Elise Hart Kipness

Elise Hart Kipness is a former television sports reporter turned crime writer. Her debut mystery, Lights Out, the first in a series, is based on the author’s experience in the high-pressure, adrenaline-pumping world of live TV. Like her protagonist, she chased marquee athletes through the tunnels of Madison Square Garden and stood before glaring lights reporting to national audiences.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I’m a bit obsessed with my title and I feel like I can say that because I didn’t come up with it. After bagging my original title, my husband suggested Lights Out. What I love about Lights Out is that it works really well for a domestic thriller. But it also has a sports reference. If someone plays “lights out” it means that they can’t miss. I thought the connection to basketball was really cool because the murder victim is an NBA player.

What's in a name?

At first my main character was named something completely different. In fact, I unintentionally chose a last name that I had a hard time pronouncing. My Long Island accent tends to come out when I have a “t” in the middle of a word. I usually pronounce it as a “d.” Originally, my main character’s last name was “Martin” which I pronounced Mar-den.” Then I thought–why would I do that to myself? So I changed my protagonist’s name to Kate Green!

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

One-hundred percent endings! I tend to write in layers, which means I’m always coming back to the beginning and tweaking it. But when I get to the ending I get a little stymied. I usually know what the twist will be, but my mind imagines so many different ways to reveal the ending that I struggle deciding which way to go. I’ve found, my best endings come in conjunction with collaboration with my agent and editor.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

My main character, Kate Green, is a way cooler version of myself. We are both sports reporters. But where I’m a soccer mom, she’s a former Olympic soccer gold medalist. I chase my three dogs around the yard, she chases bad guys through the hidden tunnels of Madison Square Garden. Her demons are also way more interesting than mine. Darker and edgier. But we both love coffee and greasy grilled cheese sandwiches.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Anything that tells a story from movies to television to songs and musicals. I’m always studying how ideas are portrayed and plots revealed.

Visit Elise Hart Kipness's website.

The Page 69 Test: Lights Out.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alysa Wishingrad

Alysa Wishingrad writes fantastical stories for young readers, tales that ask; is the truth really true? Her favorite stories are those that meld the historical with the fantastic, and that find ways to shine a light on both the things that divide and unite us all. The Verdigris Pawn, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, is her debut novel.

Her new novel is Between Monsters and Marvels.

Wishingrad lives in the Hudson Valley with her family and two demanding rescue dogs.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I think, far more than my debut, The Verdigris Pawn, Between Monsters and Marvels does a good deal of work to set the stage for the book. The title alone promises the reader, well . . . monsters, but it also promises something else that feels safer, friendlier, and above all, magical. The word Between also does a good deal of work as Dare, the main character, gets caught between a great many rocks and some very hard, and tricky places. There are the worlds of Barrow’s Bay, the bucolic island she grew up on, and City-on-the-Pike, the teeming, overcrowded, and at times desperate city on the mainland to which she is banished after her father’s untimely and mysterious death. Then once in the City, Dare gets caught between competing loyalties and allies, the truth and lies, history and facts, and who she always thought her father was and reality. And finally, Dare must learn to live between what she knows and what she hopes can be true.

What's in a name?

From the moment you meet her I think the reader understands exactly the depth of meaning behind Dare’s name. Though her given name is Darvlah, everyone, except for the governor, calls her Dare. And she is daring to the core!

Yes, she is opinionated, defensive, quick tempered, and fiery. But she also has the self-confidence to flout convention and spurn the impulse to try to fit in. She knows who she is, and she won’t change that for anyone. But she also knows that her edges are rough, and she tries, for a time, to soften them, to emulate her kind and gentle father, the one person who truly understood and appreciated her.

Dare is truly daring and bold and determined, and she will not stop until she finds the truth of the monsters and her father’s death. But she is also vulnerable and loving and devoted to truth and kindness.

I dare you not to fall in love with her!

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I don’t start drafting until I know the full arc of a story, and I cannot move forward until I have a beginning that works. It’s in those early pages that I find the voice of a piece and ground myself in the world. So I will stay there until I have a solid launch pad.

