THE
WD INTERVIEW
T
he first thing that strikes you about Karin
Slaughter is how down to earth she is. She
doesn’t really need to be—she’s a bestselling
author whose crime thrillers have been published
in 37 languages, 120 countries, and sold 35 million copies
around the globe. Three of her novels are in production
for film and television.
Slaughter is an incredibly successful writer by any
measure. She’s been turning out a novel (or more) per
year since her first in 2001. Her primary goal in writing
is to give readers the best story she can give them, every
time. The popularity of her Will Trent and Grant County
series and her four standalone novels attest to this.
Slaughter’s stories grab you by the collar, pull you in,
and keep you there until the last page. Her latest, The
Last Widow, will be published in August, and tackles
domestic terrorism with the breathlessly paced plot and
stunning twists that she is well-known for. It continues
the story of her beloved characters Will and Sara. The
plot is so current it feels ripped right from cable news.
The author has used her success to give back, too. Her
Save the Libraries nonprofit, formed in 2010, has raised
over $300,000.
Slaughter talked with WD about her process, what
being a writer means to her, crafting realistic characters,
what makes good crime fiction, and how libraries are a
critical piece of the social fabric.
I’m still losing sleep over The Last Widow. Everything
in the plot seems entirely plausible, which is scary.
How do you research the details that make your plots
seem so possible?
One thing I’ve been noticing for a while, all this white
supremacist stuff—it’s not a recent thing. It’s been bub-
bling up over the last decade. We’ve been in a lot of wars
that have been raging on and on and on. We have a lot of
people coming back who were very disaffected with that
and who are disaffected with the system, and who don’t feel
like they’re being heard. And also just people getting angry.
That kind of stuff is not anything new. Christchurch, as
awful as it was, is not an outlier. You can trace the history
of these sorts of attacks as long as you can trace history.
44 I WRITER’S DIGEST I September 2019
It was something that I had wanted to write about and
was on my mind, especially because I heard police officers
talking about it, and they were more afraid of domestic
terrorists than terrorists from outside America; that it was
becoming a real issue and that people were mostly afraid
because the tactics of domestic terrorists have started to
mirror the tactics of international terrorism, where you
really cannot predict what’s going to happen. You can’t tell
the difference between the loser who’s complaining all the
time and he’s never going to leave his house and the one
who gets fed up and does something [terrible].
That was at the forefront of my mind, and I’ve been
wanting to pull something with the CDC in, because a
lot of people don’t understand what it does. I love pulling
out details that people don’t necessarily know. I find that
kind of thing fascinating … that they’re response units
and they’re attached to the uniformed services and all
this interesting stuff about them. I wanted to bring that
into it as well. Mostly it was just doing what crime fiction
should always do, which is talking about what is going
on in the world and why it’s bad or why it’s good.
This book also brought up the idea that the world
is not a safe place for women. How can storytelling
bring attention to social issues like this and make
change? Do you hope to make people think more
deeply about some of this with your books?
Primarily I’m writing to entertain, right? If I could change
the world with what I’m writing, then I would write
very different books. But also I think, Are there things in
my books that I would want men to know? Like … sit-
ting down with my dad during #MeToo, because he said
to me, “That would never happen to you” and me say-
ing, “Actually just by virtue of the fact I’m a woman in the
world, that has happened to me multiple times,” and him
being shocked, because he had this idea that it only hap-
pened to a certain type of woman. Because this isn’t the
kind of thing that women generally share with men.
One of the things I can do is say to my readers, “You’re
PHOTO © MARC BRESTER
not alone. You’re not the only woman who knows this
code that gets passed down to us.” I want to write about
and validate the experience for women. If a woman is
murdered, there’s almost a 50 percent chance it’ll be [by]
Karin Slaughter

The international thriller

bestseller discusses weaving a
good crime yarn and her Save
the Libraries nonprofit.
BY ERICKA MCINTYRE

WritersDigest.com I 45
THE WD INTERVIEW Karin Slaughter

A lot of people have fantastic ideas for books. Probably every

person in the world has at least one really good idea. But
sitting down and figuring out how that idea is going to work,
how [the characters] are going to interact, how the plot is
going to move forward—all of that stuff is the business of
being a writer. That’s the hard part.

her intimate partner. If a woman is pregnant, she’s more
likely to die from homicide than from pregnancy compli-
cations. It is a dangerous place in the world right now, as
always, to be a woman.
The Last Widow has some fascinating characters. The
villains are truly repellent people. How did you craft
them, and what was it like spending time with these
awful people while you were writing the story?
One of the main things I do is write about people like that
in a realistic way. Horrible people aren’t horrible all the
time, otherwise they would never be able to find victims. I
think of people who follow charismatic leaders like that in
some way as victims. There’s a cult-like following that these
guys get. Also, I want to make them feel human, because
it’s boring to say, “This person doesn’t believe in the things
I believe in, so I’m just going to make them every horrible
caricature out there.” The thing that makes them more
scary is that [readers] feel like, “This could be my neighbor
or somebody I see in the grocery store.” That’s what’s terri-
fying: the everydayness of these people; they could be any-
body. I want to write about them as real humans to show
that this other side of them cancels out their niceness.
Your books are known for really good plot twists. How
do you know when you’ve nailed a really good twist?
When I get to that part in the book where there’s one of
those twists, it’s something that’s been in my head; it’s
been mulled around. I think, I can do something really
cool with this and I love those moments. I can’t wait to
write them because it’s fascinating to get to that point
where you know that you’ve got the reader grabbed by
the front of their shirt and then you can twist it in a dif-
ferent way and it blows everything else out of the water.
This issue’s theme is The Big Idea. Our readers always
want to know where the best writers get their ideas.
I wish I knew! I can’t say because it organically comes out
of my head. I think when authors say they know where
they get their ideas, they’re lying; they know something
that set them off, but they don’t know where it came from.
Sometimes I’m watching a news story or talking to a police
officer and suddenly my brain’s going in another direc-
tion. But you can’t draw a line to what they said and where
my brain went, because the nature of a writer’s brain is to
go in crazy directions. I also think that the idea is not the
hard part. A lot of people have fantastic ideas for books.
Probably every person in the world has at least one really
good idea. But sitting down and figuring out how that idea
is going to work, how [the characters] are going to interact,
how the plot is going to move forward—all of that stuff is
the business of being a writer. That’s the hard part.
You’ve published at least a book a year since 2001.
What does your writing schedule look like? Are you
one of those writers that’s super disciplined?
“Super disciplined” is a good way to describe it. I schedule
time to write. I tour quite a lot, and touring is very impor-
tant for a writer. But also being a writer is important for a
writer. I have to be careful not to tour so much that I don’t
feel like I can think about writing. That’s a problem that a
lot of writers who are successful have. They realize, “You
want me to go to Australia, but you also want me to write
a book?” I have to be careful about how I schedule my year
and say no to things. There are countries I’m published in
that I’ve been to before and I’d love to go again, but time-
wise there’s no way. I have to be very judicious about that.
It’s important to me that I remember what it was like
to be a struggling college student and how many hours
at minimum wage it took to save up the money to buy a
hardcover book from my favorite author. If I could tell
they hadn’t made any effort I felt personally rejected by
them. If your job is to be a writer, every story needs to be
the best you can write at that time. After this many books,
I owe it to my readers to give 100 percent.
What advice would you give someone who wants to
write a series of books or has an idea for a series?

