C.M. McGuire

When C.M. McGuire was a child, she drove her family crazy with her nonstop stories. Lucky for them, she eventually learned to write and gave their ears a rest. This love of stories led her to college where she pursued history (semi-nonfictional storytelling), anthropology (where stories come from) and theater (attention-seeking storytelling). When she isn't writing, she's painting, crocheting, gardening, baking, and teaching the next generation to love stories as much as she does.

McGuire's new novel is Ironspark.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I remember years ago, while working at my local RenFair, I saw a friend wearing an iron nail around her neck. She told me it came from folklore, as a way to protect children from the Fae. Not long after that, I came up with the idea for the Ironspark novel, so it was inevitable that iron would play a big role in the story to develop, since most of the story is Bryn trying to protect her family and her town from the Unseelie Fae.

Actually, Ironspark wasn’t even the title I had in mind. Originally, the novel was simply called Bryn because of my protagonist. Then, I wanted to call it Autumn of Iron, until it was pointed out that Noun + Prepositional Phrase titles in YA were a little tired for the time being. It was sitting in a cupcake shop drinking a latte and discussing the dilemma with friends that one suggested Ironspark as a title.

What's in a name?

Ironspark came about as the result of a very emotional time in my life. I was working in my final season at my local RenFair, which was stressful to the point of minor medical issues. I was preparing to go away to college and live alone for the first time, racking up huge debt by attending a college my parents thought financially irresponsible. So, at that time, I wanted to hold on to whatever made me happy.

One of my fellow castmembers at the fair played a barbarian named Bryn. I loved her character deeply and, when I looked up the nature-based origins of the name, it gave me a sense of certainty. Bryn would be my protagonist as a sturdy (if uneven) heroine.

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

I think teenaged me would enjoy the novel, if quietly. Honestly, I’d probably be pretty surprised by my having openly queer characters in starring roles. I was in my mid-twenties before I realized that I couldn’t censor myself and expect to write anything genuine.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised by violence. I was a fan of “whump” fanfiction since its early Stargate SG1 days, and it was inevitable it would find its way into my own writing.

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

Beginnings are my bane. I have to rewrite them over and over. Endings, on the other hand, are almost always more or less what I had in mind with minor tweaking. Maybe it says something that Ironspark is the first book whose beginning hardly changed, and it’s my first published novel.

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

Absolutely. I think we all have to find some amount of ourselves in each of our characters, even if it’s very small. I could go on and on about the specifics of what bit of myself I put into each character, but that would mean risking spoilers.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music is easily my biggest influence. A lot of my brainstorming comes from listening to songs I love or the radio while I’m on a road trip. Florence and the Machine in particular was a huge inspiration for Ironspark.

Follow C.M. McGuire on Twitter.

The Page 69 Test: Ironspark.

My Book, The Movie: Ironspark.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jenny McLachlan

Jenny McLachlan is the author of several acclaimed young adult novels. Before she became a writer, she was head of English in a secondary school. When she isn’t thinking about or writing stories, she enjoys living by the seaside, cycling, and running over the South Downs.

The Land of Roar is McLachlan’s middle grade debut.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The Land of Roar is one of the few titles I have chosen for my books; many of my titles have been changed by my publishers so it’s great that this one stuck! Hopefully readers will find it intriguing and the ‘Roar’ hints at the humour and dragons to be found inside its pages. It is also made up of the first two letters of the main characters’ names, Rose and Arthur, and is a clue to the observant reader that the fantasy world was created by both of them.

What's in a name?

I find it difficult to start writing until I’m happy with the names of my characters. I called my main character Arthur because it suits him. The boy came first and then I named him! His surname is Trout which is quite close to my mother’s maiden name. Maiden names often get lost so it felt good to be able to bring it back in this way. Arthur is an old-fashioned name (and my Arthur is an old-fashioned boy, valuing kindness, loyalty and friendship), but it also has associations with the legendary King Arthur. Hopefully readers will agree with me that Arthur Trout is the perfect name for an accidental hero!