But in fact, it’s the middle that is hardest for me, and that I have changed the most for both of my books. I’ve been known to chuck entire full drafts, or as in the case of Between Monsters and Marvels, the last 200 pages in order to make the middle work. If the center of the arc isn’t working, then even the tightest beginning will not matter. As for a satisfying ending, it has to be earned and built on the back of that strong middle. If I’ve done my job right, then the ending should almost write itself.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I like to think that there’s a piece of me in every character I craft—but I would say that Dare is the closest to my heart. I understand her desire to put on a tough face, I think I was like that when I was younger, to not let anyone in lest they hurt you. But I also relate to her soft heart, her unconditional love, and her undying belief that the truth is out there. I’m also just as determined as she and unflinching in my belief that we have a responsibility to each other, to nature, and to being honest and truthful in all our dealings with others.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am a devoted thief! I will glean ideas from everywhere: history, theater, tv shows, movies, music, overheard conversations, magazines, and news stories. Ideas are everywhere. I try to stay open so that those floating seeds can find me. But I also know not every idea has wings, at least not ones that I can use. But what’s fun is to see how seeds show up in unexpected ways.

Visit Alysa Wishingrad's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Alysa Wishingrad & Cleo and Lucy.

The Page 69 Test: The Verdigris Pawn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer duBois

Jennifer duBois is the author of The Last Language. Her first novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and winner of the California Book Award for First Work of Fiction. Soon after its publication, duBois received a Whiting Award and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the winner of the Housatonic Book Award. And her third novel, The Spectators, was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Stanford University Stegner Fellowship, duBois teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University. She lives in Austin.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I tend to feel pretty helpless about titles: I never know where they’ll come from, when they’ll appear in the process (if ever), or how they’ll be received. The phrase “the last language” was in my head a lot while I was writing, and though I can’t say it’s a precise reference to any single concept in the book, it did seem to generate several meaningful interpretations: the idea that Angela’s epistolary account of her relationship with Sam might be the last piece of language between them, and that Sam’s conversations with Angela might be the last connection through language he ever experiences at all; the broader (more optimistic) thought that whatever communion that existed between Angela and Sam—be it partly spiritual, subconscious, or sub-verbal—reflects the deepest form of language, the kind that will outlive all the particular tongues we know. Throughout the book, Angela is scouring global languages, hoping that their insights might illuminate the fundamental question that haunts her: does language predate thought, or the other way around? Maybe The Last Language as a title contains the suggestion that if she just finds the final language—whatever that is—it will contain the definitive answer. And of course I thought a million times while writing it that this book would probably be my last novel; I think all my books have had titles that in some way describe not only the plot/thematic concern but also the literary project at hand, and so for a time, calling this book The Last Language seemed right in that regard.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage reader self was, lucky for me, on a journey of pretty radical re-assessment of my literary values, so it would really depend on the year we caught up with me. I think my eighteen-year-old self would have been thrilled I’d written a novel at all, even more thrilled that I’d written a novel that seemed to engage with Lolita. I think if my teenage self could read The Last Language, I might be invited to reconsider Lolita—not to condemn it, but to reconsider where I thought its complexity derived. But I think even my fifteen-year-old self, who was much more innocent and much less settled on any particular literary opinion, would have been pleased that I’d written a book in which uncomfortable moral entanglements aren’t miraculously resolved through external coincidence, so that the characters don’t actually have to grapple with the consequences of making a decision. (Jane Eyre. I am talking about Jane Eyre.)

