, ‘Okay, I remember where we are. Oh, and this was gonna happen next.’”
“It helps when you have a plan to sit down each day, certainly. I get that.”
“Someone wrote, ‘When you know what’s gonna happen next, that’s when you should stop writing for the day, you should just like, walk away,’ and for me it’s two-thousand words, and I usually start getting a little fatigued at that point.”
“But these are not necessarily words you’re going to keep. Because, as you said, you have great ideas and then not so great. But still, two-thousand words is a lot of words. Is that like the adamant goal? Two thousand every day before I stop?”
“Yes, if I’m in the groove. If I’m traveling, or I’ve got copy editing that needs to be taken care of, or lots of school visits, then I might do one-thousand.”
I laugh. “Showing yourself some grace.”
“Two-thousand words a day goal is when I’m drafting. When I finish my first draft, usually aiming for a page or word count that I will totally overshoot, I begin the real editing. I believe in the Stephen King credo: ‘Second draft equals first draft minus ten-percent.’ I always cut at least ten-percent. The manuscript I am working on now, it’ll be more like twenty-percent, because I really overwrote. I will spend a week or two cutting, editing, revising. Then I show the manuscript to my wife, my first reader. She gives me notes about anything that confused her or took her out of the story. I make more cuts and tweaks. Finally, I send it to my agent and editor. The editorial process will go on for at least two to three more revisions. If the editor sees major work to be done, that could go up to seven or eight back-and-forths, with major structural changes.”
“That’s a lot of drafts. Many beginning writers don’t realize how many drafts you sometimes have to go through.”
“Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library went back and forth seven times and took over two years to complete after I had finished what I thought was my perfect first draft!”
“And that was also your first movie. Any advice you’d like to pass on to us writers?”
“One of the best books I ever read about writing was Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft where he writes about his story, and then in the middle part, he sort of blocks out how you can write, because I never thought I could write. You know, those first adult books for seventy-, eighty-, ninety-thousand words long was really different for me because at the same time I was writing those, I was writing commercials. Commercials are seventy words you’ve got if you talk wall-to-wall in a thirty-second commercial, which you never want to do. You’ve got seventy words to play with, but Stephen King really breaks it down nicely.”
“For the bigger book.”
“He does the analogy of building a house where, if you come every day and put one brick down, make sure it’s level, plumb and square. Come back the next day, put down the brick next to it, make sure it’s level, plumb and square. If you do that consistently for five days. You’ll have one row, you know. Then before long we have a wall. After that you’ll have four walls, and then you’ll figure out how to put a roof on.”
“As an author, what’s most important to you?”
“Two things, I think. Number one, that I’m entertaining my audience because I come from being a performer. I always entertain my audience. The second, that I get to keep doing it. I don’t care so much about the big advances and stuff. I even told one of my agents that, and they went, ‘What?’ I don’t care about that because I have confidence that if the book’s good and people like it, we’ll earn some money down the line. But I just want to be able to keep writing.”
“And that’s the real reason to write, isn’t it? Because you love it for the sake of writing.”
“I will share what James Patterson taught me. We used to have a training program in advertising. I don’t think anybody has the money to do that anymore. And he came in and gave this lecture once to everybody: creative people, account people, media people, research people, all the new hires. We’re all together, like twenty or thirty of us, and we had different lectures every week. So, James Patterson is going to come in now and talk to us about how to be creative. He comes in, and back in those days, he had a big, bushy beard, big old, kind of curly, bushy beard. He came up to the podium. We’re at Madison Avenue, big, you know, office building, just like Mad Men in the conference room, and he says, ‘All right. I’m going to teach you how to make a million dollars a year in advertising. The secret is…’ Before he could say another word, the door flies open, and this knucklehead comes running into the room with a banana cream pie and slams it in James Patterson’s face. And remember he’s got a beard, so he’s got all this cream, and crust, and stuff, and yellow goo just dripping down his beard, and we’re all going, ‘That guy is so fired. He is going to be so fired.’ Jim cleans himself up a little bit. He said, ‘All right. I just showed you how to make a million dollars a year in advertising. Throw a pie in their face, and once you have their attention, say something smart.’”
“Wow.”
“I never forgot that lesson. That’s why all my stories, all my commercials, start with some kind of boom, something that grabs the reader’s attention, and once you have their attention, they’ll stick around for the exposition, and to learn a little bit more. So many mysteries I read start out with, ‘I’m working in this small town, where I run the donut shop. It’s also a dry cleaner, and I’ve been doing it for all these years.’ Have somebody come in and, I don’t know, have a donut explode or something. Get my attention, and if you do that, I’ll stick around for the rest of your story.”
