“A Casual Conversation with Susan Isaacs”

Susan Isaacs interviewed by Clay Stafford

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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.

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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/