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

I think my teenage reader self would love The Land of Roar because my sense of humour has changed very little over the years. When I was a teenager, I would have found the idea of wizard-ninja who was terrible at both magic and being stealthy funny, and 44-year-old me does too! I also loved fantasy worlds when I was a teenager and really enjoyed the Moomin books. The Land of Roar is a place I would very much like to visit – like Moomin Valley – and I imagine teenage me would have loved it too.

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

Beginnings! Every time. The first 10,000 words of any book I write are always a struggle to write. This is when everything has to be put (apparently effortlessly) in place – characters, settings, plot. When the start feels right, then I can begin to write the book in earnest. Writing the first few chapters can take me weeks, but often I write the ending without even noticing that I’ve done it.

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

I’m very like Arthur, or rather, eleven year-old-me was like Arthur. I was shy, frightened of lots of things (including scarecrows and pointy black shoes!) and I loved playing. I watched with some sadness as my friends stopped playing and started going shopping instead, and, like Arthur I had a big imagination and loved visiting imaginary worlds. I did not want to start secondary school and found the first few years there difficult. Arthur and I have a lot in common!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I grew up watching some of the best children’s adventure films - The Goonies, E.T., The Princess Bride, Labyrinth - and I think my love of these films shines through in The Land of Roar. It’s a classic adventure story filled with humour where children are the true heroes.

Visit Jenny McLachlan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heidi Pitlor

Heidi Pitlor is the author of the novels The Birthdays, The Daylight Marriage, which was optioned for film, and Impersonation. A former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, she has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is also the editorial director of the literary studio, Plympton. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, Ploughshares, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. Pitlor lives outside Boston.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Hopefully, the title Impersonation does a fair amount of work for the reader. This is a story about a ghostwriter, but it's also about artifice, that which we encounter and adopt on a daily basis both in our private and public lives. People make incorrect assumptions about Allie Lang, the narrator and ghostwriter, but she finds herself doing the same of others. From where do these assumptions tend to come? What purpose do they serve socially and culturally? This is one of the central questions of my novel.

What's in a name?

I tend to give my characters names based on sound; ie, does the name suit the person on some visceral level for me? But sometimes I choose names that are also words, words that relate to the character's stage of life or state of mind. Allie is in a "blind alley" for much of this book, feeling her way toward a clearer voice and sense of herself. Nick Felles is ultimately felled by the #MeToo movement. Colin, Allie's agent, is of Irish descent, but also, and I know this is a stretch, tends to "call in" big, life-changing news to Allie.

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

Great question. I think my teenage self would be surprised that her future self would have written a novel at all, let alone three of them. My teenage self very much planned on becoming an international lawyer who lived in New York City and lived a glamorous yet edgy life. Teenage Me would have no interest in motherhood, but perhaps some in politics and ghostwriting, I'm sure. She might be surprised at how her future middle-aged self was still trying to push boundaries, protest social injustice, examine gender inequities while keeping one eye out for the comic absurdity of it all. Some things don't change.

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

Both are terrifically hard for me to write and I revise both equally, but maybe beginnings slightly more. Impersonation went through several different beginnings, but I eventually landed on a quick anecdote that set up the themes and narrator's character in order to orient the reader in what I considered the most important elements of the book. Beginnings are all about setting forth the most important points for the reader. What does the reader need to know most in order to fully engage with this book? To me, endings must do a lot of work too: echo outward, provide some amount of closure, leave the reader with a particular taste in her mouth. This also involves choices and prioritizing on the part of the writer. What sort of thought or sensation do you want your reader to experience as she closes this book?

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

Yes and no. Allie Lang and I are not talented housekeepers. We both love our children and would do anything for them, sometimes to an unwise degree. We are both feminists and freelancers and basically worker bees, working for higher profile people. That said, I am not raising my kids on my own and I am not a ghostwriter. I never lived in Manhattan or worked for a private equity firm. I am not an only child or raising an only child. I do not have a testy but close relationship to my mother-- mine unfortunately passed away when I was young.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

So many non-literary influences! Here are a few: life, family, money, my work, the rapidly changing state of our country, #MeToo, parenthood, nostalgia.

