S.M. Thayer's Blog, page 2

Julie Lawson Timmer’s UNTETHERED: An Appreciation

​Until I picked up UNTETHERED, Julie Lawson Timmer’s suspenseful and heartfelt second novel, I hadn’t been prepared for how unsettling the subject of family can be. One needn’t be a demographer to realize the shape and function of family in America has undergone radical changes over the last few decades. More than 40% of American children live in households headed by people other than their two married biological parents. As someone who grew up in a household headed by both my biological parents, and as someone who lives in a household with my wife and our three biological children, I hadn’t truly ever considered the stresses and fluctuating relationships within alternate family structures.
 
In UNTETHERED, Timmer presents two families that are about to be disrupted something bad.
 
Char Hawthorn’s husband (Bradley) has died in a car accident, leaving her to care for her husband’s high school-aged daughter, Allie. In the aftermath of the death, questions loom, primarily in the form of Lindy, Allie’s biological mother, who swoops in from California and threatens to take Allie home with her. Though Char never formally adopted Allie, they’ve grown attached to each other. Now though, they realize how precarious their relationship has become. They walk on eggshells around each other, both seemingly afraid that the other will use Lindy’s sudden arrival as an excuse to flee the relationship they’ve forged in the four years that they’ve lived together in the same household.
 
Morgan Crew is a ten-year-old girl whom Allie tutors on Monday afternoons. Adopted by Sarah and Dave Crew after years of living in foster care situations, she still dreams of living again with her biological mother— a substance abuser who might have abandoned her and who may still be incarcerated. Morgan, blessed with a profoundly overactive imagination, makes up stories about her past and repeatedly suggests that Sarah and Dave view her with disdain. She also self-harms— bruising and cutting herself as a means of ameliorate the pains of having been abandoned by her natural mother.
 
Besides Morgan, Sarah and Dave have another child—a very sweet but developmentally delayed young boy named Stevie, whom they’ve put into a rigorous speech and occupational therapy  program to get him ready for kindergarten. Morgan, too, is in therapy to address her self-harm issues. To pay for these treatments, Dave works incredible overtime hours as an auto mechanic. Sarah seems to be the most fastidious of mothers—constantly cleaning and preening, and one can only imagine the stresses inherent in raising these two children with such demanding needs.  
 
In one of the novel’s most touching scenes, Timmer shows us a flashback moment before Bradley’s death when the Hawthorns invited Morgan to spend the night at their house so Sarah and Dave could take Stevie to an all-day medical assessment. Morgan arrives on the Hawthorn’s doorstep clutching her “Lifebook,” a scrapbook stuffed with pictures of all the foster families she’s shuffled through. Eighteen months have passed since Dave and Sarah legally adopted her, yet she still asks “on a regular basis if they were going to keep her.”
 
One particular picture in her Lifebook captivates Morgan’s attention:
 
“The photograph, wrinkled and small, showed a young woman reclining in a lawn chair, a cigarette in one hand and a glass in the other. She wore a come-hither expression and a sleeveless dress with a hemline that reached only inches below her hips. Her long, dark hair was twisted into a high, haphazard ponytail. In the bottom right corner was a child of about two, standing, naked except for a diaper.”
 
The woman in the photograph is Morgan’s mother, and the near-naked child is Morgan.
 
The two girls—Allie and Morgan—become close friends. Allie, too, is fascinated by her biological mother. Lindy is erratic, dismissive, and self-centered, hardly the person most suited towards raising a teenager.
 
As Char and Bradley observe in that flashback scene, “no wonder Allie and Morgan bonded so tightly, so quickly—both of them had been abandoned by their birth mothers.”
 
Because the protagonist in Timmer’s 2014 debut novel, FIVE DAYS LEFT, suffered from Huntington’s Disease, I wrongly assumed Timmer was charting out a Lisa Genova-like writing career for herself whereby each successive novel would examine a different medical condition. Instead, Timmer’s true domain in family. Specifically, adoptive families.
 
