Ahead of the 80th Annual Edgar Award Ceremony, I asked the nominees for the Edgars (along with the special award winners) to contribute to a roundtable discussion on the state of the crime world today, for the 9th year in a row. 40 authors sent answers, the largest number we’ve ever had by far, and this has correspondingly resulted in the longest roundtable we’ve ever run (by far). I’ve divided the responses into two posts, as usual—this first focuses on craft, while tomorrow’s second part looks at writers as readers and as members of a community. It seems the biggest challenge, when it comes to writing, is simply…to go on writing while living life. Or perhaps, to go on living life, while writing. The responses below reflect and celebrate this ambiguity, for a fascinating snapshot of mystery fiction in this moment in time. Thanks, as always, to those who contributed, and best of luck to all the nominees!
__________________________________
What is your writing routine?
__________________________________
Tiffany Plunkett (Nominated for the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award – “Bloodsurf,” Hollywood Kills): Get up, sing badly to my cats, drink multiple cups of tea, wander aimlessly around the giant boards I have covered with notes, check the news, and then get at it until I get hungry. Then watch Braves highlights, take an hour bath with a book, and repeat. Often there is wine.
Adam Plantinga (Nominated for Best Novel – Hard Town): I don’t have much of a routine. In fact, if anyone would be willing to lend me theirs, I’d be interested. I read somewhere that poet John Donne used to lie in an open coffin before picking up a pen. Maybe something like that?
Richard Kopley (Nominated for Best Critical/Biographical – Edgar Allan Poe: A Life): I write in longhand in bed, with a very long typed chronological overview at hand of critical facts and vital research for a given chapter. I then shift to my study, where I enter the draft, revising as I go. If I write one paragraph a day, I am satisfied. Writing and researching the book took seven years; my book drew on my more than forty years as a Poe scholar.
Lee Child (MWA Grand Master Award): I firmly believe nothing of value ever happens in the morning, so I start after lunch and do about six hours a day until dinner. Late in the process I might go back to it for a couple hours at midnight.
Scott Turow (Nominated for Best Novel – Presumed Guilty): I get up with the sun Florida, around 7 AM, have coffee and a look at the papers, as much as I can stand, and then start writing, two hours to five hours, depending on what else is on my dance cade. That is hard work when I’m starting a book and pure pleasure when I’ve begun to fully inhabit the imagined world.
“I firmly believe nothing of value ever happens in the morning”–Lee Child
Jakob Kerr (Nominated for Best First Novel – Dead Money): When writing Dead Money, my wife and I had two boys under the age of two. So I was writing in snippets between diaper changes and naps, grabbing hours wherever I could find them. This was stressful, and I can’t say I’d recommend it to other writers :-). But in retrospect I’m grateful for it. The constraints prevented me from getting stuck in my own head, and kept me grounded in the realities of my day-to-day life.
Kelley Armstrong (Nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Cold as Hell): When I was first published, I had an infant, a toddler and a school-age child. I learned to get up early and write before dawn. Now those kids are all adults, off leading their own lives, which means I have so much more time. My mornings are for editing, and I do not get up before dawn, thankfully! During the pandemic, a bunch of writer colleagues struggled with focus, and we started doing daily sprints. We still do them, and I find I can get my word goal in those two hours, though I’ll continue on afterward if the writing is going well.
Kathryn Harkup (Nominated for Best Critical/Biographical – V is for Venom: Agatha Christie’s Chemicals of Death): I try to spend about half of the day reading and making notes and the other half of the day writing.
C.M. Kushins (Nominated for Best Critical/Biographical – Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard): I guess one of the benefits of having been such a huge Elmore Leonard fan from such an early age is having adopting his own, famous one—at least when I was younger. For most of my life, I’d get up at five in the morning in order to write first thing in the morning. I still get up at that hour, but now I pack in as much meditation, email responses, and project research as I can before really getting to the writing at nine AM. When I hit forty, I thought it would be okay to then adopt Elmore’s mid-life routine of considering his writing to be his nine-to-five.