46 I WRITER’S DIGEST I September 2019

Make sure that you want to write a series because you want
to write a series. Publishers will say if you’re writing a series
that you need to write standalones and if you’re writing
standalones they tell you [that] you need to write series.
That tells you that there’s no right way to do things. You
should write the kinds of books you love to read.
There are problems with each one from a writing
standpoint, because when you’re writing a series, you have
to constantly find new things to say about the characters,
and you have to write about it in a way that your longtime
readers don’t feel bored or like they’re being talked down
to. Then you have to find something that makes your long-
time readers feel rewarded for being longtime readers.
There’s a struggle there, to say something new and inter-
esting each time. With standalones, you’re creating a char-
acter from scratch. That’s how I decide whether my next
book’s going to be a series or standalone … I feel drawn to
the characters. I feel drawn to the story.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
In an article I read by … Dorothy Allison [who wrote
Bastard out of Carolina], she said the worst thing that
can happen to a writer is to get published. And the fact
is that if you write and you’re not published, your goal is
to get published. That’s all you can think about. For me it
defined how I thought of myself. I was always this strug-
gling writer; it took 10 years for me to get an agent and a
book contract. I got published and thought, What’s the next
goal? The thing that helped me get past that was to set more
goals for myself. So, “I want to have foreign sales, I want to
go to these states, I want to …” Your primary goal should
always be to learn how to be a better writer with each story.
The craft of being a writer is important. I’ve had the
same editor from my second book on. We grew up in the
business together. We’re close friends. I trust her. She’s the
only person who edits my work closely, and I learn some-
thing new with each book about myself as a writer, about
technique, character, and what I want to do with a story.
Writing The Last Widow, which is very procedural and
plot driven even though there’s a lot of layers about char-
acter, the time shifts in there … keeping the momentum,
knowing how much is too much, and I can skip over this
information, and all of those choices I made were not the
kinds of choices I could have made when I first started.
And then the ending of the novel, to leave that open-ended
and not have Sara’s response, and not go into “He carries
her off into the sunset” kind of stuff, to just have that shock
of, “is that the last page?!” That takes a hell of a lot of disci-
MORE SLAUGHTER
Read bonus content from Slaughter’s interview at
writersdigest.com/sept-19.
pline. Setting up those kinds of obstacles as a writer, I find
rewarding because being disciplined enough not to over
explain is a really hard thing, but it’s also a learned thing.
So that’s what I would say to new writers: Don’t let your
journey of being a writer stop with getting published.
Why did you start your nonprofit Save the Libraries,
and what do you want to do with it? What do you
wish more people understood about libraries?
I started it at the economic downturn because so many
libraries were suffering; staff were getting fired. I realized a
lot of librarians were losing jobs. In my local system, they
cut library hours, and they usually cut them at the neediest
libraries. Right at the time when people couldn’t afford to
buy books and they were cutting internet in their houses,
libraries were closing or shutting early so kids had nowhere
to go. A lot of kids in rural areas, their only access to the
internet is at the library. A lot of people who want to apply
for jobs, you have to do it online; if they don’t have any
internet at home, there’s no way for them to do it other
than the library. I thought, Let me start this charity and see
what authors can do. I got a lot of authors to do fundraisers.
We gave block grants. I donated the proceeds from a short
story to the charity. We’ve given around $300,000. It’s great
that more authors are doing this because most of us got our
start in the library … It’s really cheap for a community to
keep a library open as opposed to spending money in the
juvenile justice system when kids get bored and do stupid
things. The loss of income from children not having access
to reading is massive compared to the little amount it costs
to keep the library open.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
When you become a writer, you need to decide what suc-
cess is for you. That might be getting published, getting to
write the books you want to write, going to the library and
seeing your book. If you say, “I want to be a number-one
bestseller,” that is very unlikely. The odds must be worse
than buying a lottery ticket. For me, success is that I get to
write the books I want to write and I get to do it for living,
which is very rare. I feel honored that I get to do that. WD
Ericka McIntyre is editor-in-chief of WD.
WritersDigest.com I 47
THE
WD INTERVIEW
Lisa Jewell
L
isa Jewell has found her sweet spot. After writing a
few rom-coms, then sliding into family dramas, her
books now land solidly in the psychological thriller
category. And she’s not going anywhere.
“I’m settling here,” she says. “It was destined that I
wasn’t going to write a thriller for my first novel, and I’m
quite glad I didn’t—now. But this is where I was meant to
be, and this is where I’m going to stick.”
And why wouldn’t she? The success the British novel-
ist has found throughout her 19 novels is impressive. The
Family Upstairs was an instant New York Times bestseller
and was followed by Then She Was Gone which spent
more than a year on the same list and sold over a million
copies. Combined, her books have sold more than 5 mil-
lion copies in 29 languages.
Now Jewell is out with her a new novel, The Night She
Disappeared, about Tallulah, a missing teen mom whose
own mother, Kim, will stop at nothing to find out what
happened. It has all of the hallmarks readers expect from
a Lisa Jewell blockbuster: more twists and turns than you
can count, red herrings galore, complex character moti-
vations, and an ending you won’t predict. Jewell knows
the importance of a strong ending in a thriller, saying, “It
comes down to such minute decisions in the end. ... It’s
a strange one because, for me, the ending is absolutely
everything when you write a thriller. I’ve just read so
many thrillers with disappointing endings and I couldn’t
bear to put a book out there that had a disappointing
ending. So, I have to take a deep breath and hope I’ve
chosen the right outcome for my characters.”
But before we could talk about endings, we had to
start at the beginning, with the inspiration for The Night
She Disappeared.
I always love hearing where you get your ideas
for new books because sometimes it’s just a quick
60 I WRITER’S DIGEST I January/February 2022
passing moment. Where did the idea for this
particular book come from?
Well, it wasn’t quite as picturesque or poetic as some of
my inspirations look. The Family Upstairs was inspired
by a woman I saw when I was on holiday in the south of
France. This one was a bit more prosaic than that, but it
still has the same feeling of, I’ve just had an idea, and now
I want to write it really badly. Somebody said the words
“boarding school,” and I suddenly knew that I wanted to
write a book that was set [there], which I’ve never done
before. I had this idea of a murder mystery with a board-
ing school setting somewhere out in the countryside, in a
beautiful old building with stunning manicured grounds,
and what have you. As I was mentally processing my way
through the grounds of this beautiful imaginary school,
I saw this sign in my head, a sign saying “Dig Here.” And
that was the diving board from whence the story came.
TNSD features three different timelines that ulti-
mately catch up to each other. How do you navigate
writing those different timelines and keeping them
straight for yourself as you’re drafting or revising?
Well, it’s actually the other way around. Having the vari-
ous timelines is what keeps it straight. If I didn’t have so
many timelines going on, I would get quite lost. Because
I don’t plan when I write and I don’t have any idea where
the story is going, if I was only following my writerly
clues from the perspective of one person in one place
at one time, I wouldn’t really have a lot to go on. I think
I would get quite stuck and end up writing myself into
JEWELL PHOTO © ANDREW WHITTON
corners and not sure where to go. There’s sort of a pin-
ball bouncing around from person to person, timeline
to timeline, perspective to perspective, it’s what keeps it
all together. It all keeps the momentum going and gives
me what I need as a writer in terms of clues as to what’s
going on. So, I get to the end of the chapter with one
The New York Times
bestselling British author
discusses creating thrilling
plot twists and developing
characters in her 19th novel,
The Night She Disappeared.
BY AMY JONES