Here, in UNTETHERED, Timmer branches out. When Morgan disappears, Allie sets out to find her, and what follows verges into gripping thriller-esque territory. The writing is tension-packed and the action unpredictable.
 
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of psychological thrillers, where the antagonists AND protagonists can be downright slimy. One the things which drew me to UNTETHERED is how genuinely sympathetic I felt towards Char, Allie, and Morgan. Mind you, each of these characters are prone to lapses in judgment and, at various times, offer profound misrepresentations of the truth—and yet I still largely trusted them and rooted for them.
 
Yet UNTETHERED also contains a couple of “wildcard” characters: Lindy and Dave. We’re never quite sure how they’ll respond to the stresses of the novel’s increasingly complicated situations. They’re erratic and—at least in my reading— deliciously untrustworthy. Looking back, I’m struck that they’re the least examined of the major characters in your novel. Which made me think, as a writer, that some correlation exists between the amount of information readers are given about certain characters and the amount of surprise and disappointment these characters are then capable of providing.
 
Great novels are comprised of characters that don’t do exactly what they’re supposed to do. Right smack in the middle of Allie’s most mischievous act, Lindy calls Char to ask what’s up with her daughter. It’s a moment when, truly, any responsible adult should be truthful, and yet Char concocts a fantastical story to explain why Lindy will be unable to talk to her daughter for many hours.
 
This was truly a delicious moment. The dramatic consequences of Char’s lie would be far greater than whatever might happen if she told the truth. I’ve tried to pay attention to in the months since I’ve read this novel. To heighten tension, characters need to misbehave. For this lesson alone, I’m grateful for Julie Lawson Timmer. UNTETHERED packs a powerful, heart-wrenching punch, and I’ll be sure to read whatever else Julie Lawson Timmer writes.
 

The Girls in the Garden: An Interview with Lisa Jewell

THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN, best-selling author Lisa Jewell’s thirteenth novel, begins with the  aftermath of a summer neighborhood party. Twelve-year-old Pip watches her inebriated mother throw up. She guides her to bed. It’s late at night. She’s worried about her sister, Grace, who turned thirteen earlier in the day and has yet to return home from the party. An adult man, a neighbor of some sort, knocks on the back door and asks her to go outside with him to where “the party’s still going on.” Sensibly, Pip declines. She wants Grace to come home so she can lock the door for the night. Eventually, Pip goes outside searching for her sister. She wanders into the community gardens where the party had been. She shines her flashlight at a hedge. She sees something strange on the ground by the hedge.  It’s a foot. “The foot is attached to a person.” The person is Pip’s sister, who isn’t moving. She’s “half-undressed. Shorts yanked down to her thighs, floral camisole top lifted above [her chest]...Her face is a bloodied mass.”
 
Pip and Grace, along with their mother (Clare), had recently moved into what they thought was a rather standard London flat after their father, a prize-winning documentary film maker, torched their old house in a paranoid schizophrenic episode. Much to their surprise, the back gate of their new flat opens up to an idyllic private park. As Pip writes to her father, who’s convalescing in a psychiatric hospital, the “totally massive private park... [is]like Narnia, there’s all these tall trees and pathways and a lawn that takes you up to all these big white houses with windows that are as tall as two men... And in the park itself, there are all these pathways and little tucked-away places. A secret garden, which is hidden inside an old wall covered with ivy.”
 
The park is idyllic, as is their neighborhood. The rich and the poor mingle, everyone apparently liberal-minded and enlightened. Parents homeschool their children, paying particular emphasis to the mindfulness exercises on their curriculum. One senses a benevolent, permissive hippy-dippy vibe. After dinners, the children entertain parents and their guests with their unique arrangements of Daft Punk songs on acoustic guitar, flute, and fiddle.
 
Of the novel’s many wonderful characters, perhaps the most wonderful is that of the park, which holds a constant sense of magical possibility and acts, in many ways, in loco parentis to the neighborhood children who congregate and hang out their while their parents are otherwise occupied. One parent justifies the prolonged unsupervised park time because it provides “all the peer-to-peer stuff” necessary for proper childhood development. Pip and Grace are overjoyed when other children accept them into their coterie. 
 
