I’ve always been obsessed with survival stories—people braving the elements, or out-scheming malevolent captors or striving to survive the end of the world. The apocalyptic trope might be my favorite of the bunch, as I never grow tired of the unique ways writers imagine the unwinding of modern society, and how those at the end might manage to endure. I’m also an avid consumer of domestic suspense, and while those stories often don’t involve life-or-death stakes, per se, I do believe there’s an element of “survival” involved. Navigating the drama of marriage, the dark side of friendship, the secrets of tight-knit suburban communities.
I came up with the concept for With Regrets, my domestic survival thriller about a dinner party on the brink of the apocalypse, on a night when I felt particularly anxious leaving my young kids to attend an adults-only dinner myself. We were using a new sitter, as our usual caregivers were unavailable, and I started spinning worst-case scenarios, as I’ve been known to do: What if this new sitter can’t get the kids to bed? What if my son or daughter gets hurt and the sitter doesn’t know how to handle it? Or what if there’s a greater emergency, world-wide, and the power or phone lines go out?
Because I tend to investigate my fears and insecurities for possible book ideas (call it a coping mechanism), I started teasing out my worries into a loose pitch. What if, during an adults-only dinner party, a worldwide cataclysmic event strikes the Eastern Seaboard . . . and all the guests become trapped, unable to get home to their kids? For all my post-apocalyptic story consumption, I realized I hadn’t seen many books about the end of the world that featured neighbors, friends, or better yet, frenemies. These novels tend to typically feature strangers thrown together, like Josh Malerman’s Bird Box, or else the cast is family, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I also couldn’t recall a single domestic suspense novel where a dinner party devolved into guests scrambling for their lives because of a cataclysmic event.
I started to get excited about this genesis notion of combining a neighborhood drama with an apocalyptic novel . . . but didn’t have a firm grasp on the story’s shape and feel. My process for blending these genres subsequently ended up being quite iterative, and if I could go back in time and advise my prior self, it would be to really sit with, and ponder, the story from a conceptual perspective: What is this story, primarily, at its core?
Initially, I’d just assumed that With Regrets would be domestic suspense, with the added element of an apocalyptic threat, without reflecting on how my choice would dictate my project’s pacing and tone. My first draft included tons of setup in the first act, lots of lengthy flashbacks about the neighbors’ relationships—in fact, the catastrophic event didn’t happen until well within the second act. As a result, the draft felt bloated and, even worse, like it failed to deliver on the promise of its premise.
I stepped back and reconsidered the story, conceptually. Shouldn’t a novel about parents struggling to return home to their children during a dinner interrupted by the apocalypse be suspenseful? Maybe my story, at its heart, was really a thriller.
Reimagining the novel as a survival thriller changed everything. I realized the story’s pacing had to be far more breakneck, and so I swapped my “then-now” structure for a novel that took place in real time. I scrapped most of the flashbacks, repurposing the crucial ones as multimedia interstitials (e.g., email snippets, texts, and prior voicemails). I also made my dialogue work harder for me: every time a character spoke, they had to reveal characterization and advance the plot. These choices ironed out my pacing, and the project’s tone subsequently became more tense and ominous.
All that said, I didn’t want the thriller conceit to fully overshadow the elements I love about domestic suspense stories: the dark side of suburbia, the secrets, lies, and betrayals. With Regrets features nine dinner party attendees, a chef, plus a sommelier, and I wanted each one to feel like a character from a suburban drama that had somehow taken a wrong turn into a survival thriller. Every character had to have secrets they were keeping from the others.
To accomplish this, I used a tip from one of my favorite craft books, Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer, which recommends creating a visual map, or web, of characterization to manage a large cast with various points of connection. I also created a “chart of secrets” for revision, so that I would always have a key as to who knew what, who was keeping what from whom, and why. Then, whenever possible, I paired the revelations of these secrets and hidden agendas with big events occurring in the apocalypse plotline, to maximize the dramatic impact of every major plot point and scene. For example, readers learn of a marriage betrayal at the same time there’s a new devastating discovery about the nature of the terrorizing phenomenon. Another character reveals a secret right as the group discovers a dead victim on the front lawn.
Writing a genre-blending novel wasn’t a new exercise for me, as my recent collaboration with Jennifer Thorne, The Antiquity Affair, combines adventure tropes with a high society historical; and my prior novel, A Criminal Magic, is a fantasy meets crime thriller. But melding a survival thriller with a suburban drama was a first, and probably my most challenging (but rewarding!) genre-meld yet. I hope more writers take up the cause, and if you’re one of them, I hope some of this advice helps you on your way.
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