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