Jay Martel (Nominated for Best Young Adult – Codebreaker): We draft the outline and discuss the major plot structure and character arcs together, then we take turns drafting chapters, with the other reviewing and revising. We’ll pass chapters back and forth until we’re both satisfied and continue that way until we have a complete draft. Then we go to marriage counseling for a few months before diving into edits, which we work on together at our dining room table with big cups of coffee. We tend to agree on what needs to change and what doesn’t, but when we come up against something we disagree on, we try and take turns “winning.”
Donna Andrews (Grand Master): Writing a book falls into three phases for me: planning, drafting, and revising/polishing. And drafting’s the only one that lends itself to a routine. I try to give myself a couple of months for the planning and the only constant about that phase is that it ends the day my schedule says I need to start drafting, whether I feel ready or not. Drafting’s easier, because I make myself a spreadsheet showing how many words I have to write each day to finish my draft on time. Then every day, I drag myself down to the computer at the crack of dawn—dawn actually isn’t permitted to crack much before noon at my house—and write until I hit my quota. Once I type the end on the draft I then go into revising and polishing mode, and keep worrying over it until my deadline comes and I hit send on the email with my draft attached.
Katharine Schellman (Nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Last Dance Before Dawn): I wish I had one! In reality, my writing routine is using whatever time I have available: early mornings, during the work day, when kids are out with friends on the weekend, on trains, in coffee shops… Somehow, it all gets done! Having the uncertain schedule that comes with young kids and a bunch of freelance work means I’ve learned to settle into my writing headspace quickly without any routine surrounding that transition.
Hannah Deitch (Nominated for Best First Novel – Killer Potential): I like to write a lot in one session, so often I’ll pick one day that week where my only job is to write. In my head I call these “gremlin days” or “worm days” (I’m borrowing ‘worm’ from the brilliant Rufi Thorpe, who told me she believes that most writers are either the kind who dress respectably for a day’s work and sit at a desk or coffeeshop, or the kind who write in a weird horizontal position on the couch like a worm. It’s a worm’s life for me.) I’ll try to hit around 5,000 words for the day, but I’m not religious about word count. This structure helps me get in a good flow state, and it creates a long runway for surprises and detours. I naturally have a lot of urgency around writing, I don’t tend to need to create elaborate rituals or anything like that to make the work happen. So for me, these long sessions are also weirdly relaxing in their indulgence. The rest of the week I’m writing at a desk or a coffee shop and checking my email (bleh) and being a person—and smuggling in extra pockets of worm time when I can.
Dave Zeltserman (nominated for Best Short Story – “Julius Katz Draws a Straight Flush”): My routine is nearly the same for both short stories and novels. I first write a detailed outline—these tend to be one to two pages for short stories and eight to ten pages for novels, which gives me a roadmap to fall back on. I come up with all the character names at this time, agonizing to make sure I have the right name for each character, which helps me better visualize them.
While I have my roadmap, it doesn’t mean I follow it exactly. At some point while I’m writing, the story becomes something organic and new ideas will come to me and new characters will force their way into the story, and so I’ll take detours and sometimes shortcuts, but I’ll always try to wrestle my way back to the outline.
I set 500 words as my daily goal whether I’m working on a short story or a novel, but I’ll usually write 1000 words per day, and on some days as many as 4000 words. When I’m working on a short story, I’ll usually write the complete story before doing any editing. With a novel, I’ll edit every 100 pages as a sanity check to make sure the novel is holding together.
Amanda Chapman (Nominated for the Lilian Jackson Braun Award – Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library): Well, coffee. And then a second cup of coffee. But there are days when the Muse doesn’t show up. Not even for coffee. The only thing that snaps me out of a writing funk is sneaky tough love. “You don’t have write anything,” I say to myself, “but you do have to put your a** in the chair.” That’s easy, I think. I can put my a** in the chair. So I do. “Now,” I say, “you don’t have to write anything, but you do have to read what you wrote yesterday.” So I read what I wrote yesterday. I see a few things that might be improved. Just a few fixes. Maybe a few more. “Now,” I say, “you don’t have to write anything, but you do have to jot down a few ideas for tomorrow.” So I jot down a few ideas. Then I flesh them out a bit. Four hours later, I’ve written ten pages. On a day when I didn’t have to write anything.