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

For me, endings seem to sort of write themselves—by the time I get two-thirds of the way through a novel I have a pretty clear sense of the final third, and by the time I get to the very end I usually have a whole bunch of cherished images and sentences and downbeats I’ve been saving up to use. I find beginnings to be much harder. The beginning of The Last Language came pretty easily; those opening paragraphs were the first part of the book that I wrote, and they contained so much information about the novel I was writing—the voice, the direct address, the fact that the narrator is writing from jail—that I felt a lot of natural momentum going forward. But other times I’ve really struggled with the opening pages. For two of my books in particular, I went around and around with editing and polishing the beginnings, and something about them still feels a little off to me. Which is high-stakes, given that readers who aren’t taken with a beginning will probably just jump ship, understandably.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I wouldn’t be curious enough about a character to write about them if they weren’t significantly different from me. My characters all experience situations and dilemmas that I haven’t; in almost every case, they make decisions that I would not (not necessarily better decisions, but certainly more dramatically interesting ones). Some of my characters have sharply different moral priorities than I do, and others have profound intellectual, political, or religious attachments I don’t share. And usually my characters differ from me demographically in significant ways, as well—The Last Language is actually the first time I’ve written from the perspective of white woman living in the United States in the 21st century. All that said, because all of my characters’ brains come from my own, there are similarities between them that I can’t get rid of, even when I’ve tried. For one thing, they are all very verbal—even though lots of people experience the world in ways that are more physical or visual or intuitive than my characters, I don’t really know how to write a person like that, because my own consciousness is just wall-to-wall words. And most of my point of view characters are, in my opinion, pretty funny. For some, this is a significant aspect of characterization; for others, it’s more incidental—but the reason that my characters so consistently make jokes is that I like to make jokes in my writing, and if I make a joke I think is halfway decent, I will always be too vain to take it out. So this probably puts some kinds of characters out of range for me—I’ll probably never be able to write somebody extremely solemn or humorless or reverential before all things.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

An interest in geopolitics, which plays a large role in my first novel and a significant one in my second. News stories and gossip, since most of my fiction begins with at least a snippet of some real-life event I find compelling. Comedy, maybe especially sketch comedy, because I wish I was funny enough to be an SNL writer and this thwarted desire comes out everywhere, including in my writing. An interest in languages and linguistics. The woods around the house where I grew up in western Massachusetts. And my undergraduate degree in philosophy, certainly, since every book I write tends to grapple with some moral or philosophical question I find truly irreducible.

Visit the official Jennifer duBois website.

The Page 69 Test: A Partial History of Lost Causes.

My Book, The Movie: A Partial History of Lost Causes.

The Page 69 Test: Cartwheel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kellie M. Parker

Kellie M. Parker grew up traveling the United States and Europe as a US Navy brat. She attended high schools in three states and was too nerdy to ever sit at the cool kids’ table. With books as her most reliable companion, it was only a matter of time before she decided to write one herself. She has college degrees in biology and nautical archaeology but has always found her sense of adventure most satisfied by a great story.

Parker lives in west Michigan with her husband and four kids. She writes about brave, smart teens trying to figure out who they are and where they belong. When she’s not plotting her next fictional murder, she can be found baking, gardening, tackling DIY home projects, and reading to her kids.

Thin Air is her debut YA novel.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I admit that coming up with book titles is normally a challenge for me, but the title for Thin Air came to me pretty early on in the drafting process. This title stuck out to me for a few reasons. It’s short, which usually works well for thrillers. It implies a sense of danger or mystery since it’s hard to breathe when there’s not enough oxygen. Last of all, it relates to the book’s setting--almost the entire story takes place on an airplane at 42,000 feet. And as readers will find out, the characters find themselves in a dangerous situation almost right after takeoff. The air up there is very thin indeed!

What's in a name?

Like book titles, I often struggle with naming characters also. My go-to solution is to use baby name finders on my internet search engine, based on the year the character would’ve been born. Then I scroll through the list of popular names for that year, looking for something that feels like a good fit for the character’s personality. For Thin Air, I used Pinterest to find images for each of my characters. Once I had a mental picture, narrowing down the right names was easier.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

As a teenager, I loved reading all kinds of novels, but I definitely included a number of mysteries in my reading “diet.” Thin Air follows a group of boarding school students who are competing for a scholarship—one someone is willing to kill to win. As a teen reader who also happened to be an overachiever, I think I would’ve related well to these characters and how important success is to them. I would’ve loved the twists and turns as I tried to figure out who the killer was. Would I have guessed correctly? Hmm, not sure about that one!

