Peter Rosch

Peter Rosch is the author of multiple dark fictions born from the various addictions he chased while living in New York City as an award-winning writer and creative director. He’s many years sober now but remains an addict’s addict. What the Dead Can Do is his debut novel.

Rosch grew up in the Southwest, lived in New York for nearly 20 years, and now resides midway between Austin and San Antonio in Wimberley, TX where he works as an author, freelance creative director and copywriter in advertising, and most importantly, full-time dad.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I’d say quite a bit of work. There are dead people in my book. Check. We are going to see what they can and can’t do. Check. It sounds ominous and dark, and this book is that and more. Check and check. I like the title What The Dead Can Do for a whole host of reasons, but it was not the original title. Tend was the original title. That one word drove a lot of the plot, too. This is the story of a mother tending to her child from the afterlife. My interpretation of the word had always been tinted with empathy, love, care, and all the things that society expects from perfect mothers. Amanda, the mother here, is pushing the envelope on what it means to tend to her child—she’s trying to kill him to bring him to her so she can continue to care for him and ensure his well-being. In the end, though, I came to realize that the word tend was dated. Many people think of money first when they hear the word. It was doing nothing to take readers into the story and, in many cases, was confusing them. I count myself lucky that it did, to be honest—I was forced to re-evaluate. And I think What The Dead Can Do sets up the story and, more importantly, the vibe I want people to feel when they crack open the book.

What's in a name?

Everything. And nothing. Personally, I love to read about the meanings of names and their origins. That said, I also know that I don’t always look into why an author named someone what they did. Amanda, the mother who is seeking a way to kill her still-living two-year-old from the afterlife, is a complex character. “Worthy of love” is one of the meanings assigned to the name Amanda. The grief she experiences in this book puts her on a path to do a thing that real-world mothers do from time to time: kill their children. I went down the rabbit hole on filicide while developing this novel. Are those women worthy of love? Forgiveness? I don’t think the answer can be yes or no because the circumstances around their stories matter. Will Amanda be worthy of a reader’s love by the end of this book? I guess we’ll be finding out.

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

He’d be very surprised, I think. The teenage version of me and even the version of me up until I met my wife, Ariele, didn’t think he’d have any children. Side note: When I met Ariele, I knew I wanted to have a child with her immediately. My whole being knew. Of course, he probably wouldn’t know the backstory to this book, which is that it started as love letters to my own son in a year that I believed I was going to die prematurely, so maybe he wouldn’t be surprised. Even so, I think a lot of the complex themes in this book would go right over his head, too. He’d probably enjoy it, but I don’t think he’d truly get it. It is readily apparent to me at this moment that I don’t think much of teenage Peter Rosch.

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

Beginnings. I always have a ton of ideas for how a story can begin. I usually have an idea of where a story is going to end, too, but that changes. I’m a pantser, not an outliner, for a whole host of reasons. One of the reasons is that I believe the real ending will reveal itself to me as I walk the journey with my characters. I have some idea of where I want them to go, end up, achieve, or fail at, but I don’t really know until I’m deep into the story. Even then, a good beta reader or editor has often been the reason other ideas for an even better ending pop into my head.

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

There is a little bit of me in every character. I don’t set out to put anything of myself into my characters intentionally. I often don’t even realize what aspect of their personality is like my own until I’ve had a good bit of time away from the manuscript. With What The Dead Can Do, I’ll be curious to hear from friends and family which character they think is me or is most like me, if any. In my fifty-two years, I’ve been many different versions of myself: an addict and alcoholic, a musician, a filmmaker, a New Yorker, a Texan, a rockstar of a sort and a cowboy of a sort, too, a curmudgeonly cynic, and an optimistic Pollyanna. I am grateful for all the lives I’ve led. I don’t have Dissociative Identity Disorder, but it is not hard for me to wear a former mask or draw upon the characteristics of the people I’ve lived as in this life.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My sobriety, the sobriety of others, and the dark lives we left behind in becoming sober have heavily influenced my writing. On the whole, I don’t know that I view the world that much differently than I did as a drunk and addict, but I certainly know that old Peter could rarely find the time to sit still long enough to write a novel or be anywhere other than a bar. Music inspires me. That there are people in this world who don’t like music still blows my mind. Tons of non-literary stuff moves me. But I have to say this: my mother inspires me. On paper, her journey probably seems like an easy one, but I know better. Love you, Mom.

Visit Peter Rosch's website and follow him on Facebook, BlueSky, Instagram, and Threads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carla Malden

Raised in Los Angeles, Carla Malden began her career working in motion picture production and development before becoming a screenwriter. Along with her father, Academy Award winning actor Karl Malden, she co-authored his critically acclaimed memoir When Do I Start?