WritersDigest.com I 61
THE WD INTERVIEW Lisa Jewell
character and think, Well, now they know this fact but
that doesn’t really help me going on into the future with
this character. I need another character to come and tell
me another fact from their point of view. So that’s how it
actually works. It’s much easier than it might look to a
reader, to actually break the narrative up into those sorts
of chunks.
I’m so interested to hear that because as I’ve been
interviewing different writers who use multiple time-
lines, some of them talk about discovering another
timeline as they get further into the book and having
to go back and revise and map them out and sticky
notes and dry erase boards.
Oh, god, no! No, see when I die and they come to clear
out all my writerly effects, they will find nothing. There
would be not one piece of evidence, apart from my pub-
lished books and the documents in my Word folders,
that I ever wrote a book. I don’t have anything. It’s all just
in my head and on the screen and then, ultimately, in a
paperback novel.
My brain doesn’t work like that. I can’t take things
out of the novel and put them onto a Post-it Notes and
put them onto a whiteboard and then reconnect them
back to the novel. I can only work those things out in
the context of the novel, of the words I’m looking at on
the screen; if they’re anywhere else, they don’t make any
sense to me. It’s quite intense, but it works for me. And
[it] does the way the other writers have what works for
them. It’s the joy and the magic of it because everybody
finds their own way to do it.
So how does that way of not plotting work when it
comes to your revisions and making sure that things
work together? Do you find that you spend more
time revising as a result?
Less, actually. This is my 19th novel, and in my first 10,
12, maybe even 13 novels, I did an awful lot of revisions,
and also lots of deletions of stuff: rejigging, printing off
the manuscript and putting it on the floor, moving sheets
of paper around, and changing my mind about things.
For the biggest chunk of my career, there’s been lots
of that. But that’s something I would like to think you
should get better at—the technical aspects of writing—
once you’ve been writing for 25 years and written 19
novels. And I have … I do much less in the way of revi-
62 I WRITER’S DIGEST I January/February 2022
sions, of taking stuff out, and of going backward before I
can go forward. I spend much more time now just going
forward. Wasting much less time and being much more
efficient, much more confident, and trusting my instincts
a lot more, which I think is vital. But it takes a lot of
practice to trust your instincts.
Your novels are so very character-driven, and in TNSD,
I love Tallulah. But what’s fascinating to me is where
she is in her life. Not only is she at an age where she’s
going from being a teen to being an adult, but she’s
doing that while learning how to be a mom and figur-
ing out parts of her own sexuality that she might not
have known were there before. How did you figure
out all of these pieces of who she is?
I started writing her as an afterthought. I hadn’t been
going to include her. I had just been going to map the
whole story out between Kim and Sophie [Tallulah’s
boyfriend’s mother]. Then I got to a point … [where]
Kim and Sophie need some help here in understanding
what might’ve happened to Tallulah, and the only way I
can give them any help is by knowing what happened to
Tallulah myself. The only way I’m going to find out what
happened to Tallulah is to write the girl. So, I introduced
her quite a few chapters in, and the first chapter I wrote
was her seeing this girl who I assumed would be the girl
with the swimming pool.
I knew that Tallulah had been at a pool party with
this girl called Scarlett. I thought, Right, let’s start writing
Tallulah. And I do start very, very quickly. I don’t sit and
wait for the muse and prevaricate … I just go with the
first thing that presents itself to me. The first thing that
presented itself to me was Tallulah sitting in the cafeteria
at college and seeing this girl Scarlett. And I could have
gone any way with it, ’cause I didn’t really know who
Tallulah was, but I found myself writing that she was
really aching for her baby. I also realized that she was a
teenage mother who was aching for her baby. That kind
of formed everything else.
What if she’s aching for her baby, but she’s doing this
other thing: She’s improving herself and making a life for
herself in the future, then she’s probably very responsible
and she’s probably not very rebellious. She probably does
toe the line and do everything as expected. She probably
is quite quiet. She probably isn’t wild. It was that initial
sight of her in my mind’s eye sitting quietly in the
cafeteria, aching for her baby just informed everything.
That’s kind of how all my characters come out. I put
them somewhere because I have to start writing them. …
And that’s the joy of it. That’s why I love writing char-
acters so much—watching them unfold on the page and
watching these layers develop and getting to know them
as I write them. I never come to a book with a character
fully formed in my head and I know everything about
them. I know a couple of things and everything else
comes from that.
Some of your books, including TNSD, explore the
power dynamics and trust between people in posi-
tions of power vs. people who are in comparatively
lower positions of power, like a principal vs. a stu-
dent, or in this case, a quiet teen mom vs. a popular
teen. How do you approach working those concepts
into your novels?
Any sort of friction is going to work in a novel. I imme-
diately knew which relationships you were talking about
and from which of my novels, and I didn’t actually notice
until you pointed that out, that there is a pattern of that
in my books. I have chosen those dynamics very subcon-
sciously it appears. I guess I liked writing about hope-
less crushes, and I think there is an element of that with
the headteacher in Watching You, and a few people have
a hopeless crush on him. … And then again here, you’ve
got Scarlett who has a whole cast of people who were in
thrall to her. A whole cast of people who actually would
kill for her and do kill for her.
I think that’s a really interesting thing, particularly
for me, because I’ve never been in that position. There’s
never been anyone in my life who I’ve felt that way about
or looked up to in that way or have that sort of obsession
with … So maybe that’s why I like to explore it because
that’s not any feeling that I have for another human being
in my life, yet it creates so much interesting friction on
the page. And as you say, it also creates all this ambigu-
ity, which is the key to a good psychological thriller. I
think it’s just something I’ve naturally kind of come back
to time after time and I’m doing it again with the novel
I’m writing at the moment. There is some obsessive love
going on there as well and a master taking control of
somebody who’s in thrall to them, that dynamic again. …
So, that’s another thing that happens when you’ve
written 19 novels, you get repeating motifs. Somebody
was asking me about this last night, “What things do
you find you keep coming back to now you’ve got to
this point in your career?” And I said, “I keep going
back to teenagers.” And she said, “Oh, I thought you
were going to say houses because that is a repeating
motif, is the houses.”
So many of your books do feature a home with
secrets. What goes on behind closed doors, what
people choose to reveal about themselves to the
world, how much you actually know about the peo-
ple you live with, and there’s so much for novelists to
explore there. What about that is interesting to you?
… They’re like little boxes to lock people away with
their secrets. Places where people can be absolutely
themselves and not have to worry about what anybody
thinks or what impression they’re giving to the world.
So, they’re bound to be the most interesting place to see
stories unfold, but that’s clearly where all the interesting
stuff is happening.
Obviously, you’ve got other sorts of locked room
environments that you can write like that boarding
school, it’s a similar thing. But still, there’s nothing more
intensely private than a house with a door shut and
nobody else there apart from the people who live there
and their secrets and their true selves that come out.
Why wouldn’t you want to write about houses?
The importance of the ending in your books really
shines through. There was one point in TNSD where
I thought, OK, perhaps I figured it out. Not only had
I not figured it out, but there was a second twist that
absolutely made sense and leaves readers with a
little gasp.
Exactly. And it’s that little bit at the end, because so often
when you set up a brilliant thriller and then you have to
explain everything at the end, a lot of thrillers can just
run out of steam with all the explaining. You can almost
feel the writer just like thinking, Oh, I’ve got all these
loose ends I need to tie up and I’ve tied that one up. Right,
now I need to tie up another one, oh, there’s another one.
And then you get to the end and you’re like, “Oh. OK.” I
quite often feel like that when I’m writing my endings. …
Because it is hard to end a novel, which is why I love to
come back with a thing, a thing that, it’s usually some-
thing that I’ve been saving up for the whole book.
WritersDigest.com I 63
THE WD INTERVIEW Lisa Jewell
It doesn’t have to be a huge twist that throws the
whole thing off-kilter, just a little thing just to make the
reader go, “Ohhhh, that was going on all along in the
background. I never even thought of that.” That’s a really
good way of rescuing the ending of a thriller with that
sort of dribbling away thing that they can do sometimes.
You did that so well in TNSD and Watching You as
well. That one really got me.
Because it didn’t actually change the story, the ending of
Watching You. It wasn’t a massive twist. It just gave the
reader a different view of things, kind of mentally scroll-
ing back through everything. I like to do that. I think
that leaves the reader feeling satisfied and like it was all
worth it. It takes a long time to read a 400-page novel
and you want to feel like it was worth your time.
I think my problem with your books is I enjoy them
so much that I always say, “Oh, I’ll just read one
more chapter,” and then it’s 2:00 a.m. Part of it is
because of the way you create cliffhangers at the
end of your chapters.
I think it’s very instinctive for me in a way. Because, quite
often, the mechanics of just getting a chapter down on
the page can feel quite dull. You can sometimes write a
chapter and think, all I’ve done is move my characters
out of one house into another house. And they’ve had
a conversation and they’ve revealed a wonderful some-
thing or other. Now I’ve come to the end of the chap-
ter, and I need something to give me the momentum to
jump onto the next chapter because I’m feeling like I just
wasted 1,500 words or however long the chapter is. So, I
will just pluck anything, anything that I can possibly find
out of thin air to put into the last paragraph of the chap-
ter to bounce it back out of whatever doldrums I felt it
might have been in and bounce me into the next chapter
I’m rearing and ready to start writing. I do it for me, but
I can see it, obviously, it has the byproduct of working
quite well for the reader too.
What is the general working relationship like
between you and your editors and your agents?
Because you’ve got editors and agents on both sides
of the Atlantic—how many of them get involved in
the ideation of a book?
I’ve got a very unusual relationship with my U.K. edi-
tor, and she’s my fourth editor I’ve had over my career,
64 I WRITER’S DIGEST I January/February 2022
or maybe my fifth. But she’s the only editor I’ve ever had
who sees my rough first draft. Every other editor I ever
had before that, I would honestly rather cut off my toes
than let them read my rough first draft because they’re
the ones who pay me. I don’t want them to ever see my
dirty laundry, unwashed garments: the truth about my
terrible writing. But me and my U.K. editor, we just
clicked. I think this is her seventh or eighth novel with
me, and I’m not scared of her seeing my bad writing. It
doesn’t scare me at all.
She works as the first reader in the way, and that is
highly unusual for a writer’s editor to be their first reader.
It’s usually either someone they live with or a friend
or their agent … At the moment, my editor is my first
reader … She will fix my manuscript for me, I’ll go away
and rewrite it. Then we present that in one fell swoop to
my English agent, my American agent, and my American
editor, who then make their own editing notes. We then
do the next draft as per their input as well. So, it’s quite
unusual, but it absolutely works for me, hugely. It’s part
of why I’m so relaxed about the writing process, now that
I’m not scared of what happens at the end anymore.
Did you have any additional writing advice for the
readers of Writer’s Digest?
I think the thing that is most helpful to me now at this
point in my career is not overthinking things and just
putting yourself on the page. Not thinking about the
market, and not thinking about the book that you read
last week that was really good and why didn’t you write
that book, and not thinking about will people think
I’m stupid if I say this. There are so many things you
can worry about when you’re writing that are all irrel-
evant. Two people can write the same book and it’d be
two completely different books. The important thing is
a book that you write is your book and it’s you, and you
put yourself into it and don’t listen to any of the inter-
ference from anywhere else in the world. Just you, your
screen, your brain, your fingertips, your world, just focus
on you. Just communing with your keyboard and not
worry about what anybody else is doing at all. WD
Amy Jones is editor-in-chief of WD. Follow her on Twitter
@AmyMJones_5.
Character Study
Bestseller Walter Mosley emphasizes the importance of characterization and the
legacy of Devil in a Blue Dress.
BY TYLER MOSS

W
alter Mosley is
known for iconic
characters. From
Easy Rawlins to
Leonid McGill and Fearless Jones,
his heroes quickly come to life on
the page in a way that draws inter-
est and empathy from readers. Their
personalities are so distinct that
legions of fans line up to buy his
books, eager to devour a new mys-
tery through the evolving lens of
their favorite sleuth.
“They’re all getting older,” says
Mosley, referring to his cast of series power to change the world.” and people, and at the same time tell-
protagonists. “So [in each book] it’s a What was your inspiration for ing a very earthy story of violence and
different time and it’s a different per- this book? prison and being a fugitive from jus-
son having that experience.” I wanted to write about how impos- tice. All that stuff, you know, is part of
That nuance may seem subtle, but sible it is to understand history, and understanding how the stories we tell
it’s illustrative of how deeply Mosley how impossible it is to escape history. inform our lives.
inhabits the minds of his charac- So you’re completely controlled by
PHOTO © WIDEVISION PHOTOGRAPHY: MARCIA WILSON

ters. In a conversation with WD, he
reflects on the passion and craft that
inform his bestselling novels.
Your latest, John Woman, is
described as a “deliciously
unexpected novel about the
way we tell stories and whether
the stories we tell have the
something you can’t understand, even
though you believe you understand.
My studies in political theory led me
to that belief, and just to talk about
something so heady and intellectual
in a very earthbound novel reminds
me of one of my literary heroes, Émile
Zola from France. He was so great at
talking about the culture of a country
Devil in a Blue Dress was
published almost three decades
ago. How do you think your
writing, or your writing process,
has changed since composing
that first novel?
That’s a hard question. I’m sure that it
has, but I’m not even sure how. [It’s]
one of the things that I’ve talked to