Visit Heidi Pitlor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Black

Lisa Black is the New York Times bestselling author of 14 suspense novels, including works that have been translated into six languages, optioned for film, and shortlisted for the inaugural Sue Grafton Memorial Award. She is also a certified Crime Scene Analyst and certified Latent Print Examiner, beginning her forensics career at the Coroner’s office in Cleveland Ohio and then the police department in Cape Coral, Florida. She has spoken to readers and writers at numerous conferences and is one of two Guests of Honor at 2020 Killer Nashville.

Black's new novel is Every Kind of Wicked.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The first book in the series was called That Darkness, from a quote I ran across in the Bible that seemed to describe Jack Renner perfectly: “But if the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness.” (Matthew 6:23) I like my titles to have something in common—though my publishers have never been crazy about this habit—so all the titles in the Gardiner-Renner series are from the Bible. For this one I had picked Before Destruction, from “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” (Proverbs 16:18) I thought ‘pride’ spoke to Jack, his pride allowing him to decide who lives and who dies, and also to how the villain’s pride plays into what they do—and ‘destruction’ definitely describes a scene at the end. But the publisher thought it sounded too much like a military thriller, so they suggested Every Kind of Wicked, from: “They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice.” (Romans 1:29) Which also describes my villains to a T.

What's in a name?

I am obsessed with names. My given name is Elizabeth, which has about twenty possible nicknames (one of which is Lisa, which my family has called me since birth) and I have burned through most at various phases of my life. But of course as a child I hated it and wanted something else, beginning with ‘Rosie’ after a pretty saloon girl on my favorite show, The Wild, Wild West. (Watching a rerun as an adult, I realized that Rosie was actually a hooker, but at 7 that went right over my head.) My character’s last names come from my favorite authors: Evelyn James for P.D. James, Theresa MacLean from Alastair MacLean, and Maggie Gardiner from Lisa Gardner (though spelled differently). I have always liked the name Maggie, not for any particular reason, and in high school I thought ‘Maggie Michaels’ would be a perfect pen name. (I’ve never used it, though. Too romancey.) Jack is a name that springs from some unknown well because I use it a lot, and Renner came from my current celebrity crush Jeremy Renner. (Oh, those eyes.)

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

Not too surprised, I don’t think. It’s full of action and science and every once in a while, a dab of humor, and that was exactly what I wanted to write in high school.

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

Beginnings are the worst. I rewrite the first chapter ten times and I’m still never satisfied with it. There is so much you need to do right at the start, establish the characters, the settings, where they are in their lives, what their current major issues are, what the book is going to be about and what they’re going to have to try to do. It’s really impossible.

Endings are pretty easy for me, probably because I know how it’s going to end and have the scene pictured in mind before I even begin.

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

Maggie has my job, a forensic specialist for a police department, but there the similarities end. She’s younger, divorced, and a workaholic. I am none of those things. The outward similarities make people think that she’s my avatar in this series but…I’m not Maggie. I’m Jack. We have the same thought patterns in many ways. I’ve never felt as close to a character as with Jack.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Places inspire me more than, say, paintings or music. I love huge, sweeping buildings and monuments, wide-open spaces with stunning views. That’s why it’s important for me to be able to picture every place in my book, even if it’s something I’m making up. Since Cleveland is my home town I can close my eyes and feel the sidewalks and the hundred-year-old stone walls and what the air is like at different times of the year. This book opens up in the dead of winter at the Erie Street Cemetery, which has graves dating back to 1826. I used it in their first book together, and I liked the idea of bringing Maggie and Jack full circle.

Learn more about the book and author at Lisa Black's website.

Writers Read: Lisa Black (July 2020).