Carla Malden’s feature writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, highlighting the marvels and foibles of Southern California and Hollywood. She sits on the Board of the Geffen Playhouse. Her previous novels include Search Heartache, Shine Until Tomorrow, and My Two and Only.

Malden lives in Brentwood with her husband, ten minutes (depending on traffic) from her daughter.

Her new novel is Playback.

My Q&A with the author:

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

When I landed on the title, Playback, I knew that was it. That happened relatively early on. Before that, for a brief spell, I toyed with the title Backspace which communicated the idea of going back in time, but had a writerly (typewriterly) connotation that didn’t work. Writing is not at the heart of the book; music is. Playback evokes that music element, as well as the concept of getting a do-over at a lost relationship and at life in general.

Playback also conjures the idea that you might hear something new, something missed when you listen to something second time, much like Mari’s return trip to Haight-Ashbury, 1967 reveals different aspects of that time and place from the ones that impacted her the first time.

As an aside, I also like that the word “play” is embedded in the title. Subconsciously, it provides a sense of whimsy that suits the story of time travel, tie-dye, and tender regrets.

What's in a name?

Coming up with characters’ names is great fun for me, often an inside joke I have with myself. No one may ever know why I chose the name, but I like to think the reason floats along on a subterranean level. In Playback, Mari’s full name is Tamara Caldwell. I chose “Tamara” because it sounds like “tomorrow” and her relationship with time is so significant. And “Caldwell” because she was “called well” – a.k.a.: named well. The song “Tamara Moonlight” lies at the nexus of the time travel. Mari was named for the song which was her parents’ song when they were young and in love and, in one of those head-exploding time travel conundrums, Mari was the inspiration for the song.

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

My teenage self would probably be surprised only to discover that I haven’t grown up very much! The romance of the singer/songwriter still holds allure for me. In Playback, that’s Jimmy Westwood. I suppose I wrote him as the guy I would have fallen for when I was young so in that way, I brought that teenage self to the process. The revelation is how easily I could call upon that self. It was on tap the whole time.

If my teenage self were to read Playback and see how much music is a driving force in the story, she would say, “Of course.”

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

Apologies for sidestepping the question, but I find middles hardest to write. I usually know the beginning and have some sense of the ending. But Act II? Often a challenge. That’s when all the moving parts have to propel the story forward without the grinding of the gears showing.

With Playback

, I wrote the first four pages late one night and they never changed. It’s a bedtime story scene between mother and daughter. I wasn’t exactly sure how, but I sensed the ending would bookend that scene in some way. And it does. The epilog is one of my favorite scenes in the book. That was nearly a one-draft, straight-off- the-keyboard scene, too.

The middle, however, went through multiple outlines and then multiple drafts. I must confess that I am not a big-time travel reader, so crafting the time travel element was tricky for me. I worked hard to assure it isn’t cumbersome. To me, the time travel is just a means for the character of Mari to grow; it’s not the main attraction though I hope it’s a fun ride.

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

I carve out parts of myself for different characters, like an actor finding an aspect of her own personality that can provide the key to unlocking a character. Again, as with an actor, even the antagonists or “villains” must harbor some motivation I can relate to. In Playback, Royce plays that role. He’s a sexist jerk, but I understand him. He had to sacrifice his dreams of personal stardom to ride the coattails of someone with actual talent. I think we can all understand how painful it must be to take that route.

As for the main character, Mari, she embodies some of my more idiosyncratic characteristics – and psychology – but on steroids. She has a whole bag of tricks – verbal and emotional – to keep people at a distance. I like to think that’s no longer me, but a version of that behavior might have been me when I was younger.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music influences many aspects of my writing – not just my rather unabashed tendency to incorporate song lyrics, but also the striving for a certain musicality and rhythm in the language.

With Playback, I tried something new by writing the song that figures in the story. I’d written the lyrics in the body of the book when I had the idea that it might be fun to turn them into an actual song. I found a songwriter/music producer who composed the melody and produced the song. (Thanks to Adam Brodsky and Jeff Peters.) I’m beyond thrilled with the song, “Tamara Moonlight” – precisely the kind of folk-rock ballad I had in my head. And a spectacular music video besides!

Visit Carla Malden's website.

My Book, The Movie: Playback.