And yet, things are not as Edenic as they appear. Parents become increasingly out-of-touch with their children, who experiment with drugs and alcohol. Innocent first kisses have the potential to blossom into something more sinister. Decades earlier, a fifteen-year-old girl died in the park under mysterious circumstances that seem to have presaged the attack upon Grace. And yet the adults carry on as if everything is constantly hunky-dory.
 
THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN is very much a novel about parental responsibility and the abdication thereof. In this way, it’s reminiscent of Lauren Groff’s ARCADIA and, at times, of Joan Didion’s coolly-observed essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”
 
And yet, THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN is, foremost, an impeccable psychological thriller. As Jewell’s novel progresses and the layers of apparent innocence are unpeeled to reveal predatory behavior, spitefulness, and appalling negligence, the novel becomes a taut mystery. Any one of several characters could have assaulted Grace. As Publisher’s Weekly commends, “Jewell adeptly creates a pervasive atmosphere of unease in this well-spun narrative.”
 
As I mentioned last week when interviewing Mary Kubica, psychological thrillers are a relatively new staple in my reading diet. They fascinate my readerly interest in ways that, at times, “literary fiction” fails to do. The stories are riveting. The quality of the writing in these novels has also been revelatory. In many cases—and, especially, in the case of Lisa Jewell’s novel—the writing is exceptional.
 
Today, Lisa Jewell has graciously agreed to answer some craft questions via email about writing THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN.

Question: I’m curious about your novel’s construction. Pip’s dramatic discovery of her wounded, unconscious sister occurs within the novel’s first five pages. This is followed by a 180-page-long “BEFORE” section that lays out the events, circumstances and conflicts that lead up to Pip’s discovery. The novel’s gripping last 125 pages (“AFTER”) lead us to the discovery of who perpetrated this act of violence upon Grace.
 
When you wrote the novel’s first draft, is this how you envisioned its eventual structure? Or did you write the novel chronologically, which would have placed Grace’s discovery at about page 185? The reason I ask is that I could very easily see the novel being successful with either layout. Did you (or your editors) feel it was necessary for your readers to begin with such a dramatic discovery?
 
 
Lisa Jewell:
I started writing the novel in February 2014 with a chronological structure – the original version starts on the night of the ‘bad thing happening’ (it was a different ‘bad thing’ first time around) and then follows the characters through the aftermath. I got to the halfway point and realised that I had no idea how to progress the story; I barely knew the characters and I genuinely couldn't decide who’d done what in the dark of night and why. So in July 2014 I binned 40k words and started afresh. I can't remember what informed my decision to start the story in the middle, but from the word go the whole thing fell into place and I wrote nonstop and linear for three months without a backwards glance until I got to the end. It was important that the reader was given the chance to cast a suspicious eye over the proceedings that built up to the main event, to question each character’s actions and motives as the tension builds.
 
Question: Theoretically, one drawback of having a long “BEFORE” section is that, essentially, the material is all back story to Grace’s discovery. For me, the “BEFORE” section works because the action within it all has a forward momentum. However, because the first five pages frontloads the wham! moment, were you ever concerned that readers’ interest might flag during this section? If so, what steps did you take to counteract that?
 
 
Lisa Jewell:
My interest didn't flag as I wrote the BEFORE section so it never occurred to me that the readers’ interest would flag. As I say, I really wanted the reader to feel ‘in the know’ and to be able to look at all the characters with a sceptical, questioning eye, not take anyone at face value. Without the knowledge that someone on the garden had done a ‘bad thing’ those first chapters would have been just an extended getting-to-know-you exercise. With that knowledge though, it's a chance for the reader to play detective.
 