8 I WRITER’S DIGEST I January 2019

people about, because a lot of people
worry about technique …
It’s like when you talk about paint-
ers, and you’ll say, “Wow, look at that.
That piece looks like you could pick
it up off the canvas and eat it. It looks
that real.” I say, “Uh-huh, but that
doesn’t make it art.” That just [means]
the craft is really excellent. But, you
know, you might find somebody liv-
ing on a farm in rural Tennessee who
has palsy, draws a shaking outline of a
peach in a couple of strokes, and that’s
much more art. He has more feeling to
it. There’s more [to] the placement of
it, the weight of it. When you feel what
was behind the drawing, even.
And I say that because I’m a much,
much better writer than I was when
I wrote Devil in a Blue Dress. But any
book I’ve written now, Devil could
stand up against critically. Because
it’s actually what you put into it that
makes it the art, not necessarily the
craft. I mean, you can’t be completely
without craft, but craft doesn’t make
art. Craft just makes good sentences.
In your recent novel Down the
River Unto the Sea, it only takes
three chapters to feel like you
intimately know and empathize
with the main character, Joe
King Oliver. How do you achieve
that level of characterization so
quickly into a novel?
I think you have to know your charac-
ter intimately. The other thing about it
is this: You’re reading this novel, right?
And the notion is, well, it’s like this is
the first time you’re ever reading these
words. And maybe the last. But what’s
important to remember is that the
writer wrote a draft of that chapter and
then another and then another. The
writer has written a whole book and
then has come back to that chapter
“It’s hard to separate setting from character from
the weather. All of it is in description.”
with all this knowledge that they have
from the whole book, and brings that
to bear.
So even though it feels kind of like,
well, “He did this in the first two chap-
ters or three chapters”— really, it took
a whole book to be able to do that in
the first two or three chapters.
You’ve said that in fiction,
there’ve historically been black
male protagonists and black
male supporting characters,
but nobody writes about black
male heroes. In your mind,
what distinguishes a protago-
nist from a hero?
Well you know, Richard Wright’s char-
acters in all of his books, their main
characters—their protagonists—are
very serious people, but they’re deeply
flawed. And they’re not people that
we like or we want to be. That person
isn’t representing us in the world. That
person’s not our Captain America.
It’s like this guy and maybe he killed
somebody. Because he’s completely
destroyed by the system.
Now, I understand that a lot of
heroes—especially for people from
struggling classes in America—they’re
going to have been destroyed in some
kind of way. They’re going to have to
then attack in some kind of way. Like
King Oliver, you know. His whole life
has been turned upside down and
torn apart. He’s lost everything. For a
long time: his daughter, his wife, his
job, his belongings, everything—gone.
But we still like him. He has his flaws,
he’s done these things wrong. But we
identify with him in a way, and we can
say, “I see myself in this character, and
I’d like to be able to do what he does to
answer my problems.”
What role do you feel setting
plays in bringing a story to life?
It’s hard to separate setting from
character from the weather. All of
it is in description. You’re describ-
ing things from the beginning to the
end, and how much energy you put
into making that feel unique is what
that’s about.
Some people are less interested in
the urban environment that they’re
in, for instance. Honestly, I write well
about New York, but I still am not
quite sure of the names of the streets
that intersect with my street.
I’m writing another book about
writing, and one of the moments I
talk about is you go into a hospital
room and there’s a paraplegic man
in a white bed in a coma. How long
would it take you to describe that
scene? And the truth is, if you did
it exhaustively, it would be thou-
sands of pages. Thousands. Because
there are so many things happen-
ing, so many different elements. In
a completely pristine, uninteresting,
unmoving room.
So the question becomes: How do
you choose what to say to explain that
room in a paragraph or two and move
on? And I have an answer for that
question, and you have an answer for
that question, and all the other people
reading this will have an answer for
that question. It either comes from
your memory or your imagination, but
it doesn’t come from mine.
Tyler Moss is the editor-in-chief of
Writer’s Digest.
WritersDigest.com I 9
THE
WD INTERVIEW
Viet Thanh Nguyen
P
ersistence. It’s the theme that runs throughout Viet
Thanh Nguyen’s writing career, and it has paid off.
Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer, was the
recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal
for Excellence in Fiction, an Edgar Award, and the Dayton
Literary Peace Prize, among many others. Although it
was his debut, it wasn’t the first book he wrote. Nguyen
worked on a short story collection, The Refugees, for 20
years before it found a home. “Twenty years of rejection
and misery and isolation was a terrible experience,” he
said. “But on the positive side of that, I came out focused
on the writing, thinking that the writing was what
mattered.”
With that focus in mind, Nguyen writes books that
he would like to read, without worrying what others will
think of them, saying, “Write this book for yourself, not
for anybody else …” Because of that approach, these nov-
els from a literature professor and avid reader are multi-
layered, genre-breaking works of art that do as much to
critique culture as they do to entertain readers.
The Sympathizer follows an unnamed narrator on his
escape to the U.S. during the Fall of Saigon, to a movie
set, and ultimately to a Vietnamese reeducation camp
where he writes his confession—the very book we’re read-
ing. In the 2021 sequel, The Committed (set to be released
in early March), the narrator finds himself in Paris, still
reeling from his experiences at the camp and the fallout
from his time as a double-agent. Just as absurd and comi-
cal and sharp as The Sympathizer, The Committed is a
modernist experiment disguised as a thriller.
Between writing the novels, the publication of the
first delayed to better time with the anniversary of the
end of the Vietnam War and the second delayed due to
44 I WRITER’S DIGEST I January/February 2021
COVID-19, Nguyen found a home for the short stories
he’d worked on, edited a collection of essays by refugee
writers called The Displaced, and co-wrote a picture book,
Chicken of the Sea, with his son, Ellison. He also wrote
the nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the
Memory of War, which considers the many ways history
is remembered, misremembered, and erased. We began
our conversation by considering how the idea of mem-
ories influenced the form of his novels.
Both of the novels are written as confessions or
memoirs of the narrator repressing troubling or
disturbing memories and then coming to remember
that event by way of the writing. Were the books
always written that way, or did it take you a draft or
two to figure out that was the right mechanism for
telling his story?
The Sympathizer I knew was going to be a narrative in
which the Sympathizer was speaking to someone else.
That made it a kind of confession already, but I didn’t
know that it would be a formal kind of confession some-
one writes down until much later in the book. I had an
outline for the book. I knew the narrative would end up
in a reeducation camp, but actually I didn’t make the
connection that he would be writing his confession in
the reeducation camp until about two-thirds of the way
into the book. As I was approaching the reeducation
camp, I understood exactly what the ending of the novel
NGUYEN PHOTO © BEBE JACOBS
was going to be.
I wanted to set up within The Sympathizer a structure
whereby it would be a Vietnamese person speaking to a
Vietnamese person because if I did that, then what that
would be is that the narrator, the Sympathizer, would
The award-winning author
discusses the challenges
of writing his second novel
and why trusting readers
can make for a more
compelling narrative.
BY AMY JONES