The Page 69 Test: Every Kind of Wicked.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kylie Schachte

Kylie Schachte is a graduate from Sarah Lawrence College and an active member of the Pitch Wars online community as both an alum & mentor. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, cat, and giant dog.

Schachte applied the Page 69 Test to You're Next, her first novel, and reported the following:

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

I love You’re Next as a title, because it gets straight to the heart of the book with such a simple, economical phrase. This book is a heart-pounding, edge of your seat kind of thriller, where you truly don’t know if any of the characters you love will survive to see a happy ending. The title is a reference to a specific plot point, but it’s also a theme of the book as a whole. Anyone could be killed. Anyone could get hurt--even you, the reader, as the story crushes your heart into a bloody pulp.

I think having a big, in-your-face title was really important, because the first chapter is pretty mellow compared to the rest of the book. Flora Calhoun, the main character, experienced devastating trauma in her past, but at the start of the story she’s found an uneasy stasis or status quo. If you opened to that chapter without seeing the title, you might think this was a more conventional high school story. But in Chapter 2, that tentative peace gets shattered, and the rest of the book is a dark & vicious ride. My hope is that the title helps people to know what they’re in for.

What's in a name?

I am quite particular about character names, but I’m not the type of author who chooses them based on symbolism. The initial idea for You’re Next, was just a loose character concept of a teenage girl detective who would emulate those hard-boiled noir detectives, but also have to go to math class and stuff like that. I had no idea what her name was. I started looking through name lists, and as soon as I saw “Flora” I just knew it was the one. It felt like her.

So I didn’t go in search of any particular meaning, but “Flora” does have symbolic resonance. It’s such a soft, pretty name, but Flora’s a hard, angry character. It fits well with that dichotomy between the hardboiled detective & the teenage girl. And that duality ultimately became one of the big thematic questions of the book: what does criminal justice mean when it’s placed in the hands of a teenage girl--someone that society has deemed weak, fragile, vulnerable?

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

Honestly, not that surprised! I have been a writer pretty much since I could pick up a pencil, and I’m still very much a teenager at heart, so a lot of what I genuinely enjoy to read myself is in this book. I don’t think teenage me could have imagined how wonderful & supportive the writing community would be--that’s been the real surprise.

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

Definitely endings. Beginnings come pretty easily to me--when I first get an idea, I can usually roughly map out the first 25% of the story within a couple days. But where to go from there...that’s much harder, and I’ve had a lot of stories stall out at the end of Act One.

You’re Next went through so many total rewrites it’s hard to even say what has changed more, but probably the beginning because it can really make or break your book. The ending is super critical, but people might never read your book at all if they can’t get past the beginning. Once I figured out the ending, it mostly stayed as it was with some light touch-ups. But I was fiddling with Chapter 1 pretty much until we went to print. One thing I know for sure, though: way harder than either beginnings or endings are middles. The worst!

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

On the surface, Flora and I appear to be very different, but there’s quite a lot of me in her. Some things I drew upon intentionally, such as Flora’s outsider status at school. I moved around a lot when I was young, and by high school I was the lone new kid in a tiny school, in a tiny town, where everything appeared perfect on the surface, but dark secrets lurked underneath.

And sometimes it worked in the opposite direction, where Flora actually gave me things. I knew from the moment I started writing the book that Flora was bisexual. As I worked to understand that part of her identity, I learned a lot about myself, and ultimately came out as queer/bisexual in the middle of the drafting process.

I think when you tell a story--of any kind--it is always going to be imbued with parts of you, whether you intend it or not. That’s why it’s so vulnerable-making to put it out into the world.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Half of my family works in the film industry, and so everything I write is very cinematic. When I’m planning scenes, I will often sit there with my eyes closed and imagine them like scenes from a movie. The action, the lighting, the expressions on the faces of the “actors.”