Question: Pip writes these amazingly honest, truthful letters to her father throughout the “BEFORE” section. I marvel at the device of these letters, how they allowed you, as the author, to seamlessly plug in so much necessary exposition and back story. But these letters do more than that: they serve to ground Pip as a character. She becomes the one character whom readers sense they can trust. Was this your intention? What else do you think you gained by allowing readers to see so much of Pip’s impressions in these letters?
 
Lisa Jewell:
Pip’s letters were one of the things I changed for the second version of this book; I was aware that given that it was fundamentally a book about kids, there was no child's voice present in the book and that this was a failing. I deliberately selected Pip as my ‘voice’ because, as you say, she is trustworthy and pure. And I chose the vessel of the letters to her dad to implant a much-needed first person narrative, something direct and clean and straight to the point. With so much for the reader to question, Pip needed to be an oasis of truth, somewhere to catch your breath and look around you at the bigger picture.
 
Question: Outside of Pip’s letters (written in the first person), the rest of your novel is told in a loose third-person perspective that follows various characters around, letting us see glimpses of their insights and impressions. Since the novel relies, in part, on the sometimes conflicting nature of others’ impressions, it makes the first person/third person delineation all the more interesting. How did you manage this? Was it difficult to decide what to reveal in the third person accounts, and what to tell readers through Pip’s letters?
 
Lisa Jewell:
Peeling away the layers of my story is something I always enjoy, and something that comes quite naturally to me. Because I'm not a plotter or a planner, I'm constantly writing by the seat of my pants and the revelatory pauses – or cliffhangers – are vital to me so that I can work out were I'm headed next. So they’re not consciously ‘seeded’ and there are no ‘decisions’ as such. I just write as far as I can go, then come back the next day and go a little further. I think my writer’s brain has a natural synchronicity with a reader’s  brain, it travels at the same pace.
 
Question: This might sound goofy, but I adored the drawings Pip included in the letters to her father. Did you draw these yourself? They have such an innocent charm and, especially in the case of her drawing of the garden, impart useful information to the reader.
 
I was curious though. The last of Pip’s drawing appears on page 62. Why didn’t you include any beyond that? Were you worried that, as the novel progressed through more psychologically-nuanced material, they might seem a little light-hearted?
 
Lisa Jewell:
I asked my daughter to draw them! She was at the time the same age as Pip so it made total sense. I enjoyed verbally describing the characters to her and then watching her translate those descriptions into drawings – she got them spot on and I didn't need to ask her to change anything! I think the drawings petered away when Pip realised that her father wasn't reading her letters anymore, that she was writing the letters into the ether.
 
Question: You write children and young teens remarkably well. There’s nothing trite about your young characters. Or overly sentimental or sappy. What advice can you give when writing about young characters? What particular difficulties do young characters pose when writing about them?
 
Lisa Jewell:
I have two daughters who, whilst being incredible in a million different ways, are also rude, opinionated, bad-mannered and, on occasion, incredibly dark. I have no sentimentalised views about children – I think, as Gordon thinks, that they can be unutterably awful. I also think a thirteen year old child can be capable of anything. So I started writing about this community of children with no filter – I never once said to myself; well, a child wouldn't do that, a child wouldn't say that. And that is probably the advice I would offer; write children as though they were adults, no special dispensations, no filter.
 
Question: I was impressed by the names of young characters: Pip; Grace; Willow; Catkin; Fern; Dylan; Tyler. Together, they speak of a peculiarly youthful idealism and dreaminess. When naming your characters, how hard do you work at establishing characterization and, perhaps, the novel’s zeitgeist through those names? Do you ever worry about the names coming off as overly symbolic or ham-fisted?
 
Lisa Jewell:
I choose names as parents would choose names for their offspring. No parent just plucks something randomly from the air, the name they choose is long thought about, imbued with meaning related to the parent’s ideals, their history, their aspirations. So I do the same for all my characters, especially the children. The family I'm writing about currently have children called Ellie, Hanna and Jake; completely normal non-symbolic names for a down-to-earth family who are not trying to tell the world anything about themselves through their choice of names. So, no, I'm confident that I always give my characters exactly the right names and never worry about being ham-fisted.
 