Robert Rotstein (Nominated for the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award – “Grand Theft Auto in the Heart of Screenland,” Hollywood Kills): Going to the computer, checking work and personal emails, drafting a paragraph or two, checking Major League Baseball news, writing a few more paragraphs, focusing on my day job until I’m inspired to write a few more paragraphs, quitting for the day and eating dinner, and then getting inspired and writing 2000 words and getting to bed at 1:15 in the morning.
Cindy R.X. He (Nominated for Best Young Adult – This is Where We Die): Get woken up by my alarm, make a large mug of earl grey tea, get kids fed and ready for school. When all three kids are in school, if I’m in the midst of writing a new book, attempt to get more words down. Some days are more successful than others. I figure the story out as I go, plotting doesn’t work for me (I know this is an anomaly in our genre). I find revising to be easier than writing a new book.
If I’m in between books, I’m either getting as much reading in as possible, or, if I’m working on an idea for a new book, alternating between staring out the window, jotting down notes, and crying to other writer friends that all my previous books were flukes and that I actually don’t know how to write.
Abbi Waxman (Nominated for Best Paperback Original – One Death at a Time): My daily routine is pretty average: I get up, blunder about banging into the furniture until I’ve had coffee, then sit down and gaze numbly at the pages from the day before. Then I remind myself I’ve promised to just keep going forward, always forward, and start writing. I write for three or four hours, then go off to deal with the rest of my life. As I get close to a deadline I add a second shift after dinner, another three hours or so. In terms of each book it’s also predictable: First 10,000 words in a flood, filled with beans and enthusiasm, THIS is going to be the best one yet…then panic, I’ve lost it (if I ever had it), this is drivel without any redeeming features at all, then despair, followed by a stiff talking to and back at it, another 10,000. Rinse and repeat until it’s done. My family says there’s a ‘this is the worst book I’ve ever written’ phase and a ‘I need to add more characters’ phase and finally a ‘I need to remove characters’ phase. But I think they’re lying.
Daniel G. Miller (Nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – The Red Letter): I write every weekday morning from 8-12. I try to finish a chapter a day.
Tim Maleeny (Nominated for Best Short Story – “Lucky Heart”): I often wish I followed a daily writing routine but have always been more of a binge writer. I’ll think about a character or scene for weeks before sitting down behind a keyboard, then I’ll write nonstop for as many hours—or days, weeks, months—as it takes to finish the story. Until the cycle of procrastination, ideation, and creation begins all over again.
Ally Russell (Nominated for best Juvenile – Mystery James Digs Her Own Grave): I wish I had a strict writing routine. I would probably be a lot more productive. My writing routine is simple: I write when I feel excited to write. This makes writing feel less like a chore, and it helpes me dispel negative thoughts about my work (because imposter syndrome still gets to me). My writing routine fuels my creativity and energy, and I’ve found that I’m more likely to finish a project when I feel excited to write. This routine works for me.
“Obsession is what feeds the engine — obsession and lots of coffee.” –Michael Cannell
Michael Cannell (Nominated for Best Fact Crime – Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation): E.L. Doctorow said that writing a book is like rowing across the Atlantic at night with a flashlight. The daily exertion. The second-guessing and navigation shifts. The exhaustion.
I come from a newspaper background. I have no patience for handwringing over writer’s block. I believe in sitting down and going to work. Obsession is what feeds the engine — obsession and lots of coffee.
Vikki Wakefield (Nominated for Best Paperback Original – The Backwater): I’m such a creature of habit. I write at home in the same outside spot, whatever the weather, and I only turn up if I’ve got something to say. My routine can be unstructured, unpredictable and fairly unproductive in terms of a daily word count—I can go weeks or months without writing a word (my ratio of thinking to writing is about 80:20), followed by a burst of intense concentration that might yield little on the page. I struggle to write a scene until it has played out in my head many times over, and I can’t move forward until I’ve solved the problems in the preceding chapters. Possibly I’m a chronic procrastinator? I prefer to believe the story isn’t ready. Consequently my progress is always incredibly slow but, when I do complete a first draft, it’s whole and in good shape. I guess my routine is the opposite of routine—not an ideal way to write, but I’ve written nine books this way and I’ve come to accept it’s how my process works.
Matthew Spencer (Nominated for Best Paperback Original – Broke Road): I write every day, seven days a week, for at least a couple of hours. There is never an internal debate. I just turn up every day. It’s that thing about keeping your subconscious trained on what’s at hand—because it’s the back of your mind doing the work. Norman Mailer and Martin Amis have written a lot about that. For me, turning up is not discipline, it’s compulsion, so that makes it easier. Our youngest child is 18. So I have the time. But I’m very selfish about it. I guard my writing time—you have to train people, too: Don’t get in the way!
Sacha Bronwasser (Nominated for Best Paperback Original – Listen): I wish I had one. It is writing whenever I can find the isolation and rest that is needed. I do know that the hours between 4 and 8pm are most productive. Not by choice, but it has proven to be so. I have a summerhouse in the garden where I write, provided that the neighbour’s aren’t renovating again.
Libba Bray (Nominated for Best Young Adult – Under the Same Stars): Wake up. (Always good to start on a positive!) Doomscroll. Remember there is coffee and a dog and immediately feel more optimistic about our chances as a species. Walk dog while drinking coffee. Tell myself that today is the day I will conquer this novel, show it who’s boss, plus eat my vegetables. Immediately buy a croissant—vegetables are for the weak. Feed dog. Settle in with SecondCoffee™. Open brain wave app filled with confident settings like “Problem Solving,” “Focused and Alert,” and “Euphoria.” (I can promise you that last one is false advertising.) This app is the ambient noise equivalent of an inspirational “Hang in There!” cat poster but whatever works, right? Set a timer for forty minutes. Move boldly into that first writing session with the kind of confidence that convinced seventeen-year-old me that OF COURSE I could give myself a home perm. (That is a story for another time, friends. A time when adult beverages are served.) Re-read previous day’s work. Make changes to previous day’s work. Consider writing same chapter in haiku or from the perspective of a mime actually trapped in a box. Replace semi-colons with periods and vice versa. Check timer. Blow on brain wave app because it is clearly not working. Screw my courage to the sticking place or perhaps the sticky place since I spilled coffee. Lather, rinse, repeat. I try to get in about four hours of concentrated writing time in the mornings and save research/reading for the afternoons when my brain hits tilt.
Erin Soderberg Downing (Nominated for Best Juvenile – What Happened Then): My process for What Happened Then was unusual—I started writing this book while living on the island I used as my setting for the novel, and when it was time for me to leave the island, I found my writing stalled as soon as I’d returned to the “real world.” So I decided to try to recreate the isolation and seclusion of the island setting to get the story flowing again. Working around my family life, I ended up writing this story in bursts, whenever I had the time to isolate myself for a few days at a stretch in various island-like places—a borrowed cabin, a lonely, rented motel room, a weekend in a spooky lighthouse B&B. It was a tricky process, but putting myself into the island-like world of my characters helped me bring that isolation and “trapped” feeling to the page.
Rick Marcou (Nominated for the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award – “Baggage,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine): First off, I only write when I feel I have something to write. I am not Stephen King, for sure. I settle into my comfortable recliner in the living room, and poke away. Somehow, despite being a ridiculous night owl, and having had success in the past (college) writing at obscenely late hours, for the past few years all my writing has taken place during the workday. Very proper. Late night is now reserved for movies and crosswords.
Lee Goldberg (Nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Fallen Star): Typically, I do my best writing between 8 p.m. and 1 or 2 a.m. I then wake up at ten, have breakfast, and deal with the business of writing (interviews, promotion, meetings, copyediting, etc) while rewriting the work I did the night before. Then, after dinner, I start writing new pages. And so it goes until the book is completed.
__________________________________
Do you have an animal writing companion?
__________________________________
Tiffany Plunkett: I have a dragon, a lion, and a monkey, all masquerading as cats. Technically one is dead and ash-contained in a pendant around my neck, but I wouldn’t put it past her to be playing an elaborate prank.
Ally Russell: I have two black cats, Nox and Fury, but only one of them sits with me while I’m writing. Nox, my curmudgeonly older cat, likes to be held when I’m typing. The problem is that he’s 22 pounds. Imagine holding two ten-pound bowling balls while you’re trying to plot a story.
Allison Epstein (Nominated for Best Novel – Fagin the Thief): I live with a 13-year-old tuxedo cat named Mina. Her namesake is Mina Harker from Dracula, because she’s a biter. Before she came home with me, she spent three years in a shelter and then another year at a cat cafe, which she was politely asked to leave because she kept stealing patrons’ chairs and hissing at them. She’s a tiny terror and I love her.
Jay Martel: We have two: a pug named Boo and a Newfoundland named Taika. They are best friends, greatest frenemies, and will not let us type unless one hand is petting them.
Donna Andrews: I don’t actually live with a pet . . . but I have a frequent canine visitor, my furry niece, Maple. She’s a pom bitch—Pomeranian/Bichon mix—and when my brother travels and she stays with me, she likes to follow me from room to room. She’s snoring at my feet as I write this.
“Nox, my curmudgeonly older cat, likes to be held when I’m typing. The problem is that he’s 22 pounds.” –Ally Russell
Tim Maleeny: I grew up with cats sitting on my books while I was trying to turn the pages, but alas, I no longer have pets to help me solve mysteries.
Abbi Waxman: My cat Augie sits next to me on the sofa while I write. Occasionally he sticks his head into the gap between my knees and the laptop propped against them, and that’s my cue to get up and feed him. He’s a better time keeper than the National Institutes of Standards and Technology.
Erin Soderberg Downing: I have a mischievous Aussiedoodle named Nutmeg, and I call her my “shadow.” She’s literally always by my side when I’m writing, reading, or even going to the bathroom. She lived in my little cabin on the island where I wrote the first ten chapters of What Happened Then, and she’s the reason I included a dog in that story! To be fair, I include a dog or pet of some kind in all of my stories—animals always bring me so much comfort when I’m having a bad day, feeling anxious, or just feel down and need a hug—so I love to give my characters the same kind of animal comfort.
Joanna Schaffhausen (Nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Gone in the Night): I have a basset hound named Winston who provided a lot of character inspiration for Speed Bump, the basset in my Ellery Hathaway series. Winston likes that I work from home but wishes I would spend less time typing and more time scratching his belly. He is prone to draping his considerable ears across my laptop.
Debbi Michiko Florence (Nominated for Best Juvenile – A Study in Secrets): Yes! I have two rescue dogs, Kiku (which means chrysanthemum in Japanese) and Ponyo (named after the Studio Ghibli animated film character). They are very in tune to my schedule. They start off by rough housing in the studio until I say, “Okay, I’m writing now,” and then they settle down for a long nap. When I am done for the morning, I always plug in my external harddrive to back up my work, and the dogs know it’s about time to go into the house for lunch, so they start playing again and then wait by the door to leave. When I work in the afternoon, if my husband is home, Kiku stays in the house with him, but Ponyo always returns with me. They are the best writing companions. They are very good listeners when I need to brainstorm out loud and they never judge me.
Sulari Gentill (Nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Five Found Dead): I have three dogs who currently share my writing space. A rescue Huntaway called Alfie, an English Springer named Pig and Miss Higgins my darling Labradoodle. When I settle on the couch to write, they lay across my legs, and I am often forced to perch my laptop precariously on a pile of dogs. Sometimes I read aloud to them—being careful that the passages don’t contain words like “ball” or “bacon” lest the hounds under which I am essentially pinned, get overexcited. I could probably write at a desk like a normal person, but why would I?
Kelley Armstrong: We have two pets—a dog and a cat. The dog—Moxi—has claimed me, which means the cat—Cam—very rarely chooses my lap for his sleeping place. That’s best for writing. Having a cat on the keyboard is never helpful. Moxi is usually lying beside me, though if I’m editing on paper, she decides there’s enough room in the recliner for her. There really isn’t—she’s not lapdog sized—but I accommodate.
Jo Nichols (Nominated for the Lilian Jackson Braun Award – The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective): We have two homely gray cats, Earl and Dolly, that only two homebody writers could love.
C.M. Kushins: Not at the moment, but years ago, my Shiba Inu, Hiro, watched me write my entire first book. I’m fairly certain he was also the first to hear me read it aloud for proofreading.
Holly Kennedy (Nominated for Best Paperback Original – The Sideways Life of Denny Voss): Yes, my writing muse is my 130 lb Newfoundland dog. His name is Wallace and he snores at my feet while I write. I find his presence oddly soothing and equally inspiring, probably because he’s such a chill dog whereas I’m ADHD and I suffer from depression and a severe anxiety disorder, which makes it hard to stay focused. Wallace calms me.
Scott Turow: We have two dogs. I have a wonderful office but the older dog now struggles on the stairs and so I often write on my laptop downstairs so Dougie can be with me (or me with him.) His much younger brother tends to go to doggie daycare, so he can get his ya-ya’s out, but when he’s around, he will often remain at my feet.
Gregg Hurwitz (Nominated for Best Short Story – “Orphan X: A Mysterious Profile”): Three hundred combined pounds of Rhodesian ridgeback—Zuma, Nala, and Buster. And a Benji-looking mutt named Lily.
Libba Bray: Lot. Columbones. Hercule Puprot. Sherlock Bones. There is no urine clue or squirrel/pigeon crime he cannot sniff out. He really missed his calling as a weary French-philosopher detective. We say he has “resting ennui face.” Wait—why am I not writing this series?
__________________________________
What was the biggest challenge in writing your last book?
__________________________________
Tiffany Plunkett: Time management and cat interruptions, and a lingering sense of global dread.
Caroline Fraser (Nominated for Best Fact Crime – Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers): Writing Murderland sometimes felt a little bit like being an air traffic controller, juggling multiple timelines of serial killers—who did what when—and slotting their activities into the unfolding overlaid history of lead exposure, which may have influenced their behavior. It was a thrilling and absorbing exercise but occasionally hair-raising, trying to fit everything in while being accurate.
Daniel G. Miller: I traditionally write procedurals, but my last book was a psychological thriller. I found this far more difficult because in a procedural, the investigation drives the plot, but in psychological thrillers, perception drives the plot, which is much more difficult to achieve.
Abbi Waxman: Trying to avoid reading the news, otherwise I would spend the day banging my head on a table and getting nothing done. But at the same time if I didn’t I would feel like a dilettante.
Tim Maleeny: My last novel, Hanging the Devil, was a global art heist which required a lot of research into smuggling, forgery, and repatriation of lost art, so the biggest challenge was doing enough homework to start writing my story without getting lost in the endless accounts of real-life crimes and histories of famous paintings. Finding that balance between research and writing was key to finishing my book.
C.M. Kushins: Elmore was always prolific—and I think he made it a point to be. Unlike so many of us, he really enjoyed the act of writing—sitting down, reading over the previous day’s work, and then letting his imagination go to town, giving nearly full-reign to the characters he adored. It was such a joy to see that come across in every page of his notes and biographical files, but it did lead to a very large body of work that I had to somehow condense without making any canonical omissions, and assess within the confines of a single volume. (He was at work on his forty-sixth novel at the time of his passing, not including his short stories and screenplays. It all had to be read and considered.
Debbi Michiko Florence: I am a pantser. I start with a premise, the main character, and a vague idea of where the story is heading and then just start writing. It’s during the drafting and revision process that I get to know my characters and discover their story. I learned the hard way that this isn’t an ideal way to write a mystery. Book 1 of my mystery series was my 29th published book, but my first mystery. When I wrote book 2, this time, before I started drafting, I figured out who did what and how. The why stayed a real mystery until I drafted and revised. But it was definitely smoother knowing the what and how before diving in! I still prefer not to know everything when I write a new story, however. It’s the discovery process that motivates and intrigues me.
Richard Kopley: The biggest challenge in my writing my last book was bringing Poe to life. I tried to do this with new discoveries, revealing interpretations, and engaging writing.
Libba Bray: Weaving together three different timelines (WWII Germany, 1980’s punk Berlin, 2020 NYC during Covid) into a coherent, interconnected whole was certainly a challenge as was weaving in a fictional fairy tale that functioned as both story and commentary. But the most unexpected challenge involved writing about Covid while living through Covid when none of us had any idea how, when, or whether it would end. And in subsequent drafts, I was surprised at how much I had forgotten or suppressed—how quickly the mind works to hide trauma behind a narrative curtain that’s less scary, which, interestingly, mirrored the story I was trying to tell on the page.
Jo Nichols: Not getting divorced as we polished the final draft!
Cindy R.X. He: The last book I wrote I had to very deliberately make sure the protagonist isn’t an unreliable narrator, because just before working on it I realized that every single protagonist in my three earlier books were all unreliable, something I’d done quite unconsciously. I don’t know what that says about me. And then because of that, I think I struggled to come up with a twist that was big enough. My editor assured me it’s a great twist, but I still don’t know. I guess we’ll see when the reviews start coming in.
Amanda Chapman: When a character in your book may (or may not) be Agatha Christie on holiday from the Great Beyond, it behooves you to get to know the real Agatha Christie. I’d read all of the biographies, of course, but I wanted to hear Agatha Miller Christie Mallowan speak for herself. I found four wonderful sources in which this charming, funny, introspective, shy, adventurous and intellectually curious woman does just that: the delightful Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, in which, for example, she confesses her girlhood fondness for flirting and dancing; The Grand Tour, her letters home from a round-the-world voyage in 1922, in which she waxes rhapsodic about, of all unexpected things, surfing; Come Tell Me How You Live, a fascinating memoir of her first dig with her second husband, the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan; and – to me as a mystery writer, the most instructive — Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, culled from 73 (!) volumes of handwritten notes for her books, plays and stories. Actually, now that I think about it, getting to know the real Agatha Christie was not so much a challenge as a gift.
“I wrote Five Found Dead while I was in treatment for cancer…My work became a life raft through it all, a passage to the other side.”–Sulari Gentill
Sulari Gentill: I wrote Five Found Dead while I was in treatment for cancer, so there were physical challenges with things like fatigue and pain. My work became a life raft through it all, a passage to the other side. It meant the act of writing was a particular joy and reclamation of my self. And of course, I’m a writer, so those challenges, also became an excellent source of material.
Donna Andrews: Since I wrote my last book while doing all the prep for having a hip replacement, the biggest challenge was finding the time—and focus—between all the medical appointments. But I turned in my revisions the day before my surgery was scheduled, so all is well.
Michael Cannell: Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal that Shocked the Nation is a narrative non-fiction account of high-ranking NYPD detectives who secretly worked for organized crime. The mob is long on lore, short on facts. So the research and reporting can be challenging. Thank god for trial transcripts, and heartfelt thanks to all the retired detectives and FBI agents willing to share their memories.
Scott Turow: Most of the ‘action’ in the book I’m finishing now takes place in the early 1960’s, a very different time, and so recreating that mindspace for readers was, indeed, challenging. THe judges and juries smoked in the courtroom, and a gentleman would not walk around downtown without a hat, sex was generally unmentionable, and for gays and people of color life was much harder, without discounting the obstacles that endure.
Holly Kennedy: For me, the biggest challenge in writing The Sideways Life of Denny Voss, which was written in first person from a cognitively challenged man’s POV, was to make certain that Denny’s voice came across as authentic, so much so that readers would feel like his story read more like non-fiction than fiction. While readers tried to figure out who killed Mr. Tesky in the book, I also wanted them to surprise themselves by falling in love with Denny Voss.
Matthew Spencer: Broke Road is a follow to my debut Black River. They’re police procedurals and the main characters, a female Homicide detective and a male journalist, carry over. In the first book they meet, and take stock of each other as they work together on a case. In Broke Road, they’ve known each other two years, they’re trauma bonded, there’s history between them, water under the bridge. So where are they at? And where are they going? And not just with the investigation, but emotionally. I wanted to bring that to life, their relationship. The wonderful thing about crime fiction is you can do that, write about people, their interior lives, at the same time as putting them under pressure, unfurling a plot. And then the best thing is bringing all that together. The plot intertwines with their emotional state, and vice versa. There’s richness there, I think, and hopefully some humour.
Ally Russell: The last book I wrote was Mystery James Returns from the Grave, the second and final book in the Mystery James duology. I’ve never written about the same characters more than once, and it was challenging to maintain character personalities, plot points, and minor details across two books. Writing this duology was a learning experience.
Vikki Wakefield: To the River has a dual-viewpoint, multiple timelines and a complex, character-driven plot, so it was tricky to write in terms of craft. The most difficult part, though, was researching and writing during Covid—I’d never felt more afraid for the future and so disconnected from the world and yet I needed to be in it, observing people and place, making connections. It was like trying to write in a dark, quiet room, relying purely on memory and imagination. I think that’s why this book has a strong sense of isolation and unease running through it.
Lee Goldberg: It was about a detective who uses elements of design to solve crimes… the challenge was taking that science, that way of looking at the world, and making it entertaining and natural without exposition. To understand that world, I had to read lots of non-fiction books and research papers, but I didn’t want any of that work to show in my writing or it would read like a textbook.
Sacha Bronwasser: The biggest challenge in Listen was to weave real events, in this case a wave of terrorist attacks in the 80’s and the attacks of 2015 in Paris, into the story. These were real events which affected real people in their real lives. To describe them respectfully and combine them in a natural way with a fictional storyline was my biggest challenge.
Hannah Deitch: Killer Potential is a novel about two fugitives who are fleeing a crime scene they know they will be blamed for if they stick around. For 80% of the novel, the main characters are on the run. I have done many, many cross-country road trips. I have never (fortunately) fled a crime scene. Imagining the particulars of how they would steal cars, stage home invasions, pickpocket, plot escapes into Canada, etc was a big challenge. A lot of the hypothetical legal particulars were also difficult, because we don’t have many modern-day outlaws that I could use as referents. The Luigi Mangione thing felt eerily relevant, but I was long finished with the novel by then. So I was relying very heavily on my own imagination, and some very sketchy googling. I would not be surprised if I googled my way onto an FBI watchlist.
Rick Marcou: I’ll tell you after I write my first! So far just a novella, which may one day grow up to be a book. Or maybe to be published as is. Now that’s a mystery to be solved.
Andrew Klavan (Nominated for Best Critical/Biographical – The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness): The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness is a study of three real-life murders that have appeared in fiction again and again. In a way, I guess it’s a defense of our profession: an explanation of why creating art about evil is in itself a good. After the research, the biggest challenge was making that esoteric argument personal, human and direct. That process required a certain amount of self-exposure, which is painful. I would have much preferred to have exposed somebody else!