When you read the book, it’s pretty clear that I borrowed a lot of sensibilities from film noir--both the classics, like The Big Sleep, but also more modern updates to the noir genre, like Brick, Nightcrawler, and even parodies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Because You’re Next is a twist on noir--I mean, it’s set in a high school with a sixteen-year-old detective--I wanted to know the tropes & visual language of the genre backwards and forwards. That way, I could both “play it straight,” so to speak, when I wanted to lend gravity & weight to a scene, as well as subvert or parody those tropes when I wanted to be more playful.

Visit Kylie Schachte's website.

My Book, The Movie: You're Next.

The Page 69 Test: You're Next.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Riordan

Kate Riordan is a British writer and journalist who worked for the Guardian and Time Out London.

Her new novel is The Heatwave.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The Heatwave, as a title, doesn’t attempt to tell the reader much about the specific plot points of my story, which is set in the south of France and brim-full of long-buried family secrets. But what it does suggest, I hope, is the mood of the book. A heatwave is by its nature extraordinary and so it follows that the people enduring it will start to behave in extraordinary ways, shucking off the normal rules like their clothes as the mercury keeps on rising.

A reader knows without conscious thought that there will be drama in a book called The Heatwave because hot weather can send people mad; we naturally associate extreme heat with fury and fire and boiling resentments, and all of these are present in the book. We also know instinctively that heatwaves can’t go on forever. At some point the weather is going to break, and probably in dramatic fashion. Any reader will pick up that the action ‘on the ground’ in the book is going to mirror that climax.

I did consider the title Heatstroke instead - I liked the single word, and the sensuousness of ‘stroke’ (though the medical condition, which features in the book, is anything but), but the word ‘heatwave’ seemed to hold more menace and tension - and that’s exactly what I was after.

What's in a name?

The family in my book is half-French, half-English. The narrator is Sylvie, who is returning to her childhood home in Provence, which is also where she lived with her now ex-husband and their first child, Elodie, who they lost ten years earlier. Their younger daughter is Emma, who left France for London when she was only four and is to all intents and purposes, fully English. Those two girls names, both beginning with E, were very deliberately chosen. Elodie is French, pretty but foreign, melodic but unknowable, just like the character herself. Emma is English and familiar, a little bit gauche and plain - and the daughter who is a much simpler proposition for her mother.

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

Not very surprised at all! I have always loved France and spent a lot of time there as a teenager. 1993 is the present day in the book and Emma is turning fourteen, which is more or less the age I was myself back then. I did that on purpose so I could relive my own teenage summers: the promise of sultry evenings, the cool jewellery you could buy in the markets, the unfamiliar smells and sounds, the boys. Everything feels super-charged when you’re that age, caught between childhood and the adult world, and I wanted to try and capture that as best I could from my own memories.

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

I love beginnings. There’s that line about every book being a beautiful idea ruined and I think lots of writers identify heavily with that. When I start, I have such high hopes, but of course it never quite turns out the way you intended. Actually, it’s not the end that’s so tricky - it’s the middle. That’s the bit that gets away from me!

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 there are always elements of you in your characters but often it will be something quite small that you borrow from your own life. So you might have a character who doesn’t like flying or who loves the burnt crust of pizza (both of these apply to me!). These little details can make a character ring true. But with the big stuff it’s much more fun to create people who are absolutely not like you.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I did a lot of film studies as part of my English degree - I was always drawn to those courses over the more traditional literature options. I try to write in a very visual way - I want readers to be there, in the world I’ve made up - and so I definitely draw on films and TV shows I’ve loved to do that. Drama series are also brilliant for plotting and pacing - there will often be multiple arcs running at the same time: one for a single episode, another for the season, others in case a second or third season is commissioned. There are even mid-season arcs in case a show gets cancelled. The writers really squeeze every drop of tension, potential and possibility out of their cast of characters and there’s a lot to learn there for a writer.

Visit Kate Riordan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Darin Strauss

Darin Strauss is the bestselling author of several books. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing and numerous other awards, Strauss has seen his work translated into fourteen languages and published in more than twenty countries.