Question: As I mentioned earlier, as the novel builds to its conclusion, readers sense that many characters could have been responsible Grace’s assault. This creates great tension, but did you worry about casting suspicion too broadly? Were you worried about a red herring or two, thinking perhaps readers might see too easily through some of the suspicions you cast on the characters?
 
Lisa Jewell:
I'm not really a thriller writer, I write about families and relationships and secret histories, so I don't tend to think in terms of red herrings or twists. I've tried to come up with ‘big twist’ in my last few novels and I totally can’t do it! This was really a novel about a community, about how your preconceptions and assumptions about people you thought you knew can be shaken when something bad happens, how thin the veneer of trust can be. So I wasn't looking to trip up the reader or hoodwink them, I just wanted them to put themselves inside the community and watch it all unravel.
 
Question: I liked how history worked as a minor theme of this novel. One of the characters is a octogenarian Holocaust survivor working on her memoirs. We have the knowledge of the unsolved death decades earlier in the park, and how Grace’s assault might be somehow connected to it. Pip and Grace’s father, the film maker, received an Oscar nomination for a “documentary about Polish skinheads, the neo-Nazi thing.” History repeats itself. There are fears that the father, once released from the psychiatric hospital may lapse back into another mental breakdown or dangerous paranoid schizophrenic episode. These thoughts were on my mind while reading THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN.
 
When you notice a theme like this developing in your manuscript, do you actively work to develop it further? Or, perhaps thinking that understatement is best when exploring complex themes, do you work to tamp down the overt references and connections?
 
Lisa Jewell: I have to confess that I didn't actively notice this theme as I was writing and I'm not sure I recognise it now. I don't tend to write with themes or messages in mind. I see myself as a pure storyteller, but I'm sure things seep through, sub consciously.
 
Question: Beyond providing a gripping and electrifying story, what else do you wish to impart on  your readers? After readers race to the conclusion of THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN, what do you hope they’re thinking about?
 
Lisa Jewell:
I’d hope that they were thinking about what actually happened on the night in question; my description of events is deliberately hazy and slightly surreal. I wanted the reader to fill in some of the blanks, imagine it for themselves, to be Tyler, to feel what she was feeling. A lot of readers have complained about the ending, about the lack of comeuppance. This saddened me as I’d hoped that the reader would think, well, a lot of people here behaved badly, this child was damaged and pushed to the limit by many different factors, the victim herself wanted no revenge, and the adults acted protectively, sealed themselves over the children, asked no questions, but ensured it would never happen again. It’s strange to me that so many readers wanted retribution and punishment for a child. So that's what I hope; that readers will look at the events and the players and ultimately feel compassion.
 
 
Addendum: Yesterday, The New York Times ran a very positive review of THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN. This well-written and very compelling novel deserves to get a lot of attention this summer. I’m very grateful to Ms. Jewell for availing herself to my questions and for providing such wonderful and thoughtful responses. As some readers of this blog know, I’ve been writing a psychological thriller of my own, and it’s been very instructive being able to ask both Ms. Jewell and Ms. Kubica questions about their writing processes. I hope other readers and writers find them as interesting, and as helpful, as I do.
 
A friend of mine, Jenniey Tallman, recently published a strange yet forceful post-apocalyptic short story, “We Are Persistence Runners” at Electric Literature. Do yourself a favor and give it a look!
 
I’ve also had a few short stories published in recent weeks. Here’s “After the Riots,” which appeared in Atticus Review. And here’s “Pools,” which appears in Pinball’s latest issue. Many thanks to Michelle Ross and Lucas Church, editors at these fine publications, for all their help and assistance! These enigmatic stories are quite unlike the novel I’m writing, but I’d like to think they say a lot about our current socio-political moment. In any case, I hope you enjoy them!
 
Lastly, many thanks to Deborah Schneider for generously helping to facilitate my interview with Lisa Jewell.  