WritersDigest.com I 45
THE WD INTERVIEW Viet Thanh Nguyen
not have to explain a lot of things. If you’re speaking
to someone of the same background, you don’t have
to explain the things you share in common. This was
important for me because very typically the way that so-
called “ethnic” or “minority” literature operates in the
United States is that the so-called “ethnic” or “minor-
ity” writer is expected to speak, to write, as if they were
addressing someone who needs things explained to
them. That is, the reader, who is assumed to be of a dif-
ferent background, but it’s a majority background.
And that is wrong. Because if you’re a writer of the
majority background, you don’t have to translate. You
just assume that your readers have the same background,
and you’re probably right. But myself being this so-called
“minority,” I’m not of the majority background but I
always approach the literature of someone like Philip
Roth or Jonathan Franzen, whoever, as someone who’s
both an insider and outsider.
I didn’t plan to write a sequel to The Sympathizer, but
at the end of the novel, I thought, Oh, I’m not finished
with this character yet. I’m not finished with these issues
the novel raises. Since The Sympathizer is a spy novel and
a thriller novel and those genres are perfectly fine with
sequels and series, I thought it was perfectly legitimate to
continue in this vein and write another book about the
Sympathizer. In the second book, the challenge was, how
do I write this in a way that both continues the action
narrative of the spy-thriller story, but also continues the
formal aspect of the book and the confession? I thought
in the very beginning, Well, he’ll be writing again to him-
self probably. But where will he be writing this? I thought,
Well, the first book he was in a reeducation camp, and
then in the second book, it’ll probably be a task given to
him in an asylum. Because he’s not going to be quite right
in his mind. I’ve got to figure out how to get to the asylum.
In the case of The Committed, the process was differ-
ent than The Sympathizer. In The Sympathizer, I had a
two-page outline. In The Committed, I had something
like 50 single-spaced pages of notes and outline. So that’s
much more detailed.
So it’s a sequel; it has to function as its own novel and
this is a kind of a tricky thing to do. The Committed is
written so that you can read it without having read The
Sympathizer, which means certain explanatory things
that have happened to explain the background and the
plot and all of that. The justification for that is that there
are these readers who need things explained to them.
46 I WRITER’S DIGEST I January/February 2021
This is also very important to me because as a writer,
I just felt like I had to have a justification for why things
appear in the book. You know, when you read a series
and you read the second, or the third book in the series
or trilogy, you can see exactly when the writer is explain-
ing things to the reader, like what happened in volume
one and there’s no justification for it. It’s simply that a
reader has to be brought up to speed in the book. But as
a writer, it always bothers me to see that because I know
it’s necessary, but at the same time, it doesn’t work in the
function of the narrative. So in The Committed, there’s a
justification for the explanation of the plot that happens
because of who he’s writing to.
I really like that explanation of how the format of it
helps get some of that backstory into the second
book. How else was writing the sequel different
from the first?
Well, one main difference is I had much more material
in advance prepared for the book. The process of writing
the book was initially very easy. What had happened was
that I finished all the edits for The Sympathizer in early
2014, we decided—the publisher and I—not to publish
the book until April 2015, which was well more than a
year off. The reason why we did that was my suggestion,
that April 2015 was the 40th anniversary of the end of the
Vietnam War and therefore there would be a lot more
attention paid to the book. But that meant that I had a lot
of time before The Sympathizer came out. In that interim,
I wrote Nothing Ever Dies. I had spent over a decade
working on [The Sympathizer] and writing articles. So
what I did there was I wrote the book from scratch based
on the ideas in the articles, but the narrative of the book
was something new.
I finished that in about a year and then I had a few
more months. I wrote 50 pages of The Committed before
I had to go on book tour for The Sympathizer and writing
those first 50 pages was pretty easy. I wrote them fairly
quickly, I had the outline, things were going great. Then
I went on the book tour and that was something that was
disruptive. Then the novel won the Pulitzer Prize and
everything just basically went to hell, in a good way! But
for like a year, I wrote nothing because I was so over-
whelmed by all of the publicity.
It was also more challenging because my thought
process kept continually getting interrupted. That’s dan-
gerous for a writer. The Sympathizer felt like one smooth
flow and hopefully felt that way for the reader. For The
Committed, I thought I might lose that flow. I had to
spend a lot of time just going back over the narrative
over and over again, which I didn’t have to do with The
Sympathizer, to try to make sure I had this continuity of
plot and voice and emotion.
When you talk about being interrupted and not hav-
ing enough continuous time to stay in the frame of
mind to write, was any of that piled on by trying to
stay out of your own mind? The Sympathizer won so
many awards and got so much critical acclaim. How
did you not put irrational pressure on yourself to
compete with yourself?
I think that’s always there and it’s something I am thinking
every now and again: Will the book be as good as the first
book? Will it get as much attention? You just have to stop
thinking about that and the way that I stopped thinking
about that was to write. Not to get into my own mind, but
to get into the mind of the Sympathizer because he and
I are sort of alter egos. We share some similar ideas and
issues and personalities, but beyond that, he’s obviously a
very different person. I had to get into his mind. That was
the only way to solve a problem and inhabit it. So it was
not actually hard for me not to think about all the other
worldly things that might concern a writer.
I think this is a situation and maybe it wasn’t as much
of a big deal for me because I—basically in order to write
The Sympathizer, what happened to me is that it was like
20 years of struggling with my writing. Most of it devoted
to my short story collection. When I set off writing The
Refugees, I was in my 20s and a very different person
than I am now, in a sense that back then, I cared about
my writing, but I also cared about all the things you were
talking about. Will it be successful? Will I be famous? Will
I get awards? I mean, these are things that preoccupy a
lot of writers, but they’re utterly unimportant. They have
nothing to do with the writing. Unfortunately, if I’d been
successful at 25 or 30 with that book, I probably would
be exactly in the position you described—worried about
whether I could succeed again.
In writing The Committed, I wouldn’t say it’s been like,
Well, I got all these things. They’re great, I don’t need any
more of that. How many prizes do you want as a writer?
How much is going to be enough? To me, I felt like I’d got-
ten enough with The Sympathizer. I got enough awards to
last anybody for a lifetime. So with The Committed, I was
free from having to worry about that. I mean, it’d be nice
to get more, obviously [laughs], but what was crucial for
me was to think, I don’t need any more of these things. I can
still write this novel for myself.
In reading the two novels, it occurred to me that you
are a fantastic example of a writer who knows the
“rules” and knows how to break them well. There
was one choice in particular that I wanted to ask you
about—it was to do with pacing and dialogue. Your
books don’t use quotation marks for dialogue or ital-
ics for internal thoughts, which forced me to slow
down and read carefully. But at the same time, the
books are incredibly fast paced in plotting. It was a
constant feeling of wanting to read fast because I
couldn’t wait to see what happened, but then need-
ing to read slow to really see what happens.
My other life is that I’m a professor of literature. I have a
PhD in English and I read a lot and I’m very broadmin-
ded in my reading. So I’ll read very serious modernist
literature. I’ll read sort of lower brow literary fiction and
I’ll read so-called low brow genre fiction.
From all of that, what I can tell is that what’s con-
sidered contemporary, legitimate literary fiction in this
country tends to lean toward the middle brow. By that
I mean, it’s dominated by realism. It’s dominated by
not being very intellectually challenging and not very
formally challenging either as if modernism never hap-
pened. In modernism people were doing very serious,
complicated stuff in the 1920s and 1930s and it’s as if
for most American fiction writers of the contemporary
period, it never happened. It’s weird.
And to me, anything that happens in all of these
genres—and I consider contemporary literary fiction a
genre, too—it’s important. They’re all interesting in their
own ways. My desire in writing these novels was to write
novels that were very serious, that would be very chal-
lenging formally, and could be very entertaining at the
same time. I have trust in readers, not all readers, but I
have trust that there’s a large number of readers out there
that can handle this kind of combination. That want to
be entertained and that want to be challenged and elevated