His new novel is The Queen of Tuesday.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Tough one. I picked The Queen of Tuesday because I hoped it a) sounded cool, b) was mysterious, c) made sense once you realized the book was about the most famous television star of all time.

The book has tough to name because it's tough to peg: It's a half memoir/half fiction hybrid, about a speculative affair between my grandfather and Lucille Ball.

What's in a name?

Letters, generally.

More serious answer: I wanted to show how much sway Lucille had over America at that time. Her show (which in real-life aired on Monday nights, but in my book -- to show that it was a novel -- ran on Tuesdays) had the country all to itself on that night.

The nation's reservoirs are said to have dipped when her show broke for a commercial. (The whole country, flushing as one). Also, Lucille Ball was kind of a proto-feminist and progressive. She had one of the first famous American interracial marriages, and she fought to get her Latinx husband on primetime TV; she was a secret communist; and she invented the idea of reruns so she could have kids and still keep her job.

Anyway, she was a Queen, or as close as we get in this country to one.

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

Ha! A lot -- by the fact that it's got raunchy sex, and by the fact that the raunchy sex features my real-life grandad. And that the sex he has is with Lucille Ball, whom I didn't appreciate at the time.

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

I think beginnings are hard. Endings are also hard. As are middles.

Nothing comes, that is, without ulcerous tears. I change beginnings of novels more -- but maybe only because I have most time to futz with them.

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

They're always me, and the farther their life story is from mine, the more like me I think they are. In my books, these characters are like me: Eng, the conjoined twin from Thailand in my first book (Chang & Eng); Darlene Stokes (The African-American female doctor in More Than It Hurts You), and -- curve ball -- my grandfather, Isidore Strauss, in this one. My favorite character ever is my imagining of Lucille Ball, in this one. But she's not me at all.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I play guitar, seriously enough that I considered trying to be a professional player instead of a writer. So: music. There's a great, famous quote from Updike: "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is ecstatically." I think the Beatles, in "And Your Bird Can Sing" embody that; I put the song on often when I write. When I want to come at something from an odd angle, I listen to Monk's take on a standard. Like that.

Also, in this book, my family are characters -- named, and accurately portrayed. So: they were a big influence on this story, of course.

Follow Darin Strauss on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Celia Rees

Celia Rees is an award-winning YA novelist who is one of Britain's foremost writers for teenagers. Her novel Witch Child has been published in 28 languages and is required reading in secondary schools in the UK. Rees’s books are published in the US by Candlewick and Scholastic. Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook is her first adult novel. A native of the West Midlands of England, she lives with her family in Leamington Spa.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I find that a title is there, almost from the beginning, or it is not. If it’s not there, it can take a while to find. Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook began as The Cold War Cookbook. Short, simple words with an assonant ring to them and I liked the contrast. Cold War and Cookbook shouldn’t go together, and I thought that was intriguing. I never wanted the book to be called anything else. A good title should do what it says on the tin and I felt this one did just that. It’s set in the Cold War, a time synonymous with spying, and has recipes! Miss Graham was added much later. It puts the main character on the cover and into the reader’s consciousness right away. The title is unusual, a bit quirky and I liked that. My publishers weren’t so sure and wanted to change it at the last minute but I stuck to my guns and I’m glad about that.

What's in a name?

Names are very important, especially in historical fiction. They have to be right for the period. Nothing jars more than an anachronistic name. Names tell us about a character’s background, nationality, region, class, even religion. Even so, the name has to fit the character, or it never feels right. In Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook, I called the main character Edith because it was appropriate to her time, class and nationality and it felt right for her. It could seem kind of boring, but there is a Joni Mitchell song, "Edith and the King Pin," which showed it didn’t have to be. With Dori, I chose a nickname as a shortening of any variation of Dorothy, so whatever her current nationality, she was always Dori.

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

Very. That I’d written one at all would have been a shock, that I’d written it about Aunty Nancy an even greater one!