Don't You Cry: An Interview with Mary Kubica

​In January, I read the most remarkable book: Paula Hawkins’s THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN. It was my first dip into the domestic suspense/domestic noir/psychological thriller genre, and it absolutely captivated me. Hawkins’s fast-paced twisty plot, her bevy of largely unlikeable characters, and the inadvisable choices these characters made, provided immense readerly pleasure. More than anything, I was struck by the novel’s narrative propulsion. I tore through the pages. For years upon years of reading primarily literary fiction (a genre that often de-emphasizes plot for the sake of other fictive elements), I’d forgotten how much fun reading purely for the sake of story can be; page-turners are fun!
 
I wanted to read more books like THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, so I dweebishly Googled, “Books like GIRL ON THE TRAIN,” which lead me to THE GOOD GIRL, Mary Kubica’s 2014 debut novel about a young woman’s abduction. Kubica’s characters were nicer, and more sympathetically-drawn, than Hawkins’s. Much of the novel’s action occurred in the Minnesota woodlands, which Kubica rendered expertly, and I was fascinated by the Stockholm Syndrome-like relationship that gradually developed between the kidnapped woman and her captor. Again though, it was the story itself—rather than secondary psychological musings or the lyrical passages about the brutal cold of an unheated cabin in Minnesota’s winters—that had me hooked.
 
I’ve since run many dweebish Google searches, and read a boatload of books I wouldn’t have picked up had I not first read THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN and THE GOOD GIRL. Among the best were Gillian Flynn’s GONE GIRL and S.J. Watson’s BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP. A common misperception among lit fiction aficionados is that “commercial” fiction usually isn’t very well written. I’ve not found this to be true. Although Google led me to a few clunkers, Gillian Flynn and Lisa Jewell (whose new novel, THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN, I read last week) are among the best pure writers I’ve read in recent years.
 
 Last weekend, during the lightning storms that discombobulated our holiday weekend plans, I read Mary Kubica’s new novel, DON’T YOU CRY. Although it’s a quieter novel than THE GOOD GIRL, it builds to the most riveting conclusion of all the novels I’ve recently read. I reached out to Mary Kubica, who kindly consented to answer a few questions via email.
 
 
Question: DON’T YOU CRY is told through two alternating present-tense first-person narratives. Quinn is a recent college graduate working a dead-end job at Chicago law firm who awakes one morning to discover her roommate (Esther) has mysteriously vanished. Alex is a recent high school grad living off-season in a summer resort town who becomes curious about an odd young woman (“Pearl”) who drifts into the diner where he works.
 
The way you juggle these two narrators is really interesting. Although readers sense a connection exists between Esther and Pearl, the paths of Alex and Quinn never directly cross. So many novels nowadays are told with fractured or conflicting narrations. Here though, I don’t sense two different viewpoints but, rather, two different investigations that gradually zero in on the novel’s central mystery. In some ways, Quinn and Alex represent the “before” and “after” narrations—Quinn largely uncovers the mysteries and events that lead up to Esther’s disappearance, while what Alex finds out about Pearl helps readers understand what happened after Esther disappeared.
 
How did you arrive at this narrative strategy, and what difficulties did it pose to you as a writer? Although it all made sense to this reader, were there times when you wanted to introduce different characters’ perspectives? Was there ever a moment, for instance, when you started drafting, say, an Esther-narrated chapter?
 
Mary Kubica:
When I came up with the premise of Don't You Cry, it was more of a concept to me than a storyline.  I was intrigued by the idea of exploring the simultaneous disappearance and appearance - of one woman, two women, I didn't know at the time, but I was eager to find out.  I prefer to write from multiple perspectives because it gives readers a more comprehensive view of the novel and allows them access to the inner thoughts of multiple characters.  In that regard, this novel was no different than my previous two. Quinn and Alex were the ideal candidates to narrate the story because they're detached enough from the mystery, and yet intricately connected to it; for numerous reasons, any of the other characters wouldn't have been possible narrators.  As an author, writing from multiple perspectives or time frames can prove problematic and so, in order to make sure I keep the characters' voices fresh and unique, I write one character in his or her entirety, and then go back to the beginning of the novel and switch gears.  In the case of Don't You Cry, I wrote Quinn's entire storyline from beginning to end, and then went back and began Alex's narrative, merging them together when I was through.  
 