at the same time. So what that means is that writing a
novel with a plot was very important to me and if you
read a lot of contemporary American literary fiction,
especially what’s produced out of MFA programs, they’re
terrible at plotting. Yes, there’s a plot loosely speaking in
there, but it’s people dwelling on their alienation of one
kind or another.
WritersDigest.com I 47
THE WD INTERVIEW Viet Thanh Nguyen
But I read a manual on how to write movies, screen-
plays, and all they care about is plot. That’s bad too, but I
just distilled that. If you go underneath the hood of these
two novels, you’ll discover it’s a very conventional plot
structure—three act structure—all the expected turns
are happening, all the expected beats. That was what the
outlines for the novels were designed to do, was to make
sure that I knew where to put plot events to keep the
reader reading.
Now, given that, I read a lot of genre fiction. I love to
read detective novels. The problem is, I cannot remem-
ber which ones I’ve read. I will be behind a year or two
and I’ll want to go back and I’ll start thinking, What was
the last book that I read? I cannot remember! Because
they’re very entertaining and they’re instantly, for me,
forgettable. That’s a serious problem. One of the rea-
sons why those genre novels are forgettable is because
they’re all about the plot. Some of the time the charac-
ter’s important too. But the characters sort of remain the
same over the trilogies and tens and tens of novels.
I needed to break down that element as well. The
question of being deeply immersed in this narrator’s
point of view and being subjected to his character and
everything that he undergoes is really crucial because
he is designed to be unforgettable. Whether you like or
don’t like the books, I don’t think you can forget who this
person is. That’s why the book draws heavily from mod-
ernism, immersing the reader deeply into one character’s
very seriously warped perspective out of the belief that
all of us are deeply warped people. Whatever we pres-
ent to other people within our own psyche, we’re deeply
warped people most of us, not all of us. [Laughs]
The other issue was that when you read a lot of con-
temporary literary fiction, I can see the rules, as you
said, that are in operation. The rules include things like
quotation marks, explaining things to the reader, and lots
of description. I know that none of these things actually
have to happen. They’re just conventions. I learned those
conventions for The Refugees, and I’ve learned them by
reading a lot. In The Sympathizer and The Committed
though, the challenge was in contemporary literary fic-
tion, when you deploy these rules, it’s not that you can’t
get into the personalities of your characters. Obviously,
these contemporary literary novels can be very immer-
sive. I feel like they serve in a certain way to separate
the reader from the character and experience that’s
unfolding. If I strip the novel of these elements, number
one, would it be possible to get the reader closer to the
48 I WRITER’S DIGEST I January/February 2021
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
Read more about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s nonfiction and genre-
busting novels in an extended cut of his WD interview at
WritersDigest.com/be-inspired.
Sympathizer? And number two, simply by stripping away
these features, which readers of contemporary litera-
ture have been trained to expect, what will that do to the
reader? Will it awaken the reader?
Do you have any final advice for the readers of
Writer’s Digest?
Persist. I think that’s all it takes to be a writer. It’s not
about how-to books or writing seminars or degrees. All
those things can help obviously, but no one can substi-
tute, for you, the will to persist because for almost all
writers, except the very few whom we all love to hate,
writing will be a difficult experience. The only thing
that will see you through is the conviction that you have
something worthwhile to say and an interesting way of
saying it. That’s the only way for you to realize that goal
is to persist.
That persistence doesn’t mean you have to sit there
and write every day. I don’t write every day. I can’t write
every day because I have so many other obligations,
but I write a lot over a certain amount of time. So the
Malcolm Gladwell idea, that you have to do something
for 10,000 hours to get really good at it, I think it’s, for
me at least, true. But I didn’t write 10,000 hours by writ-
ing every day. I wrote 10,000 hours over 20 years. And
I did it simply through sheer persistence. And that is
what turns people into writers. That doesn’t mean that
you’ll be a great writer at the end. You should at least be
a competent writer at the end. It doesn’t mean you’ll be
a published writer at the end of that, but you can write
something that you yourself will respect. And in the
end, that’s what it boils down to. I mean, it’s important
obviously for a lot of people, and for me too, to be pub-
lished and have our works read. But it’s also important
to me to respect myself as a writer and what I’ve written
and to know that I’ve written something that I want to
read. And that is what made those 10,000 hours of
persistence through all the difficulties absolutely worth
it. WD
Amy Jones is editor-in-chief of WD.
THE
WD INTERVIEW
Chris Bohjalian
I
n late January, WD joined Chris Bohjalian in his writ-
ing office via video call to talk about his newest book,
Hour of the Witch. Like many of Bohjalian’s novels, it
features a misunderstood but strong female protagonist,
Mary Deerfield, who has to fight her way past rumors,
false accusations, injustices, and the control of inept (and
insecure) men in power to try to get the life she wants. “I
love my heroine,” says Bohjalian. “I love Mary Deerfield.
She’s courageous. And like many of my female heroines—
Serafina Bettini, Alexis Remnick, Cassie Bowden—she’s
deeply human. I mean, these are powerful, powerful
women and they’re human beings. They’re imperfect, but
they are so damn courageous.”
Mary Deerfield is courageous. She’s a 17th-century
Puritan woman married to an abusive man nearly two
decades her senior whom she tries to divorce after he
stabs her with a newfangled eating utensil—a fork, also
called “The Devil’s Tines” because of its resemblance to
the Satan’s accessory. Shortly thereafter she is accused
of witchcraft when another fork is found buried by her
front door. What follows is classic Chris Bohjalian—
moments of deep dread, extraordinary plot twists, and
characters you love to root for paired with characters you
love to hate.
For nearly three decades, Bohjalian has been enter-
taining readers with stories that by turn are pulled right
from the headlines (an airplane pilot tries to land his
damaged plane on a lake Sully Sullenberger-style in The
Night Strangers) or surfaced from the depths of his-
tory, shining lights on little-known or nearly forgotten
events as with The Sandcastle Girls during the Armenian
Genocide. In all instances, he connects those events to
the inner lives and motivations of individuals, showcas-
ing our shared humanity.
In the case of Hour of the Witch, the origin story is a
little bit of both. While the setting takes readers more
than 350 years into the past, the courtroom drama and
historical thriller also has echoes of current events. The
details of how the novel came to be is where we began
our wide-ranging conversation.
54 I WRITER’S DIGEST I May/June 2021
You’ve always told interesting stories about where
you get your ideas for your books. How did you
come up with the story for Hour of the Witch?
I have always been obsessed with a Puritan mind and
Puritan theology. First of all, for the Puritans, Satan was
your neighbor. Satan was a real, actual creature—as real
as the midwife, as real as the minister, as real as Jesus
Christ. Secondly, imagine going through life where you
are constantly wondering, Am I among the saved or the
damned? That’s the reason why the Puritans were so
meticulous in their diaries and their ledgers. They were
always examining their behavior because of the great
catch-22: If you come to the conclusion you’re saved
because of your works, there’s the ultimate sin of hubris
and you’re probably damned.
The other thing that I love about the Puritans is we
view them as these women and men dressed in black and
coifs who were utterly humorless, but when you read the
poetry of Anne Bradstreet, who was the muse for Mary
Deerfield in Hour of the Witch, you realize that they were
deeply passionate. I mean, there were five reasons you
could divorce in the 17th century. Polygamy, you dis-
cover that your husband has another wife in London;
desertion, your husband runs off to New Haven; and, of
course, adultery. But, among the reasons a woman could
divorce her husband was impotence. And I think that
speaks to the fact that the Puritans expected normal
conjugal relations.
Where did this book come from? When I was in
college, I was obsessed with Puritan theology and I’ve
moved a lot since college, but the only books that have
come with me through all the moves are my books on
Russian literature and my books about the Puritans.
BOHJALIAN PHOTO © VICTORIA BLEWER
Now the real inspiration for this book probably was a
three-line reference from the Boston Court of Assistants
in 1672. Only one of the 31 divorces in the 17th century
was granted because of what today we would call domestic
abuse—then they called cruelty—which there were three
lines. The whole idea of a woman in 1672 standing before
the Court of Assistants and saying, “My word against
New York Times-bestselling
novelist Chris Bohjalian talks
about working with the right
editor, how he finds the
perfect ending for each novel,
and the inspiration for his
new historical thriller, Hour of
the Witch.
BY AMY JONES