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I think I feel more pressure when I’m writing a beginning, because it sets the tone for the whole story. If I don’t “get it right,” then I worry the story will run off the rails right at the start. So in that sense, I think endings are easier. By the time I get to the end, I know the characters very well and my subconscious brain has pulled together all the loose threads of the story into a nice, tight ending. But because I’m often tired of drafting and ready to be done, I tend to rush my endings and need to go back later to flesh them out more. Beginnings are harder, but I change the ending more during revisions.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

To some extent, all my characters are infused with little bits of me, whether it’s a personality trait, an interest or skill, or something from their backstory. I think that’s a natural outflow of writing characters you care about. But I don’t want them to be clones of myself, so I make sure to round them out with plenty of things that are different, even if they’re small. Emily, the main character of Thin Air, is much more extroverted and “popular” than I was in high school. She also drinks a lot of Diet Coke, which I can’t stand. But she’s smart, loyal to those she loves, and has a quirky sense of humor like I do.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My writing tends to be shaped by two major non-literary inspirations: my love of learning and my love of travel. I’ve got a pretty good storehouse of random information in my brain after years of learning about things that interest me, and these facts often work their way into whatever I’m writing. And because of all the places I’ve been able to visit, setting is very important to me in my work. I want the setting to feel real to readers and to play such an important role in the story that it couldn’t happen the same way if it were set somewhere else. For Thin Air, I loved being able to research private luxury planes and thinking about how to use elements of the setting to propel the story forward.

Visit Kellie M. Parker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kim DeRose

Kim DeRose writes dark, magical stories about strong, magical girls.

She grew up in Santa Barbara, California, where she spent childhood summers reading books and writing stories (which she was convinced her local bookstore would publish). She now lives in New York City, where she spends all seasons reading books and writing stories.

DeRose earned her MFA in film directing from UCLA, and currently works in digital media.

When she’s not reading or writing she can be found listening to podcasts on long walks, drinking endless cups of coffee, and spending time with her family.

For Girls Who Walk Through Fire is her debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I think my title, For Girls Who Walk Through Fire, does a very good job at taking readers to the core of the story. These girls have been through something, they have walked through fire. And it simultaneously does a good job of alluding to the witches and witchcraft featured in the story because, as we know, so many women were labeled witches and burned at the stake. And yet the teen witches in my novel aren’t about to adhere to that narrative, these witches are fighting back. What I also love about the title is that it’s as much about my characters as it is about the readers. In fact, the book is partially dedicated to anyone who has walked through fire.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Oh, I think she would be very surprised, but pleasantly so. Taking a step back, I think my teenage self would also be incredibly surprised that I’d written and published a novel to begin with. Becoming an author was my childhood dream, but by the time I was a teenager I had abandoned it, believing it to be unrealistic. It took me a very long time to circle back around and remember what I’d known as a kid: that I am a writer.

I think my teenage self would also be very surprised by the serious subject matter of the book. If she was able to read For Girls Who Walk Through Fire, I think it would open her eyes and make her think about her own experiences and the experiences of her friends quite differently. I think it would help her to stop minimizing things that happen to her, and all around her, and stop considering them “normal” or “just what girls have to put up with” or “the way guys are.” I think this book would help her see that all of these experiences really are that bad, and that they all flow out of the same misogynistic rape culture.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

With this novel I found both the beginning and the ending to be rather easy to write, which isn’t always the case. But I knew exactly where I wanted For Girls Who Walk Through Fire to begin - with Elliott sitting in her sexual assault support group - and I knew exactly where and how I wanted it to end (which you’ll have to read to find out!). Neither of those changed very much. In general, however, beginnings are harder for me to write and are often what I revise several times. There’s a lot to introduce and set up quickly, and to do so in a way that feels natural and engaging can be tricky.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Yes, I definitely see aspects of myself in my characters. I wouldn’t say that any of them are auto biographical by any means, but there are parts of me in all of them. Elliott and Madeline are probably most like me in very different ways. Elliott is very much who I internally was as a teen and wished I could have been externally. And Madeline is a much more extreme and driven version of who I was socialized to be as a teen. But there are also parts of me in both Chloe and Bea, as well as in Mary, Elliott’s mom and dad, and in Otis.