I smile. “And there’s nothing better for a kid than an exploding donut. I can see why the kids love you.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, literary theorist, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
Clay’s book links:
https://www.amazon.com/Killer-Nashville-Noir-Clay-Stafford/dp/1626818789/ref=sr_1_1?tag=americanbla03-20
Chris Grabenstein is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Mr. Lemoncello, Wonderland, Haunted Mystery, Smartest Kid, and Dog Squad series. He has also co-authored three dozen fast-paced and funny page turners with James Patterson. https://chrisgrabenstein.com/
Chris’s book link:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/588883/the-smartest-kid-in-the-universe-by-chris-grabenstein/
Killer Nashville Interview with David Baldacci
Clay Stafford Talks with #1 Global Bestselling Author David Baldacci on Developing Characters
I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with David Baldacci, #1 bestselling crime and thriller novelist. We talked about his new novel, Simply Lies, and then other aspects of writing. Baldacci has had major success in writing both series and standalone novels and he shared with me his insight about the key to both these types of storytelling: the characters. Simple enough, but it opened up questions for me. “I get characters must hold a readers’ attention throughout the plot of a novel and carry one book in a series to the next, but how does a writer cultivate a character to be able to do this? When we chatted earlier, you seemed to imply that the process was more spontaneous.”
Baldacci shrugs slightly. “I really am much like, let’s see how it goes… Let me just wake this person up at the start of the day and walk them through what I want him to do. Let’s see what he does. Let’s see how this stuff ticks. It’s like you’ve got this blob of clay. You spend a little time with it and then you start chipping some stuff off here. Let’s see how the world that I’ve created for him and I’m putting him or her through is shaping him or her. And then we’ll figure out what sort of personality flaws and interesting personality traits this person might have. It’s always important to put the characters into the world that they’re going to be in for 400 plus pages and see how it works out.”
“So you just let the writing process mold the character itself naturally. But what does that mean in terms of planning?”
“Early on, I did the personality sketches and chapter outlines, but I just realized that none of it really was working for me. I don’t sit down and do character personalities with seventy-seven different ideas of what this character should be because it’s overkill and you’re never going to remember it all. You’re going to keep referring back to this checklist of stuff and you’ll realize that the majority of it you don’t even need or want in this person.”
“So is it more efficient to ditch the outlines and charts?”
“You’re going to get a better feel for this character about how they actually should come across to the reader and what you think they’re going to need in order to get through this novel in a plausible way.”
“Do you have other tactics to build and enhance characters?”
“If I have one main character like Amos Decker or Will Robie, I give them a lot of baggage in their own personal background that I can then exploit later in future books. So if you were to start a book and you really want it to be a series, you have to sort of build up that stuff in that first novel. It can be through backstories of one character or multiple characters that you’re going to exploit in future books. Or it could be something about a physical characteristic, an intellectual characteristic, or the people that the main character will meet on an ongoing basis because of the work that they do, and they can be exploited in the future books and build it in.”
“I’d think a perfect example of this is your character of Amos Decker, who had a blow to the head in a football incident, which caused hyperthymesia, perfect recall, and synesthesia.”
“It changed the way his brain operates so he has a lot of personal demons in every book. What I try to do with Decker is show his brain constantly transforming itself because of the brain trauma so every book he has to deal with something new happening in his own mind and his own personality, which continues to change on him. You can imagine how difficult and frustrating that could be. Plus, I have new elements about how his mind works to come in every novel and I have a lot of personal baggage.”
“So practically speaking, how do you pull all this together, if I were going to sit down and write something right now…”
“Do this judiciously. You don’t want to blow everything up in the first novel. You need to turn the tap on and turn it off. Be thinking about those things and lay Easter eggs throughout a series of books, and they’ll only be resolved in future books. Plant some things and foreshadow some things in earlier books that you can take advantage of in later books.”
“So for you, planning involves more strategic backstories and personality traits than charts, outlines, and lists.”
“You don’t have to do it one way. And what works for someone else may not work for you. During the course of your career, your process actually may change a little bit. You may become more outline oriented or less outline oriented further along you go because there’s no perfect way to do this. You just sort of jump in. You have a little bit of structure about the things you want to accomplish, things you want to write out, things that you might see coming up ahead and then go from there.”
“You really have a fondness for your characters. It comes through.”
“When you create a character, it’s almost like adopting someone into your family. You’re going to spend a lot of time with that person on a very personal basis and you need to make sure that it’s a sort of person you want to hang out with for a while. You have to feel passion and interest about what they’re going to be doing in the novel. The character is the only opportunity you get to connect with the reader on a human level. The plot does not do that for you. The characters do. So, if you write a character who never makes a mistake, you’re going to lose the reader at page 10. If you have a character who gets knocked down and then gets back up and tries to keep going, you’re going to have the readers in your pocket.”
I smile. “Which you certainly do.”
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer and filmmaker and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/
David Baldacci is a global #1 bestselling author with 150 million copies sold worldwide; his newest thriller, SIMPLY LIES, was published April 18, 2023. https://www.davidbaldacci.com/
Submit Your Writing to KN Magazine
Want to have your writing included in Killer Nashville Magazine?
Fill out our submission form and upload your writing here: