Each year, authors, editors, and members of the mystery community gather together in New York City to award the nation’s most prestigious honor for crime writing—the Edgar Awards, organized by the Mystery Writers of America. This year, as the pandemic rages on and the quarantine continues, will of course be different. The awards will be presented virtually, and announced midday on Thursday, April 30th. Ahead of the online ceremony, we caught up with 20+ nominees for a roundtable discussion on the state of the mystery. We decided to split the discussion into two parts—in the first installment, nominees reacted to the extraordinary events of the year so far, and reflect on the genre at large; in this second installment, nominees give writing advice, talk big breaks, and think back on the little details and small moments that make the grand project of writing worth all the effort.
You can see the full list of Edgar Nominations here.
Read Part 1 of our roundtable discussion on The State of Crime Writing here.
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What’s one piece of advice you wish you’d had at the outset of your writing career?
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Naomi Kritzer (Nominated for Best Young Adult – Catfishing on CatNet): “Just keep swimming.”
Carol Goodman (Nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – The Night Visitors): Don’t give up your day job.
Catriona McPherson ((Nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Strangers at the Gate): Oy, I had it but I wish I’d listened to it. “Don’t sign with the first agent who offers”. That would have saved some re-shuffling.
Hank Phillippi Ryan (Nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – The Murder List): Stop worrying. I know that sounds pretty crazy, right now. But there are so many things we can’t control, and in the writing world, current events aside, we can’t truly know what’s good or bad. Be careful what you wish for, be careful what you grieve over, be careful what you strive for and try to force to happen. Those things aren’t efficient, or even helpful, because something else will happen. And not getting what you wish for may be absolutely great—I just did a whole TedX talk about that! Early on I got a rejection from someone I had pinned all my hopes on—but they said no, and I was crushed. Turned out the rejection wasn’t about me at all, and had it worked the way I wanted, it would’ve been a disaster. We just never know these things. So people always say work as hard as you can, do the best you can, persevere. It sounds like a throwaway, sometimes, but it is the key to everything.
Stop worrying. I know that sounds pretty crazy, right now. But there are so many things we can’t control, and in the writing world, current events aside, we can’t truly know what’s good or bad. –Hank Phillippi RyanSamantha Downing (Nominated for Best First Novel – My Lovely Wife): I don’t know if this is advice, but I had no idea how long it took for a book to be published. I was completely unaware of everything that went into a single book. For long stretches of time it feels like nothing is happening, but there’s a lot going on in a publishing house that I didn’t know anything about.
Lara Prescott (Nominated for Best First Novel – The Secrets We Kept): I wish someone would’ve told me that writing doesn’t have to be perfect the first time around, and that you can always make it better in the revisions. Working on a novel—a process which can take years—is a constant negotiation with oneself to keep going, keep writing. Oftentimes, when you linger, the magic that can make something great is broken.
Gigi Pandian (Nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – The Alchemist’s Illusion): Don’t compare your career to anyone else’s. That applies to both your goals and your experiences. As soon as I attended my first mystery convention, I knew I’d found my people. But more writers I’ve gotten to know, the more I see that everyone’s journey is different.
Emma Rowley (Nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Where the Missing Go): To be more realistic about the time it takes to write a book. I used to try to replicate the office hours I was used to—9 to 6, say, which just wasn’t how my brain worked or conducive to creativity. So while yes, you do have to be disciplined to complete a novel, you also have to work to your strengths and rhythms and attention span. You’re not a machine!
Barbara Bourland (Nominated for Best Novel – Fake Like Me): Everything will take more time than you expect. Don’t let it get to you. It’s not personal, it’s publishing.
Dave Zeltserman (Nominated for Best Short Story – “Brother’s Keeper,” from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine): Do not write noir and instead focus on more commercially accessible books. True noir, where the protagonist is on a one way ticket to hell, has a small readership, which pretty much damns you as far as book sales go and is a great way to short circuit a writing career before it ever starts. But if I had been given that advice (or more specifically, been willing to take it), I wouldn’t have written some of the books I’m most proud of, I probably would’ve never found my voice, and I wouldn’t have had a movie made or gotten some of the critical response that I received, including making NPR and Washington Post’s best of the year lists. And even though I put myself behind the eight ball with those noir books, I was able to escape the noir trenches and extend my writing career by writing mysteries, thrillers, and horror.
Edwin Hill (Nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – The Missing Ones): Look for successes everywhere, big and small. Landing a novel contract is awesome, but so is writing a post for a blog or selling a short story. If you focus in on balancing your time investment, you’ll find that you can build a strong portfolio that will support selling a novel. (I didn’t follow this advice.)
William Lashner (Nominated for Best Paperback Original – Freedom Road): Appreciate the process. I think perhaps when I started I was mostly driven by the externals. I wanted money, and a little fame, and the so-called writing life, and I didn’t ever want to wear a tie. But when the externals are what matter, it’s hard then ever being satisfied because there’s never enough money or success, and people still have weddings where ties are required. Eventually I realized that the greatest joy from being a writer is in the writing itself. Most of the work is hard and sloggy, but there are moments of such transcendent emotion that make me feel like I’m communing with the heavens. Usually, strangely, this happens in revision, but when it comes it obliterates me in the best way.
Laura Tucker (Nominated for Best Juvenile – All The Greys on Greene Street): Not a piece of advice, necessarily, but I do think it’s helpful to know how very badly it can go, and for how long. You’re floundering, making wild stabs, kissing frogs who don’t turn into princes, and it feels like you’re not doing a damn thing. But that is the work, and all you can do is keep doing it.
Adriana Mather (Nominated for Best Young Adult – Killing November): Be wild—twirling in a field, spouting terrible poetry under the stars wild. (And believe me, my poetry is unredeemable). But that’s what’s fun about writing—taking a chance. I’ve realized that for me what’s inspiring, what makes me want to get up in the morning and jump into a story, is pushing the boundaries of imagination. And sometimes that works out with utter beauty and grace and sometimes it’s the writing version of “Nailed it.” The whole point is to try, because story telling is a leap into the unknown where blank pages loom before you in their stark orderliness. And I for one believe the best approach is to stick your tongue out at them and make fart noises.
Tara Laskowski (Nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – One Night Gone): Write what you love. It took me too long to realize that I should be writing crime fiction. Those are the books I’ve always loved in my lifetime, but I didn’t realize until very recently that I could also write them!
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What event in your writing career do you consider to be your most important ‘break’?
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Gigi Pandian: Being awarded the Malice Domestic Grant for unpublished traditional mystery writers was the kick I needed to take my writing seriously. It was also my introduction to the world of mystery writing. When I began writing that first novel, even though I’d been a life-long mystery reader, I didn’t know a soul in the mystery writing community. Without the grant, I’d still be writing but I doubt anyone else would have read my work.
Barbara Bourland: I ghostwrote a nonfiction book almost ten years ago. That project gave me the confidence to write my own first novel in a few different ways: one, it taught me how to hold a hundred thousand words in my mind at once, which was a genuine neurological shift from the writing I’d done before. Two, it defined what a complete, book-length idea feels like, in terms of the starting gate. It’s also, frankly, tremendously pleasurable to write in someone else’s voice, to live in their mind and research area, to find the boundaries of their ideas and perspective. If you’re coming from any kind of professional writing career but have never stretched to a book-length project, don’t hesitate to ghostwrite – it’s a very sturdy set of training wheels.
Hank Phillippi Ryan: I love that question, because again, as always happens, it came out of adversity. I have had the joy of having so much support from incredible authors along the way—Sue Grafton helped me so much, and Robert B Parker. Katherine Hall Page. Lisa Scottoline. Lee Child. I can’t even list them all. And I do my best to do the same with new authors now—it is one of the happiest parts of my life. Working with MWA University. Life-changing. But my biggest break (so far!) came at the dentist’s office. I had to have a root canal, and I was really angry, and cranky, and my tooth hurt, and I was missing work, and everything was awful. I picked up an old copy of People Magazine—you know the ones that all all thin and the staples are coming out. There was an article about Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, who’d told his family and constituents that he was off hiking the Appalachian Trial—when he was really off with his mistress. An I thought—who would do that? Who would be “the other woman,” that’s so destructive. And at the end of the article, someone was quoted as saying “You can choose your sin, but you cannot choose your consequences.” And I thought: MY BOOK MY BOOK! And at that moment was born the idea for The Other Woman, my fifth book but very first thriller. It started my relationship with the publisher (Forge) and editor (Kristin Sevick) I still have and adore, and won the Mary Higgins Clark award.The whole root canal thing was totally worth it.
Samantha Downing: Joining a local writer’s group. Getting objective feedback is crucial, so my writing improved far more than when I was just writing on my own, without any feedback. It was also through my writer’s group that I met the person that led to getting an agent. Without that connection, I wouldn’t be published right now.
John Vercher (Nominated for Best First Novel – Three Fifths): Being published in the first place. The first time I took my oldest son to a bookstore where he could see my book on a shelf was an emotional moment for us, and one I’ll never forget. The proverbial icing was when Jason Pinter and Chantelle Aimee Osman told me they believed enough in my book to make it the launch title for their inaugural imprint. I’m forever indebted to them for my “break.” They changed my family’s life.
William Lashner: I’ve been doing this for a long time now and there have been so many “breaks.” I remember when I got into writing school, when I got an agent, when I sold my first book, when I first made the bestseller lists. All of these were huge. But the biggest “breaks” for me, and the ones I remember most fondly, are when an idea explodes in my brain and I am sure I’m onto something. It means that my next year is taken care of. I’m in the middle of a middle-grade supernatural-legal-thriller series and I remember how excited I felt when I first came up with the idea. And now I have this science fiction love story that’s seizing my brain and that I can’t wait to start. I don’t know where they come from, these ideas, but they are gifts.
Mo Moulton (Nominated for Best Critical/Biographical – The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women): Getting the chance to write about Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey for The Toast. That essay helped me realize I had more to say about Dorothy L. Sayers’ work, and especially her interpretation of this difficult business of being human and having relationships. That led directly to undertaking the project that became The Mutual Admiration Society.
Karen Abbott (Nominated for Best Fact Crime – The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder that Shocked Jazz-Age America): I was working as a journalist in Philadelphia, and eager to try my hand at book-length narrative nonfiction. While sifting through newspapers looking for a juicy story, I had an unexpected conversation with my grandmother. She told me that her mother and her aunt immigrated to the United States from Slovenia in 1905. They settled in Pittsburgh, but one weekend the aunt went to Chicago and was never heard from again.
I was fascinated and haunted by this bit of family lore. I began looking through old Chicago newspaper clippings from 1905 and came across a sensational report: Marshall Field Jr., son of the department store scion, had been shot—while cavorting inside the most lavish brothel in the world. The brothel, named the Everleigh Club, was operated by two mysterious sisters, Minna and Ada Everleigh, and frequented by many famous men: European royalty, sports heroes, journalists, politicians. There was a $50 entrance fee—an exorbitant sum in 1905—and the Everleigh “butterflies” were even tutored in the poetry of Longfellow. This sounds terrible, but I immediately forgot all about my missing ancestor, and dove into the story of the Everleigh sisters. That research led to my first book, Sin in the Second City.
Lara Prescott: My first big break, so to speak, was actually a failure: getting rejected by every MFA program I applied to the first time around. I call it a big break because that rejection made me more determined to hone my craft. That gave me more focus and drive, and led me to write a story that ended up published in The Southern Review, which was my second big break. And getting that story published gave me the confidence to re-apply to MFA programs, leading to my third big break: getting accepted into the Michener Center for Writers for a three-year fellowship at the University of Texas. The MFA program allowed me, for the first time, to focus solely on my writing (and receive much-needed mentorship and advice from amazing writers such as Elizabeth McCracken and Ben Fountain). And having that time to write was essential to completing my novel, which led to my latest big break: getting a novel published. So, it’s been less a matter of one individual “big break” moment and more of a nuanced path that’s led me to where I am.
Emma Rowley: It’s funny how in retrospect you see one thing led to another. To condense massively, If I hadn’t trained as a journalist and starting writing professionally in that way, I wouldn’t have been asked to look over a ghostwritten memoir, or later started ghostwriting non-fiction books myself—which meant that when I was ready to write my own story, I knew at least that I could write a book and what that might involve. (And now a ghostwriter is the heroine of my upcoming novel, You Can Trust Me.) So rather than a single ‘break’, I think a writing career is made up of steps, and you won’t always know until later that you were on the right path. Perhaps it’s a reminder to keep the faith.
Dave Zeltserman: There are so many, including my first short story sale which made me feel like I belonged as a writer. But my biggest break was having NPR select Small Crimes as one of the five best crime and mystery novels of the year back in 2008. Small Crimes was rejected by every NY publisher, some several times, before being bought by the London publisher, Serpent’s Tail. While it got a starred review from Publishers Weekly, it looked like it was going to disappear without much notice before that NPR selection. That led to me being discovered by more crime fiction readers and eventually to a Netflix movie.
Adam Price (Nominated for Best Paperback Original – The Neversink Hotel): Getting into Cornell to do a fiction MFA. I know many people hate MFA programs, and there’s some justification for this, but it was invaluable in terms of both learning and having time to write my first novel. It was lucky—I mean, I do believe I’ve gotten somewhere at least partly because of hard work, but getting into that program, where they take 4 people out of 500-1000 applicants a year, was just exceedingly fortunate.
Catriona McPherson: That’s a good question. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that before. [pause to make a note of it and use it some time I’m moderating a panel in the future] I thought my big break was the first TV option being sold. You know, because it would immediately go into production and be on Masterpiece Theater in a week or two? Now, I look at options as nice little piles of cash and a rest for my agent till they lapse and she has to start selling them again.
My real break was moving to the US. In 2009, when the global economic meltdown reached publishing, I would have stopped full-time writing and got another day-job. But we were already set to emigrate. So I sat tight and wrote. Then, when we arrived in California, I didn’t have a work-permit for two years so instead of job-hunting I sat tight in the sunshine and wrote some more. Those three years made all the difference to me and I wouldn’t have had the nerve to stick at it if I’d had other choices.
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Do you think of your books as crime fiction? Mysteries? Thrillers? Do the labels matter?
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Barbara Bourland: My books get described as literary fiction, as “unconventional” mysteries and thrillers, and as women’s fiction…t’s all over the board. When asked I tend to say I write for women and leave it at that. Certainly labels are meaningful; they indicate something to the reader and set an expectation. I bet a librarian could give you a bang-up answer for this, but ultimately, novelists are not in the label business. We’re in the “make an argument in a hundred thousand words” business. The labels come after we’ve done all the work.
Laura Tucker: I was deeply influenced by a lifetime of reading crime fiction, particularly the way that the protagonists are often chasing life’s real mysteries—questions of good and evil, why humans behave the way they do–while solving the central puzzle. My main character is deeply frustrated and intrigued by mysteries in her real life–dead ends that fail to yield, the way clues can mean too many things, or nothing at all. So yes: it is a mystery, but maybe more of a mystery about mysteries.
Carol Goodman: I generally just say “mystery” because there’s always a mystery to be solved. There’s also an element of “thriller” because there’s always an imminent threat to the narrator that keeps the tock ticking and the pages moving. I don’t really worry about labels much. Many of my favorite books are hybrid or multi-genre.
Catriona McPherson: They don’t matter to me and if they help booksellers and librarians…I call the strand of writing that Strangers at the Gate falls into “contemporary domestic noir psychological woman in peril thriller”. If you use all the words you’re bound to have used the right one, right? Sometimes I call them the “where’s she off to now?” sub-genre, because there’s very often a woman on the jacket and she’s always walking away. Where’s she off to now?
Dave Zeltserman: I’ve written books that are clearly noir, others that fit solidly as crime fiction, pure mysteries, and I have a thriller series written under the pseudonym Jacob Stone (and I also write horror). Labels do matter for readers. While there are some common threads in crime, mysteries, and noir fiction, they’re certainly different styles of books aimed for different readers, and thrillers are an entirely different beast altogether. That being said, regardless of what genre of book (or story) I write, readers can tell it’s one of my books.
William Lashner: I think labels matter mostly to the readers, giving them an idea what to expect. One of a writer’s job is to meet, and then exceed those expectations. But a really good book will transcend its label and become something unique. Devil In A Blue Dress is a mystery, yes, but that word doesn’t do it justice. When I first started, I worked very hard to maintain all the conventions of a mystery, usually with a corpse at the beginning and plenty of suspects. But now I try to create something new with each book. The only constant, in pretty much everything I write, is that there’s a little bit of detecting going on. There’s just something about a detective story that keeps the book moving and tells so much about the protagonist and the world.
Adam Price: My first novel, The Grand Tour, is definitely not a crime novel/mystery at all. The Hotel Neversing is a mystery, but also a family epic and a literary novel (whatever that means). My work-in-progress is even more of a commercial mystery (I think). I think in one sense labels don’t matter at all—like, is The Big Sleep detective fiction/hard-boiled, or straight literature, at this point? All of the above, and who cares, it’s great.
On the other hand, I think labels are useful for readers, who have limited time and would like to apportion it with things they want to read. For that reason, it’s useful to publishers and booksellers, too. It’s useful, in other words, in the marketplace, but at the end of the day, whatever you call it, bad is bad and good is good.
Tracy Clark (Nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Borrowed Time): I write a PI series set in Chicago, so I suppose it would fall under the category of crime fiction? A crime is committed; somebody ends up really dead. I’m not thinking about labels, though, when I write. I’m concentrating on other things, like finishing. If someone wants to label the books mysteries instead of crime fiction, I’m not going to argue with them.
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Was there one character detail in your recent book that meant more to you than all others? One quirk, eccentricity, or deeply human feature that captured you in the writing process?
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Samantha Downing: I recently wrote about a character who kept mentally telling himself to keep his mouth shut. This was something that really struck me, because so many people offer their opinions and advice without being asked (including me). Sometimes it’s better to just say nothing.
Maureen Callahan (Nominated for Best Fact Crime – American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century): The lead FBI agent on this case, Steve Payne, had no problem talking, in great detail, about the most gruesome details of these kidnappings and murders—but he was very shy and reluctant to admit that every morning, he spent $5 buying his favorite “frou-frou” coffee. He was really embarrassed by that detail, but I found it endearing.
John McMahon (Nominated for Best First Novel – The Good Detective): I think skepticism is one of the most underrated character traits. It’s powerful because it psychologically aligns with the reader. The reader knows a magic trick is afoot and we’re hiding details, so a skeptical character is an avatar for them. Yet that character can also be lying or hiding something, so they can become a riddle within a riddle. And isn’t that the fun of it?
John Vercher: The way my protagonist, Bobby, often viewed events in his life through the lens of comic books. As a child, I struggled with identity and finding where I fit in the world and reading comics that mirrored that struggle was a way for me to cope and not feel alone. I’d lose myself in those narratives to the point where they became an obsession, one that continues to this day.
Tara Laskowski: My novel, One Night Gone, features two alternating narrators, one in the present day and one from the mid-1980s. Maureen, the teenager that narrates the 1985 thread, completely surprised me when I started writing her. Her voice came out strong and forcefully, and I found her so easy and fun to write. It was a delight writing her sections. I’m not sure that’s ever happened to me before—a character just coming to me like that, begging to be written.
Edwin Hill (Nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – The Missing Ones): The Missing Ones is about friendship, warts and all, and I wanted to explore how people stay friends and protect each other, even when they don’t like everything about each other. My protagonist, Hester Thursby, makes some choices at the end of the novel that center on friendship, and they surprised me when I wrote them, which is the best kind of writing. Since those choices are central to the plot, I won’t say much more!
Karen Abbott: One of the most interesting and complicated characters in The Ghosts of Eden Park is Mabel Walker Willebrandt. In 1921, when President Warren Harding appointed Willebrandt to be the assistant attorney general of the United States, she was 32 years old, only five years out of law school, and had never prosecuted a single case in her career—and yet suddenly she was in charge of overseeing all Prohibition-related prosecutions in the United States. Her crooked bosses at the Department of Justice and the White House clearly thought her inexperience and youth would be a detriment, but she surprised everyone by kicking ass.
In addition to the overt and pervasive sexism she experienced, Willebrandt had to grapple with a tremendous physical challenge: She was almost entirely deaf. Because she didn’t want her male colleagues to know of this handicap, she spent an hour each morning styling her hair to conceal her hearing aids. She never spoke of her deafness in public, but sent these incredibly raw and poignant letters to her parents:
“The dread shadow of deafness all but submerges me. For Mama and Papa, dear, when from every quarter and indirectly… I hear the most extravagant marvelings at my capacities over the way I handle myself before the court, and when presiding over trying conferences, that surge of bitterness rises even at their praise when I think, ‘Damn you, you think that’s good, do you know what then I could do if I weren’t struggling under the most horrible handicap that you do not guess.”
One more thing that underscores Willebrandt’s absolute badassery: She bossed around J. Edgar Hoover, who was just at the beginning of his career. I love the idea of a woman telling him what to do.
Mo Moulton: In The Mutual Admiration Society, I write at length about the collaboration between Dorothy L. Sayers and her friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne. They co-wrote the original play of Busman’s Honeymoon, most notably. Unsurprisingly, they wrote copious letters to each other. In addition to being a playwright, Byrne was a historian of Tudor England. The two of them wrote letters to each other in Tudor English, with original spelling and sometimes even period-appropriate handwriting. (I struggled with the handwriting, to be honest!) Their “Tudor” letters are some of the funniest—my favorite is probably the one in which Sayers describes being condescended to by a young literary agent. So disgusted was she with the impertinent young man, she wrote him a long, angry letter. But, she tells Byrne, “having sett all these Words upon paper for the easing of my Stomack, I did tear all upp again, & so leave him as they say to stew in his own Juice.” From the sheer frivolity of taking the time to write this way, to the joy in language, and the fact that these middle-aged, established authors could still enjoy play-acting and goofing around—these letters capture what made me love the members of the Mutual Admiration Society so much.
Adriana Mather: My favorite characters are the prickly ones that give the main character hell. The type that you start out hating and wind up making an “awww” noise about. There is one such character in my Killing November series that I adore. She’s brilliant, she’s ruthless, and she’s always up to something. For me, these characters represent the duality of human nature—the best and the worst—and they remind me (even though it’s not immediately obvious) that our perceived flaws are sometimes our best teachers.
Naomi Kritzer: My book is about teenagers, and one of the things I most enjoyed was writing about the ways in which teenagers are there for one another—both in person, and online. Teenagers can be really amazing friends to one another—it’s something I think they often don’t get enough credit for. Writing about those friendships made me really happy.
Emma Rowley: The place my novel Where The Missing Go is set is a character in a way—it’s a fictionalized version of the village where I grew up in Cheshire, England, which is very personal to me. Adapting a setting I knew in real life also helped me as a writer to envision exactly where the action was taking place throughout the book.
Laura Tucker: My protagonist is a twelve-year-old girl—an artist growing up in 1980s SoHo. The fact that she’s an artist was a North Star for me as I was writing because she sees the world in a very particular way, and she processes what’s happening to her by making art. Craft and skill are important to her; she wants to get better so she can communicate what’s in her head to other people, but she’s already an artist—that’s baked in. Reminding myself to look at the world the way an artist would is the thing I miss most about writing from her perspective.
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What was the biggest obstacle to finishing your recent book? How did you overcome it?
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Lara Prescott: The biggest obstacle was convincing myself to keep going—that the novel would eventually come together, that if it did a publisher would want to publish it, and that someone would then want to read it. That’s a mental obstacle, and one I overcame by just gaming myself into getting up every day and putting the work in.
Maureen Callahan: The FBI, Department of Justice and federal prosecutor’s office in Alaska withheld thousands of case file documents plus at least 13 hours of interviews with Israel Keyes, the most diabolical serial killer they’d ever encountered. I spent five years and $30,000 of my own money suing in federal court—and winning, just months before my final draft was due. Without that information, American Predator wouldn’t have been able to tell the full, unknown story.
Hank Phillippi Ryan: I am constantly pushing myself to be better better better, and working on my twelfth book, I was in a very heightened state of self-criticism. I kept reading my pages, and writing more, and thinking—is this good enough? I overcame it, actually, (as much as I could), by telling myself all that I could fix is all later. It’s okay if it’s terrible now, I reassured myself. Boy, this is terrible now! I said. Good thing I’m going to fix this later. It is always neverendingly fascinating to me, and I have to relearn it every time, that the key of writing is the revising. So I push myself every day to just—advance the plot, advance the story, advance the book, keep going keep going keep going. I will fix it later. And every time, seriously, every time, something happens in the revision, some twist or realization, that sets the whole book into place. I need to remember that my brain is planting things in my writing even though I don’t realize it at the time.
Naomi Kritzer: I was writing the draft in 2017, and it felt like the world was on fire, with new fires breaking out around me constantly. It was incredibly difficult to write, particularly any sort of long project that required sustained concentration. I wound up dealing with this by shifting my schedule: the world got quieter after midnight, and that’s when I did most of my writing.
William Lashner: About halfway through Freedom Road, my bitter-old-hippie book, I was stuck. It’s a road book and I liked where it had been but all I could see were two endings—one unbearably tragic, one unbearably redemptive—and the truth was I couldn’t stomach either one of them. Which is why I called my editor and begged her—literally begged her—to take my superhero novel instead of this road thing which I couldn’t end. But the brilliant Alison Dasho read what I had and then encouraged me to keep going, and, in effect, gave me permission to find a less orthodox ending. I predictably ended with something both tragic and redemptive—the inevitable is sadly inevitable—but it has a feel like nothing I had done before, something almost psychedelic, with wisps of color and memory at the site of an old hippie commune. I never would have found that if I hadn’t been stuck halfway through. Sometimes being stuck lets you know that your direction is wrong and it’s time to turn the map around. And sometimes that gets you an Edgar nomination.
Catriona McPherson: I had tried something new. Not new to writing; just new to me. Four voice characters, one in first and three in third. And it kicked my butt. It took eleven drafts before it was ready to go out the door. (Note to self: avoid challenges.) I overcame it by…drumroll…re-writing. There really aren’t any hacks, are there?
Adam Price: Not knowing who the killer was, all the way into later drafts. The book was pretty far along, nearly finished in some aspects, and I still couldn’t figure it. I kept changing who it was, adding characters, imagining and reimagining the murderer. I guess I overcame it by just working on it long enough, and giving my subconscious enough space to work on it, that literally one day, I was like, OH!!!! It was obvious, suddenly who it should be. But I wouldn’t have gotten there without not knowing who it was for a long time, I don’t think.
Tracy Clark: The world in turmoil hit me hard on this one. Global pandemic, lockdown, quarantine, no ventilators, needless deaths, panic, fear, Washington in chaos, seemingly sane people hoarding toilet paper…still working that one out. I’m not going to lie it was difficult to focus on Cass Raines and pretend death when the world’s in crisis. I don’t have any special tricks for overcoming writer inertia. Wish I did. I just pretty much white-knuckle it. I keep tapping words out until I have something I can work with, trusting at some point that my brain will kick in and move me in the right direction. There is ZERO finesse involved. It’s butt in the seat and muscle memory…and hot tea…lots and lots of hot tea…and my writing hoodie and headphones…and a deadline.
“There is ZERO finesse involved. It’s butt in the seat and muscle memory…and hot tea…lots and lots of hot tea…and my writing hoodie and headphones…and a deadline.”–Tracy ClarkEdwin Hill: The Missing Ones was my number two, and I’d say I hit all the typical challenges of a second novel—self-doubt, looming deadlines, the sudden (and very welcome!) pressure that comes writing under contract. Now that it’s over, though, it’s like going to the gym. I can’t really even remember how painful the process actually was!
Adriana Mather: While writing the sequel to Killing November entitled Hunting November, I came up against a very unfortunate case of “my characters are smarter and more skilled than me.” Truly. They hurt my head to write. They are brilliant strategists and deception experts—I can’t even tell a lie without ratting myself out ten minutes later. They are talented fighters, imploring everything from knives to poisons—I once shot some arrows at the Renaissance Faire. And so I got to work. I took a lying class, researched the history of poisons, learned micro-expressions, and studied knife-throwing videos. Then I wrote. Rewrote. And revised. Again and again until I could do my made-up literary friends justice.
Karen Abbott: Shortly after I sold The Ghosts of Eden Park, my beloved African Grey parrot passed away. She was 19 and I’d had her since she was six weeks old; I even syringe-fed her. Her name was Poe—after Edgar, of course—and, like her namesake, she was brilliant, brooding, and opinionated. She was my constant writing companion, and often delivered her verdict on a day’s work by literally shitting on my pages. I miss her voice—she was an incredible talker—and her gorgeous blood-red tail. I dedicated The Ghosts of Eden Park to Poe.