Writers Read: Carla Malden.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Chessler

Michael Chessler was born and raised in Los Angeles. He graduated from Harvard College with a degree in English and American literature, and also studied Italian literature at the Università di Firenze. After working various odd jobs in the entertainment industry—perhaps the oddest being a short stint as a motion picture literary agent—he began a career writing, producing, and directing television. Chessler has developed pilots for all the major networks, and has been a showrunner, producer, director and writer on a number of TV series.

His new novel is Mess.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My one-word title Mess does a good job of encapsulating my novel, which is about a personal organizer whose life’s work is tackling physical messes, yet is woefully inept at trying to organize her own internal messes—the tangles of negative thoughts and the overstuffed boxes of suppressed emotions.

What's in a name?

I chose the name Jane Brown for my protagonist because I think you’d expect someone named Jane Brown to be brisk and efficient. Also, the name “Jane” has always been a favorite of mine, certainly influenced by the associations with one of my favorite 19th century novelists, Jane Austen, as well as one of my favorite 19th century novels, Jane Eyre.

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

My teenage self would not be terribly surprised by Mess, in fact, I think he’d be stoked! I’ve always gravitated towards perceptive characters with lots of internal conflicts who are also blithely unaware of their own contradictions. Two very LA novels with vivid, almost grotesque characters were baked into my psyche at a young age: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, and I hope their profound influence is manifested in Mess in some way.

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

In this case, definitely the ending. A lot of this has to do with the fact that Mess began as a short story. Early readers asked me if it was the beginning of a novel, and even though I hadn’t conceived of it as such, once asked, I immediately envisioned how the novel would unfold and knew what I wanted the culmination of the romantic arc to be. While I had an end point, this ending needed to be earned. I wanted it to be surprising but seem inevitable at the same time, so mapping out the journey from the beginning to what I hope is a satisfying ending required lots of adjustments and fine tuning.

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

Those closest to me would probably say I’m very neat and organized, yet I’m also probably inordinately preoccupied with what I perceive to be my organizing failures, especially the one project I have been putting off forever: going though my old papers and digitizing those I want to keep. So like Jane, I am a type-A perfectionist whose constant struggle to live up to impossible ideals creates a lot of unhelpful noise in my head.

Visit Michael Chessler's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mess.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Tarr

Patrick Tarr’s novel, The Guest Children, comes after a long career in film and television. He won a Writers Guild of Canada award for his first produced script before gathering over a decade of experience as a staff writer, creative producer, and showrunner. For his work as head writer and executive producer on the international hit series Cardinal, Tarr was awarded 2021 Canadian Screen Awards for Best Writing in a Dramatic Series and Best Dramatic Series. A graduate of the Canadian Film Centre, he returned as Executive Producer in Residence for the 2022 Prime Time TV program. He lives in Toronto with his family.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I think it gets them about halfway there, and the cover does the rest. ‘Guest Children’ was the term used for kids evacuated to Canada from cities in England that were under threat of bombing during World War II. I do think there’s something inherently spooky about those two words together, but the title in combination with a creepy photo of a remote, forested lake gives readers a pretty strong sense of what they’re in for. The original title was The Sand Palace, which is a structure that holds symbolic meaning in the story. But along the way, that element became less central and I needed a new title. The Guest Children was just sitting there, already waiting in the text. It felt just right.

What's in a name?

While they’re not the main characters in the story, the young brother and sister at the centre of the plot are named Frances and Michael Hawksby. I did choose these names deliberately to evoke the child characters from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw - Flora and Miles. That story, like mine, deals with children in a remote place, and a character who’s called there who begins to question what is real. Their last name of Hawksby was a bit of a hat tip to Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster, another story set mostly at a remote house. In the setting of that story, anything can happen, and I wanted to evoke that same unpredictability - at least for myself - in writing The Guest Children.

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

Horror really got its hooks into me from about twelve, and I spent most of my teen years borrowing paperbacks I was probably too young to read from the revolving horror rack in my local library. So I don’t think I’d be too surprised that I’d written a ghost story. I’d probably be more surprised that I’d managed to get a book published, as it just didn’t seem like an attainable dream to me at the time.

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

Endings, no doubt. When I started out writing, I thought I had so many great beginnings. But the truth is, it’s can’t be a great beginning if it doesn’t serve a great ending. It’s just a piece of something. I think my work as a television writer helped me become stronger as a storyteller. Outlining is a vital piece of that process, and I’ve since learned that I need to put the work into an outline when writing a novel as well. Outlines aren’t fun, but getting stuck midway into your novel isn’t fun either. By the time I sit down to write my beginning, I already know what my ending is - or what it might be. An important part of moving to a first draft is being flexible enough to change a plot point - or your entire ending - if you realize it’s not suitable anymore. But just because you may decide to change your destination, that doesn’t mean you wasted time drawing a map.