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

Apart from one very major and radical change, the beginning and end were always the same. I knew where the story would begin and where it would end even before I began to write the book. It was what happened in between that I wasn’t sure about!

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

I sometimes think writers have multiple personalities! There are always aspects of yourself in all characters. Some very distant, perhaps, some closer. The characters have to be there and realisable inside you somewhere, or else how could you make them up?

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My first book was inspired by a true story involving a murder, told to me by a friend in a pub. Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook was directly inspired by my own family history, my aunt in particular, and the chance discovery of an old cookery book. Other books have been inspired by songs, random reading, newspaper stories, films, TV, places I’ve visited, even art galleries and museums. Inspiration can really come from anywhere. It’s often not just one thing but a series of seemingly chance and unrelated things that collect and cluster and begin to form themselves into an idea that will become a book.

Visit Celia Rees's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patty Dann

Patty Dann's novels include Mermaids, Starfish and Sweet & Crazy. The books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Mermaids was made into a movie starring Cher, Winona Ryder, and Christina Ricci. Dann is also the author of The Butterfly Hours: Transforming Memories into Memoir, The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss, and The Baby Boat: A Memoir of Adoption. Dann's articles have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, O, The Oprah Magazine, and numerous other publications. She teaches writing workshops at the West Side YMCA in New York. Dann is married to journalist Michael Hill and has one son and two stepsons.

Her new novel is The Wright Sister.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Katharine Wright was extremely well known in her day. I wanted a title to give her the attention she deserves, so I've called it simply but boldly, The Wright Sister, which seems comparable to referring to Orville and Wilbur as The Wright Brothers.

I must admit, that frequently when I tell people the title they say, "I didn't know the Wright Brothers had a sister."

What's in a name?

The names of the main characters in the book are real, as it is a historical novel, but I've also invented some characters and taken names from people I've known or made them up.

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

My teenage self would certainly be shocked that I write about the intimate relationship between Katharine and her husband, Harry Haskell. I've written that they have an extremely passionate life, which I never would have imagined when I was a teenager.

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

People often say that in good writing there should be surprises for the writer as well as the reader. I certainly have found that. I wrote so many drafts of my books, even though they are very short. I end up going back and re-writing my opening pages after I've written an ending. I like to have the whole conflict of the book in the opening, but I often don't know what that is until I finish it.

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 Katharine Wright, married in my 50's to a journalist. In Katharine's case it was her first marriage. I had been widowed, but I, like Katharine married a widower. Being a second wife and socializing with my second husband's friends was something I drew on in my book.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am very interested in family life. In this book I write about adult siblings, which I find a fascinating topic, how family dynamics can change or stay the same after the death of the parents. Wilbur, Orville and Katharine were such a tight unit, for so long. Katharine's marriage was such a dramatic move, that I felt compelled to write about it.

I'm also fascinated by inventions. The first automobile, as it was called, was sold in 1903, the same year of the Wright Brothers' first flight. I'm constantly thinking about how inventions change our world.

Visit Patty Dann's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kali White

Kali White VanBaale is the author of the novels The Monsters We Make, The Good Divide, and The Space Between. She's the recipient of an American Book Award, an Independent Publisher’s silver medal for general fiction, the Fred Bonnie Memorial First Novel Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for General Fiction, an Iowa Arts Council major artist grant, and the Great River Writer’s Retreat. She's also writes and publishes short stories, essays, and articles, and serves as the managing editor of the micro-essay journal The Past Ten.

Kali holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She's a core faculty member in the Lindenwood University MFA in Writing Program and regularly teaches writing workshops at various conferences and festivals. In addition to writing and teaching, Kali is an advocate and state lobbyist for mental healthcare reform.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I typically go through multiple titles before landing on the one that finally feels right, and this book was no different. I think I went through four working titles in all.