I often think about what my documentary professor told us in graduate film school: that every documentary is a portrait of the artist. I think that’s true for books as well. It isn’t that a particular character or set of characters is you, the writer, it’s more that the entire book is filtered through your perspective and a reflection of you (which means it will also reflect your limitations). It’s your lens on the world in that particular moment.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I have a ton of non-literary influences.

Music is a huge part of my writing process, so I’m always listening to music when I write, and it varies quite a bit depending on the book or even the chapter or scene that I’m working on.

I’m also a huge film lover (and, as mentioned above, went to graduate film school) so I’m very inspired by a variety of filmmakers. I have too many to name here, but I will call out my deep ongoing love of all things David Lynch. I love his exploration of whiteness and the dark underbelly of suburban life.

I’m also a big podcast listener and there are a lot of intersectional feminist ideas, progressive conversations, and creative explorations within podcasts that have been very influential on my thinking and writing. Of note is We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle and Abby Wambach, The Roxane Gay Agenda, The Laverne Cox Show, Call Your Girlfriend with Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow, Still Processing with J Wortham and Wesley Morris, Unlocking Us with Brené Brown, Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis Dreyfus, and Forever35 with Doree Shafrir and Kate Spencer.

Visit Kim DeRose's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina McDonald

Christina McDonald is the USA Today and Amazon Charts bestselling author of These Still Black Waters, Do No Harm, Behind Every Lie, and The Night Olivia Fell,  which has been optioned for television by a major Hollywood studio.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Book titles are always a work in progress. I rarely know what it will be right away because I need to explore my characters, my themes, my plot.

My agent suggested we change the original title I had for These Still Black Waters as she thought it gave too much away. We brainstormed a number of ideas together and both loved These Still Black Waters, as the town of Black Lake (where the story is set) and the theme of the black waters that so many secrets lie beneath is very central to the story.

And then that first plot point, when the reader learns that a body has been found floating in Black Lake on a still, hot summer day, it really encapsulates the feel, the aura, even the plot of the story.

What's in a name?

I’m not exactly sure what makes me give a character their name. It’s something very ephemeral for sure, something that is more feeling than reason.

Sometimes, in fact, I go through various names, and as I write the character, as I meet them and get to know them, I might feel the name is wrong and I’ll change it. And yet I know for absolute certain when I’ve landed on the perfect name, when it matches the character I’m creating.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

The short answer is, it entirely depends on the book. I rarely know the ending before I start, so I could never start at the ending and work my way backward, although, with These Still Black Waters, I had a general idea of the main twist.

That being said, I still always start at the beginning. With These Still Black Waters, the first scene where Neve has left her home because of a traumatic home invasion and returned with her daughter to her childhood summer home, that was the first scene I wrote.

It changed massively as I wrote the book, and I kept coming back to edit it as I found out more about Neve, more about where I wanted the plot to go, realized where I could add little clues and red herrings, but that scene, it was always first. And I think it’s key in showing how destabilized and traumatized Neve is after everything that’s happened to her.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I think all of my characters show a little bit about me and reflect a bit of my personality, but as a whole, they are entirely different people. I create characters by looking into their past, their character ghost, how they were raised, their values, and how those things created the person they became in their present.

Obviously, each of these things are completely different to me and my life, so they are very different to me as a person. But there are always little snippets, like things I love or hate, or things I notice when observing other people, or maybe the way I talk or the inflection of a word or even a philosophical thought I have. So in a way they reflect me both wholly and not at all.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The news tends to influence my writing quite a lot. I see things that I find shocking, things that stay in my mind, that I can’t shake free, and they’ll show up in my stories in some form or another, if not in the story itself.

These Still Black Waters is probably the first story I’ve written that just unspooled entirely from my imagination rather than a news story that stuck with me, and yet, it’s the story I wrote during the pandemic, so there’s a strong influence of living during lockdown in there as well. That time of life was so alienating, so isolating, and I think that really came out in Neve’s character.

Visit Christina McDonald's website.

The Page 69 Test: These Still Black Waters.

--Marshal Zeringue