WritersDigest.com I 55
THE WD INTERVIEW Chris Bohjalian
his”—because it’s all behind closed doors—“my husband is
a beast” and getting that divorce, fascinated me. And I just
thought this woman was unbelievably courageous. This is
one of the first women to really take her destiny into her
hands and stand up against the patriarchy.
It’s a very timely novel for a book set in 1662, and
when one of the magistrates says to Mary Deerfield, “You
are a nasty woman,” the reference will not be lost on our
readers. I mean, I could’ve said, “But her emails!” I was
writing a lot of this during the Brett Kavanaugh confir-
mation hearings and I kept wanting to say, “Believe her!”
There are so many echoes to our current political
arena and that was one of the things that stuck out
to me, this politicizing of something that is seem-
ingly innocuous, a fork, and turning it into “The
Devil’s Times.”
Well, there are two issues. I started writing this book in
2001, and I had it with me on my laptop on 9/11 when I
was on a book tour for Trans-Sister Radio. I was actually
on the tarmac, 7:15 a.m. in Denver, about to fly to San
Francisco, when the towers were attacked and collapsed.
We never flew on to San Francisco. I returned to my
Denver hotel, and I spent the next week working on this
book because I was all alone. My wife used to work on
the 104th floor of Two World Trade. Finally, about a week
later, I was able to return to Vermont and I resumed
work on the book.
And I couldn’t write it. I was so depressed. Every
moment I spent with a manuscript brought me back
to Denver and being all alone in that hotel room. So I
scrapped the book and instead I started a new one that I
thought would allow me to channel happier memories. I
wrote Before You Know Kindness.
Years later, Trump was elected and we had the
Women’s March the Saturday after his inauguration. All
of these remarkable women around the country stand-
ing up for women’s rights. At the time, I was writing The
Flight Attendant and I was having a great time, but some-
thing about the Women’s March reminded me that in a
filing cabinet in the basement were 100 pages of Mary
Deerfield’s story.
I began to think, I wonder if I can emotionally deal
with this material? And the damnedest thing happened:
It invigorated me. Instead of feeling as I felt in 2001, I felt
this is a book with a purpose. This is one of those legacy
books for me, like Midwives or The Sandcastle Girls. Yes,
it’s going to be a novel of historical suspense, a slow burn,
56 I WRITER’S DIGEST I May/June 2021
but this is a book for all of those remarkable women
who, for the last four years, have said, “I matter, you are
not going to diminish me.”
You’ve written historical novels previously, more set
in the recent past hundred years or so. But this one,
you go back almost 400 years. What kind of unique
challenges did that present?
First of all, here’s what made it easier. No one in the 17th
century is alive today to point out to me any mistakes
I’ve made about trenchers or pillowbeers.
What made it more difficult in some ways is the same
thing. There was no one I could interview. When I was
writing The Light in the Ruins, I interviewed an Italian cop
from the 1950s who could talk to me about a Florence
homicide investigation. When I was writing Skeletons at
the Feast, I was able to interview Holocaust survivors and
Prussian refugees to tell me their stories. No one could tell
me what it was like to be tried as a witch in Boston. So I
had to deal entirely with antiquated primary sources and
historians. And I loved the primary sources, and I loved
the historians. It’s how I work; I love having lunch with
someone who was there. I love having coffee with some-
body who’d say, “No one ever asked me that,” or, “Wow.
I never even told my husband that.” And so that was dif-
ferent, but fortunately the Puritans, well, they didn’t have
email but they saved so much of their correspondence.
One of the things I did, the Puritans used the words
thou and you, depending on whether it’s formal or
informal. The writing varied dramatically depend-
ing on the level of education, but I made this decision.
All of the second-person pronouns would be thou,
thy, thine, and thee because it felt to me 17th-century
New England. I looked at Anne Bradstreet’s poetry. I
looked at 16th-century Shakespeare. One of the ways
that I could ground the sensibility of this book was mak-
ing that one simple change. I know at the beginning for
some readers, it’s going to feel, “Oh, dear God, no, can we
just have the second person we know?” So many readers
have told me that the more they read Hour of the Witch,
the more they got into the groove, and thou, thine, and
thee were this funky music they got into once they were
into the book.
One of the things that I love discovering every time I
open up a new Chris Bohjalian book is seeing how it’s
set up. I loved that Trans-Sister Radio was the five-
part NPR series, that The Double Bind had “medical
records” interspersed throughout, and that Hour of
the Witch has “court documents.” After reading the
whole book, I go back and read those parts again to
see what clues I missed that could inform my read-
ing of the book. At what point in your drafting do you
have that part of the book figured out?
I am usually three-quarters of the way into a book before
I know the ending. When I was writing Hour of the
Witch, I had no idea what the ending was going to be.
I did not know Mary Deerfield’s fate. And so what that
means is, going back and rewriting, not simply the inter-
stitial pages, but the book itself once I know the ending.
But I can’t imagine, most of the time, knowing the
ending for a book, because the pleasure for me is being
in this room and letting my characters take me by the
hand and lead me through the dark and the story. In
Hour of the Witch, I was at least halfway through the
book before I knew who and why there were Devil’s
Tines buried in the dooryard. I had no idea.
All my books begin with a premise—often a character,
but rarely the plot. I mean, alcoholic flight attendant wakes
up next to a dead body in a hotel room far from home.
Love story set in the midst of the Armenian Genocide.
Young Puritan woman wants to divorce her husband for
domestic violence. That’s often all there is.
I want to talk more about endings. At the end of The
Red Lotus, I gasped because I thought, Oh, there
is more going on there, even if I didn’t need to see
precisely what the “more” was. Do you write mul-
tiple endings and then figure out which one works?
I love an ending that is Aristotelian and that means two
things. It is utterly surprising, but the reader says, “Oh, it
could not have ended any other way.” I also love endings
that do one of two things: They either break your heart
or they make you happy. There’s no in-between. In my
opinion, if an ending doesn’t break your heart or leave
you happy, you have not stuck the landing. Your floor
routine might’ve been impeccable, but without an ending
that fits one of those two criteria, you haven’t nailed it.
Some of my books, yes, end in utter heartbreak and
some are happy. But I mean, think of all of the main
characters I’ve killed right at the end of my books! You
and I were just talking about The Red Lotus, and just
when you think it’s essentially a happy ending, (I mean,
not completely because one of my favorite characters
dies), but you think it’s OK. I didn’t pull—I try at least—
to pull the rug out from under you so you go, “Holy cow,
no, please no!” especially in 2020—the year that Satan
spawned. In Hour of the Witch, I did try out multiple
endings. The Flight Attendant had multiple endings. The
Red Lotus had multiple endings before I decided on the
one that most perfectly, in my opinion, stuck the landing.
I’ve often got in this room, two massive whiteboards
with black, blue, and red erasable markers showing all
of the different possible endings and what that means
for each character. When I’m at that stage, I’m sitting at
that desk looking at the whiteboards there, just deciding,
“OK, heartbreak or happiness.”
In terms of the craft, what do you wish you had known
when you first started almost three decades ago?
When I graduated from college, I knew nothing about
how to write fiction. I was a great reader, but I was a terri-
ble writer. It’s why I’m responsible for the single worst first
novel ever published. Bar none. My second novel is pretty
bad, too. The third isn’t great. That’s why the earliest of my
books that I allow to remain in print is Water Witches.
Malcolm Gladwell taught us the 10,000 hour rule.
You’ve got to do something for 10,000 hours. And my
first three books, I was putting in my 10,000 hours. That
was my Beatles in Hamburg phase and I wish I could
take those three books back. I wish my first book was
Water Witches because by then I had, first of all, learned
how to move characters around a book, how to move the
pieces around the chessboard. I didn’t know that in my
first three books.
Secondly, I learned something so basic, that as a
young writer, I had lost sight of. What we do as fiction
writers is cause and effect. If this cause, this deus ex
machina cause occurs to this character, what is the most
normal thing for him or her to do? What’s the effect?
And third, research. I didn’t do a hell of a lot of
research for those first three books. I thought, Virginia
Woolf and John Updike, did they research their books?
They’re just writing about human beings and the human
condition. You can do that if you’re Virginia Woolf; you
can do that if you’re John Updike. Clearly you can’t do
that if you’re me! I have to do the homework, especially
given the kinds of books I write.
Speaking of research, as I read through your books, I
sometimes saw hints of connections between earlier
books and your newer books, even though they’re
all distinctly different stories. You’ve got a pilot in
The Night Strangers and The Flight Attendant, or
WritersDigest.com I 57
THE WD INTERVIEW Chris Bohjalian
a story about the foster care system in The Buffalo
Soldier and a homeless teen who will do anything to
avoid the foster care system in Close Your Eyes, Hold
Hands. Do you intentionally save bits of what you
can’t use in one story to inspire later ones, or when
you’re looking for a new idea, do you go back to your
older work and think, Oh, there’s something I could
explore in a whole different way?
It’s actually a third answer. My books are weirdly auto-
biographic and filled with the things that interest me. I’m
obsessed with aviation. I mean, going all the way back to
Midwives when Sibyl Danforth, the midwife, her attorney
Stephen Hastings is explaining all the things that have to
go wrong for a mother to die in birth. His analogy, which
is like 10 pages in the book, is all the things that have to
go wrong for a plane to crash.
So aviation, the natural world, the way children and
teenagers are so often screwed by the system are clearly
things that interest me and that recur in my books. And
autobiographically, my biggest fears are for my wife and
my daughter—always—and I channel that Dread, capital
D, into my work.
You’ve worked with mostly the same two editors
over the course of your career, Shaye Areheart and
Jennifer Jackson. What is it like working with the
same editor for such a long time? How do you think
they’ve influenced your writing?
Working with Shaye Areheart and Jenny Jackson has
been among the greatest professional blessings of my
life. When Shaye left Penguin Random House in 2010,
I wanted Jenny to be my editor for a couple of reasons.
She’s smarter than me and we have the same taste in
books. So when Shaye moved on, I went to Jenny and
Jenny said, “Yeah, let’s do this.” Jenny is just brilliant, just
as Shaye was brilliant. Shaye was the first person in a
major publishing house to take a chance on me. She was
the one who read 60 pages of Midwives and said, “Oh my
God, there’s a book here.”
The first book that Jenny Jackson and I did together
was The Sandcastle Girls about the Armenian Genocide.
There were a lot of people in 2010, who said, “Do not
write a book about the Armenian Genocide. It is a career
killer. No one cares.” But I said, “I need to write it as a
grandson of two survivors.” And when I told Jenny, this
will be our first book together, I hoped, she said, “That’s
wonderful. People need to know this story. And you’re
the perfect person to write it.”
58 I WRITER’S DIGEST I May/June 2021
She and Todd Doughty and Suzanne Herz and Bill
Thomas at Doubleday got behind this book about the
Armenian Genocide and understood that it was fun-
damentally a love story like The English Patient or
Atonement or Corelli’s Mandolin. It’s now the second
bestselling novel ever about the Armenian Genocide.
The only one that’s bigger is from 1933, Franz Werfel’s
classic The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.
It’s interesting that that was the reaction because
when I read it a few years ago my reaction was, How
did I not know about this? I’m really glad that you
chose to write about it and that she was behind you
in taking that risk.
That’s the moral for young writers and aspiring writers.
Two of my most successful books begin with a premise
that no one knows about. Shaye Areheart took a chance
on Midwives and people were telling her, “Why are you
publishing this book? No one knows about midwives.”
People were saying about The Sandcastle Girls, “no one
cares.” And Jenny Jackson said, “You care and that’s what
matters.” The moral to that is write what you love.
You said you’ve already got your next book finished?
Book 22 is done. Did you see the movie Once Upon a Time
in Hollywood? It’s fantastic. It’s Hollywood 1969 and it’s
about the Tate-LaBianca murders, but it’s also about mov-
ies. So my 2022 book is called The Lions of Hollywood. It’s
set in 1964 and it’s about an Elizabeth Taylor-like starlet
who brings her entourage on a honeymoon safari into
the Serengeti and it all goes to hell. Think And Then There
Were None. How many of these nine Hollywood people
are going to be alive at the end of the book? I just loved
writing it because I’m writing about Hollywood in 1964
and I’m writing about East Africa in 1964. I was in heaven
writing it during the pandemic.
Any last tidbits for aspiring authors?
Here are the things I like to tell aspiring writers: Read a
lot. Write in whatever genre you love. If you love science
fiction, write science fiction. If you love romance, write
romance. If you love literary fiction, write literary fiction.
Understand the first draft is not the last draft and try to
be disciplined. Don’t wait for the muse. Writing is work.
It’s a marathon. Get your 10,000 hours and do it every
day, even if you’ve got a full-time job. WD
Amy Jones is editor-in-chief of WD. Follow her on twitter
@AmyMJones_5.
 Scott Turow
PUBLIC DEFENDER
With 11 bestsellers over a
40-year career, the two-time
Authors Guild president
testifies on the secrets to
sustained success.
BY TYLER MOSS