The novel premise is based on the idea of one crime exposing another. The story begins with two missing paperboys two years apart in the early 1980s, but the cases themselves are just the center tentpole the main plot is built around. They set in motion a chain of events for my fictional characters who live in the same neighborhood as one of the missing boys—twelve-year-old Sammy Cox, who also has a neighborhood paper route and is keeping a terrible secret, his eighteen-year-old sister, Crystal, who dreams of going to college to become a serious journalist and is desperate to win a major writing scholarship to pay for school, and Sergeant Dale Goodkind, who has been assigned to both missing paperboy cases and has a complicated past of his own clouding his professional judgement.

The title then comes from the idea that by dehumanizing criminals as “monsters,” we can blind ourselves to perpetrators who are just average, everyday people. It also eventually becomes, by the end of the story, the title of Crystal’s essay she submits for the scholarship application.

What’s in a name?

Since the story is set in 1984, I gave the younger characters popular 80s names. As a Gen X kid I went to school with so many “Crystals,” and I ended up with “Sammy,” which is a form of the Hebrew name “Samuel” meaning “God has heard,” because it felt so relevant to Sammy’s character carrying a devastating secret. Their mother is named Tina, a popular name in the 1950s when she was born, because I’ve known so many hardscrabble single mothers named “Tina” in my lifetime.

As for Dale Goodkind, I one day stumbled upon a story by a writer named Terry Goodkind and just loved the last name and all the ways I could play around with different meanings and metaphors. Eventually, his last name became a critical plot point in the story.

I spend a great deal of time deciding on character names and often go through several before I settle on the one that finally feels right for that particular character (much like titles.) I’m careful to use names appropriate to the era the story is set and when the character was born, and that are common to the region the characters live. I’ve always loved meanings and origins of names, likely because of my own first name with the Hindu spelling “Kali,” the goddess of energy and destruction (which I’ve been teased about most of my life.)

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

I think young Kali would be very surprised by what adult Kali writes. As a teen, I mostly read Danielle Steel and Harlequin romance novels with a few Stephen King books in the mix. Apparently, I preferred either hardcore romance or hardcore horror, and not much in between. I don’t ever remember reading any true crime or mystery/suspense novels until well into adulthood. I didn’t become interested in that genre until after I finished my MFA and started reading a lot of Midwestern Gothic stories, and then really got into true crime stories and documentaries. My tastes definitely evolved into grittier, darker stories.

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

Beginnings, for sure! That first blank page is so intimidating. I also have to write my way into a story to a certain degree, before I start to understand what the story really wants to be about, which means I usually have multiple false starts. I probably re-wrote the beginning of Monsters five or six times. Endings come so much easier. I always have some idea of what the ending will be before I even start writing and pretty much write my way toward it for three hundred pages.

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 there’s some piece of myself, to varying degrees, in at least one character of every story I write. In Monsters, the character of Crystal Cox is a strong reflection of my younger self in how she so badly feels the need to prove herself to the world and feels like an underdog in everything she does, but also that she wants to do right by the world and make her mark. I vividly remember feeling, as a teen, that I was often underestimated because of my humble background or whatever, but it only made me fight harder to prove everyone wrong. In that way, Crystal ended up becoming a fictional version of my young self.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Shortly after I started writing the first draft of Monsters, the movie Spotlight was released and it was hugely inspirational for my writing. At that time, I was still figuring out the character of Crystal, who I regarded as the moral center of the story, but who was still lacking some definition in my early drafts. But once I saw Spotlight, I suddenly knew who she was. She was a truth seeker. She wanted answers, no matter how difficult they would be to uncover.

I also frequently listened to the Spotlight soundtrack because the music itself was inspiring with its feeling of heavy urgency. I listened to different soundtracks that felt representative of each character: Crystal’s was the Spotlight soundtrack, Sammy’s was the Doubt soundtrack, and Dale’s was the Fargo movie soundtrack among others. Before I start writing a book, I always put together a long playlist that becomes the “sound” of the story in my head. It actually tricks my brain into getting down to work each day just by hearing the music that I associate with the character or story.

And honestly, writers need all the tricks they get.

Visit Kali White's website.

--Marshal Zeringue