 
Question: The least interesting character in Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY is, inarguably, Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator. You’ve done something similar in DON’T YOU CRY. Quinn and Alex aren’t glamorous or especially mysterious. Every other character, even the agoraphobic middle-aged woman whom Alex befriends, is portrayed as leading a more-interesting life. Esther bustles with energy and compassion. Pearl vibrates with a spooky weirdness.
 
Was this a conscious choice? Quinn and Alex have remarkably low egos. Did that help you in some way clear canvas space so that your novel’s other characters could shine better?
 
Mary Kubica:
To me, Quinn and Alex are human.  Like all of us, they are flawed in some way.  Due to circumstance, they're drifting aimlessly, trying to find themselves and coming to terms with what defines their lives.  Quinn is twenty-three years old, newly graduated from college and making her way into the 'real world', which she seems quite unprepared for.  Like many recent college grads, she is living on her own for the first time in her life, and struggling to realize what means to be an adult - financial obligations, independence, working for forty hours a week.  She is stuck in a job she doesn't enjoy but isn't sure how to amend the situation.  Alex, on the other hand, is eighteen and brilliant, forced to remain in a small town, caring for his alcoholic father because he's terrified of what will happen to his father if he leaves.  He's lonely and wants something else for his life, but doesn't have the means or ability to find that something else.  Quinn and Alex are quite similar and grow by leaps and bounds throughout the pages of the novel.  They both left an indelible mark on my heart and I hope they do with readers, too.    
 
 
Question: Every writing manual will tell would-be novelists that readers need to know what their protagonists want. Quinn and Alex succeeded as characters because, although their professional and personal lives are in shambles, we know what they want—Quinn wants to find out what happened to Esther, and Alex wants to find out more about the strange woman who drifts into his diner. What else though helped make Quinn and Alex successful characters?
 
Mary Kubica:
Quinn and Alex are human.  They're relatable to readers.  They're not simply characters or caricatures, but hopefully come to life throughout the book.  As an author, this is one of my most important tasks.    
 
Question:  I’m especially impressed by DON’T YOU CRY’s well-constructed plot. How do you go about plotting your novels? Do you outline them, or do the plots naturally emerge once you begin writing? Are there certain questions you ask yourself, or ask of your characters, along the way?
 
Mary Kubica:
I don't outline, but prefer to dive right in to the writing.  I often begin with a problem; in the case of Don't You Cry, it's a missing woman.  From there, I develop my characters and set the stage, and once I have that out of the way can really tackle the plot.  To me, with mysteries, there often seems a logical progression of events and so I let these guide me through the writing process.  I enjoy getting to know my characters and letting them take control of the reins, and am often surprise myself by the twists and turns a novel will take.  By not outlining in advance, the novels seem to have a more organic feel to me than a premeditated one.
 
 
Question: Along with the plotting, I’m also struck by the narrative momentum of your novels. Partly that’s a product of the tension you create between your characters, and the do-or-die stakes your characters eventually find themselves in. But how else is that achieved?
 
Mary Kubica:
Ending every chapter on a cliffhanger is something I try to do or, if not a cliffhanger, some other situation that will urge the reader to turn the page and continue on.  There are also multiple mysteries in the novel, not merely one.  Though I may save the big bombshell for my ending, any number of questions or problems arise throughout the text, propelling readers forward.  This keeps the reader invested throughout the novel and not merely wanting to skip to the last few pages to see how it all resolves. 
 
Question: Especially with DON’T YOU CRY, I’m also struck by the economy of details, scenes, and circumstances. Characters don’t ramble off on long tangents, nor are scenes invented just for beauty’s sake alone. Every little detail seems necessary to the plot. After you write your first draft, do you often find yourself cutting scenes/lines/paragraphs simply because they don’t contribute directly towards the novel’s resolution?
 