PHOTO © JEREMY LAWSON PHOTOGRAPHY

42 I WRITER’S
ER’S DIGEST I May/June 201
20177
A
uthor, attorney, advocate—Scott Turow’s collec-
tive roles range in scope and responsibility,
yet each is a key exhibit in the mountain of
evidence that upholds his position in writing’s
upper echelon.
Over the past four decades—2017 marks the 40th anni-
versary of his acclaimed debut, the law-school memoir
One L—Turow has published 11 bestsellers (nine of them
legal thrillers), served two stints as president of The Authors
Guild, and penned op-eds for The New York Times and essays
for The Atlantic, all while continuing to practice law (most of
it pro bono) in his hometown of Chicago. When asked why
he didn’t quit his day job after finding literary success (the
way most other lawyers-turned-bestsellers do), his response
is firm: “For me, having to produce a book a year would be a
form of slavery.”
Indeed, it’s that kind of conviction that keeps Turow’s
body of work squarely in the realm of art.
As president of The Authors Guild, he fought relentlessly
for writers to receive a fair wage equal to their creative
output. His background as a litigator made him an ideal
candidate for the position, targeting issues such as intellec-
tual property rights and e-book piracy during his tenure.
With one foot in the literary world and the other in
law, the twain meet in his novels. All are largely set in
Kindle County, a fictional facsimile of Chicago’s Cook
County, where the Cubs are called the Trappers, the Lake
looms large and the courts are packed with complex cases.
It’s a setting shaped in his celebrated first novel—1987’s
Presumed Innocent, later made into an eponymous film
starring Harrison Ford—in which deputy prosecutor Rusty
Sabich is charged with the murder of a beautiful colleague
with a mysterious past.
His latest, Testimony, Turow’s first novel in four years,
drops in May: a suspenseful globe-trotter in which middle-
aged attorney Bill ten Boom leaves behind his life in Kindle
County for a role with the International Criminal Court in
The Hague. His new position takes him to Bosnia, where
he investigates an alleged genocide, has a fling with a sultry
barrister and becomes involved in the pursuit of a Serbian
war criminal. Turow deftly explores identity as a theme both
overt and subtle, as ten Boom struggles with a family secret
that has roots reaching back to Nazi Germany.
Turow took a short recess from the courthouse and his
current work-in-progress to chat with WD from his home
in the Chicago suburbs.
Between your writing and your legal practice, how in
the world do you prioritize your time?
When I’m writing I usually push everything else aside and
write in the morning until the early afternoon. Now, that
can be interrupted—I’ve got a court call on Monday, so
it’s not invariable. Life interferes, which is what you would
expect of life.
Wally Stegner, who was one of my teachers at Stanford
[University’s writing program in the early ’70s, prior to law
school], really taught the value of putting your butt in the
chair every day, especially if you’re trying to write a novel.
I’ve found it a really valuable lesson. He used to say, “It’s
true the muse may not visit you every day, but you have
to sit down and give her a chance to show up.” I thought
there was great wisdom in that. The writing, now and for
many years, has had the first claim on my time.
How do skills honed in practicing law translate to how
you approach your writing?
There’s a good deal of back and forth between the two
callings. I learned in the courtroom a whole lot about
being a novelist that I didn’t learn during my years as
a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. I always thought the ideal
would be to write a novel that would be equally appeal-
ing to—as I put it in my debates with members of the fac-
ulty—a bus driver and an English professor. Certainly, as
a prosecutor in a courtroom, you’re trying to tell a story
to a broad audience.
I learned about being concise because you don’t have
infinite patience or attention from a jury. I learned that,
whatever I had been taught or valued about literary
experiments or refinements, sometimes the tried-and-
true was a better idea. I certainly came to embrace crime
as a subject matter by recognizing how potent the effect
was, both on jurors and everybody else watching in
the courtroom.
I realized pretty quickly that, without trying to press
the metaphor too far, being a prosecutor and being an
author were more similar than I would have thought, in
the sense that you are telling the jury a story and it’s a
WritersDigest.com I 43
 Scott Turow
“I was very proud to be a spokesperson for the American
authorial community because, quite frankly, as a general
matter, they’re getting screwed .”
story about how something that the community regards
as evil happened. You tell the story through multiple
voices—those voices happen to be called witnesses in
the courtroom—but if you lose track of the need to be
telling a consistent narrative, you’re losing your way
as a prosecutor. I truly learned a great deal in my first
couple of years as a prosecutor that I later turned into
the writing of Presumed Innocent.
Novels in the milieu of the law trend toward a
formula: crime, reveals, resolution. Yet your
books manage to shirk the formulaic. What’s
your secret?
My first secret is … I don’t like formulas. [Laughs.]
I don’t like novels where I know the ending halfway
through. It just comes from personal preference.
And you’re right: The classic detective story has a
pretty predictable ending. There’s a crime, the detective
investigates, the detective solves it, good triumphs
over evil and the guilty get punished. So it’s always a
variation on that theme. I take a certain amount of
godlike pleasure in toying with readers and sort of
rubbing my hands and going, They’re never going to
figure this one out.
A hallmark of your novels is the casual reappearance
of characters from past books. These relationships
between characters seem to extend beyond what’s
on the page. How extensively do you develop
their backstories?
I am deeply struck by the way people move from the
background to the foreground in life. I got married again
this last summer. The woman I married is someone who
I met 30 years ago. Twenty-five years later, through a
remarkable set of coincidences, we begin pursuing a per-
sonal relationship and end up married five years [after
that]. I just love that. I love the ironies of it. I love every-
thing it says about the unpredictability of life. So I’ve
built it into the novels.
Will a character in the next book be thinking back to
something that happened while Bill ten Boom was U.S.
attorney in Kindle County? You can virtually guarantee
it. The reflection about ten Boom will be nowhere near
44 I WRITER’S DIGEST I May/June 2017
as appreciative of ten Boom as he is of himself. It’s like
I’m given the opportunity to do further commentary—
like when you get a DVD and you’ve got the outtakes. It’s
a chance to not only add to the book I’m writing, but to
the books I’ve [already] written.
Your novels proceed at a brisk pace, full of twists
and turns. What is your writing process like?
Essentially, I’ve preserved the writing process that I had
in writing Presumed Innocent. I was working full time
as an assistant U.S. attorney. The job was wonderful, but
consuming. The only time I had to write was on the
morning commuter train, because by the end of the day I
was too overwrought with what had gone on in the office.
So it was only in the morning, on the 30-minute train
ride, that I could write.
Because I only had 30 minutes, it just didn’t seem
natural to try to connect things, because there was too
much boiling up inside of me that demanded expression.
Whatever I was feeling passionate about that I could
convert into fodder for the story I was beginning to tell,
I’d write down that day—whether it was dialogue, or a
particular setting, or the history of a character, a piece
of internal reflection about the justice system—I wrote it
down and figured I’d someday put it all together. Were it
not for the invention of the personal computer, I’m not
sure that would’ve happened. But in 1982 I bought the
first of the so-called portable computers, which weighed
only 40 pounds. I began typing in all these disparate
pieces and thinking about how they’d fit together, trying
to put them in order. And that’s still the process I follow.
For about a year I write [each story] that way. I feel
my way along: Who is the main character, what is his
family like, what are those relationships like? I know
what I want to write about in general, but the specific
contours … I’ve got a lot of thinking to do. Once I’m
done with that, I’ll begin trying to shape it, and that’s
just a matter of sitting there and going, “What pieces fit
together?” And over the course of the year some sequence
would’ve begun to suggest itself to me. I almost never
figure out the ultimate resolution—the whodunit—
at that point.
You’ve served two stints as president of The Authors
Guild. What compelled you to take on such a public
role in the interest of the greater writing community?
Some of it is natural to somebody who has been, at
moments, a lawyer for the downtrodden. I’ve been
unbelievably fortunate in my writing career. I have been
deeply conscious of the fact that, for the privileged few
of us who can call ourselves bestselling writers, almost
everything that’s happened in publishing—and there’ve
been tremendous changes since One L was published 40
years ago—it’s worked to our advantage. It’s a phenom-
enon of American society over the last 40 years that it’s
become much more a winner-take-all society. While it’s
been great for bestselling authors, it hasn’t been good for
most people in the literary community. The notion that
you publish a couple of books and you have a career and
a publisher that’ll be publishing your books for the rest
of your life, that went out the window. People scuffle to
make a living.
My perception of that became dramatically exacer-
bated by the digital revolution. What fundamentally
happened is that [up to that point] authors controlled
their copyrights so they had control of the intellectual
property, and that gave them a certain bargaining posi-
tion. With the advent of digital, you had a lot of other
intellectual property owners, whether Amazon or oth-
ers. But it’s all big capital. All of a sudden big capital is a
player and they’re in control in a much different way.
The result has turned into a massive food fight in
which all of the various constituencies have decided
to improve their position at the expense of authors. I
was very proud to be a spokesperson for the American
authorial community because, quite frankly, as a general
matter, they’re getting screwed. There’s a lot to complain
about—not for me, but for the other 99 percent.
Significant as the digital shift has been, what is the
biggest challenge you currently see for writers?
If you look at e-books in the big picture, they have
every potential to expand the literary marketplace, and
because of that, to expand author’s earnings. [But] this
becomes an example of everybody [else wanting] to eat
lunch at the author’s expense. You have publishers who
have succeeded in changing the royalty structure from
physical books to e-books, so what used to be based
on the retail price of a hardcover [is now] based on the
net sales. The division of the spoils in the hardcover
world is basically 50-50 between author and publisher.
The standard e-book royalty is 25 percent of the net, so
SCENE OF THE CRIME
Turow discusses the role setting plays in his fiction, and why
the backdrop of his latest, Testimony, is so different from
past works, at writersdigest.com/jun-17.
author’s incomes on e-books have essentially been cut
in half.
Then you have the entry of Amazon. And Amazon,
in my view, engaged in what when I was in law school
was called predatory pricing. They sold e-books for less
than they were paying the publishers for them. In my
view, the point of this was as a barrier to entry to other
people from getting into the e-book market, because
how many other companies can afford to enter a mar-
ket where you’re losing two to five bucks every time you
sell a book?
The distortions that Amazon was creating in that
market ended up coming at the expense of authors.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the e-book as
an institution—it’s what’s come with it that’s perilous
for authors.
The other thing that concerns me is that as Amazon
gets more and more control, they have certainly dis-
played an attitude of trying to cut down on the share that
goes to publishers. If they’re ever successful in getting
rid of publishers, in my view, the authors are next. There
won’t be anywhere else to go, and if Amazon says your
royalty will be half of what it used to be, then it will be
half of what it used to be.
You’ve written 11 bestsellers over a four-decade
writing career. How have you sustained such consis-
tent success?
This process, for me, has not yet become dull. The begin-
nings with a book require a lot of self-discipline to
make myself sit down. But once I’m into it, I get up in
the morning really looking forward to writing. And I
look forward to what I’m going to discover—and, also,
to taking advantage of what I’ve learned in writing the
last book and hopefully not making the same mistakes.
Making new mistakes, but not the same mistakes. So to
whatever extent I get credit, I think it’s because I have
not suffered any flagging of interest in what I’m writing. I
still love the process. I remind myself all the time: What
a life! You get handsomely rewarded for going upstairs
every day and playing with your imaginary friends. WD
Tyler Moss is the managing editor of Writer’s Digest.
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