Mary Kubica:
Yes, of course.  I'm longwinded when I draft, and have to cut lines or scenes to make sure the story is concise (and I stick to my word count).  I'm also prone to inserting too much backstory, which is later irrelevant to the plot.  But because I don't outline in advance, I don't always know this at the time, and though some of that text may not make it to the final novel, it's a wonderful way for me to better understand my characters and what makes them tick.
 
Question: Violence. While the body counts rarely are as high as found in, say, crime novels or international espionage thrillers, inevitably domestic suspense and psychological thrillers contain some level of violence. How do you handle violent scenes? Do you like writing them? Do you have ideas about how much violence is enough, and on how vividly it should be portrayed?
 
Mary Kubica:
It varies by novel, but for me personally, I prefer the psychology behind my characters' actions to creating that violence on the page.  This is where I place my greatest efforts: my characters' mindset.  There are violent moments, of course, because of the genre, and often my characters' thoughts and actions lead to some sort of boiling point where someone gets hurt.  I have no qualms in writing dark or violent scenes but do shy away from the overly graphic because I don't think it's always necessary.  As they say, sometimes less is more.   
 
Question: As I touched on above, “commercial fiction” is naturally more concerned about story and plot than “literary fiction,” but what other concerns are the rightful domain of commercial fiction? In other words, beyond providing a gripping and electrifying read (which you do so very well), what else do you wish your readers walk away with when they finish one of your novels?
 
Mary Kubica:
I want my readers to be moved.  I want them to be touched by my characters' struggles, but I want them to be shocked as well.  I hope to create endings in my books that my readers want to walk away from and tell a friend about.  To me, good writing, a strong plot and substantial characterization are all important aspects of any novel.
 
Question: You’ve now published three wildly successful novels. What are the most important lessons you’ve learned about writing during your career? Craft-wise, what was the hardest aspect about writing for you when you began?
 
Mary Kubica:
I have no formal training in creative writing and like to think of myself as self-taught.  I had to write plenty of mediocre manuscripts to find my voice, and discover what worked for me as an author.  Every author is unique, and I chose not to prescribe to rules one may find in a textbook or writing manual, but rather to find myself on the pages of my own works.  I've grown immensely as a writer in the last few years, and I credit my editor for that, for pointing out my strengths and weakness as an author so I know where to place my greatest efforts.  It's a skill that grows with time, and I hope to get better with each novel I write.
 
 
Question: Which writers (or books) have been most influential towards your own writing?
 
Mary Kubica:
Every book I read in some way influences my own writing.  Reading is not only wonderfully therapeutic, but through it, I'm able to examine other writing styles, voice, how an author navigates a certain situation, etc.  I'm an avid reader of all genres, and though I'm not sure it had a direct influence on my writing, like to credit The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien as one of my favorite books of all time.
 
Addendum: Writers of literary fiction are constantly asked to explain aspects of their craft. The Paris Review, through their “Art of Fiction” interview series, has interviewed literary fiction writers for over sixty years. If you go through their archives, you’ll find interviews with everyone from E.M. Forster and Ernest Hemingway to Louise Erdrich and Jonathan Franzen. But you will not find Paris Review interviews with writers of commercial fiction, and while commercial fiction authors are often interviewed elsewhere, rarely are they asked the nut-and-bolts under-the-hood craft questions that are often asked of lit fiction writers. This is unfortunate. Craft is an important aspect in all fiction, including commercial fiction; because we don’t often see commercial fiction writers address issues of craft, one might mistakenly assume commercial fiction writers don’t care about their craft. Or, by extension, one might assume that commercial fiction isn’t written well enough to warrant questions about craft. I hardly think this is the case. The best commercial fiction is rarely as formulaic as its detractors often insist it to be. Over the next few months, I hope to interview other domestic suspense and psychological thriller writers. Writers of all stripes can benefit from learning how commercial fiction writers tackle the subject of writing.