Usually the changes I make to my beginnings involve the delete key. Once I truly know my story, I realize I have more material than I need at the beginning, and need to get things in motion faster.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The films The Others and The Devil’s Backbone are highly atmospheric ghost stories about children during wartime, and both were major influences on The Guest Children. They’re quite different films visually and thematically, but I found strong resonances in them both when I was trying to nail down how my story would feel. Apart from those, my setting and atmosphere were inspired by walks in the Canadian wilderness. The idea for this novel sprang forth after I read a bit of history about these children who came to Canada to shelter during the war. Walking in the woods, I found myself wondering what it must have been like for kids from the huge city of London to find themselves plunked down in a remote location in Northern Ontario.

Visit Patrick Tarr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gabriella Buba

Gabriella Buba is a mixed Filipina-Czech author and chemical engineer based in Texas who likes to keep explosive pyrophoric materials safely contained in pressure vessels or between the covers of her books. She writes epic fantasy for bold, bi, brown women who deserve to see their stories centered. Her debut Saints of Storm and Sorrow is a Filipino-inspired epic fantasy out with Titan Books. Saints has been named one of Spotify’s Best Audiobooks of 2024, and Buba a Spotify Breakout Author of 2024, and Saints was one of Reactor’s Reviewer’s Choice: Best Books of 2024.

Buba's new novel is Daughters of Flood and Fury.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I know some people think its overdone, but I have a real soft spot for blank of blank and blank title formats for epic fantasy, so Daughters of Flood and Fury does a great job setting genre and tone expectations for readers before they’ve even opened the first page. I want you to read the title and immediately think Southeast Asian seafaring Fantasy Feminine Coming of Rage.

What's in a name?

To be entirely honest I’m not very good at names! My character’s names change a lot. Four times for the whole cast in Daughters of Flood and Fury. The only reason I don’t get accused of lazy naming is not that many people know Tagalog. I often share about my FMC Lunurin’s name meaning “to drown” in Tagalog, one of the few names I developed myself rather than pulling from 17th century baptismal records/census naming/and ship manifests, but I didn’t stop there. My MMC Alon Dakila has an equally symbolic and matched name to his wife, Lunurin. Alon in Tagalog means wave, which is especially fitting for my tide-touched healer. His last name Dakila means great or noble, what better name for the family of the Lakan of Aynila (their chief of chiefs).

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

Beginnings are very difficult for me. I often have to give myself permission to write the worst beginning in order to start in on the story and actually make progress. My motto is that anything can be edited better, but only once it exists, so my beginnings also change the most, as I work to make the worst beginning that got me started a good beginning. I usually go into my drafts with a pretty clear vision for the end already.

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

Oh yes, I don’t actually believe that a writer can divorce themselves from the characters they write. What I like to do is to take one facet of my personality and dial it to 300% and then watch the plot hit the fan. Lunurin has the most of me, my anger and my grief. Alon has all the stubborn damned inconvenient morals and none of the internal snark monologue. Inez is very much the wounded inner child who doesn’t want peace, she wants to create problems, and I support her.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Many of my inspirations are historical. For Daughter of Flood and Fury I drew on the sinking of the Spanish Armada, the history of piracy and karakoa raiding in the Philippines from Luzon and the South China Sea down to the Sulu Sea. I’m a big believer that reality is weirder than fiction. And for some more fun pop-culture hits I was absolutely influenced by Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, because it sent me down the research rabbit hole on Piracy in Asia, and Trese, a Filipino Netflix Anime and before that a komik that was my first pop culture interaction with Filipino folklore outside of family stories.

Visit Gabriella Buba's website.

My Book, The Movie: Daughters of Flood and Fury.

Writers Read: Gabriella Buba.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leigh Dunlap

Leigh Dunlap is the screenwriter of the hit Warner Bros. movie A Cinderella Story. A native of Los Angeles, she attended film school at the University of Southern California. She now splits time and personalities between South Carolina and South Kensington and dreams of one day giving it all up and searching for buried treasure. Until then, she writes movies and books. Including Bless Your Heart, her debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Bless Your Heart. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? As if someone is wishing you well. In the south, however, it’s a passive-aggressive put down. It’s someone smiling while stabbing you in the back. It’s a great title for a murder mystery about the rich and powerful people of Atlanta. The original title for my novel, though, was The Buckhead Betties. They are the Karens of Atlanta. Beautiful, rich and insufferably entitled. The publisher wanted to change the title because they didn’t think people would understand what a Buckhead Betty was, and that’s a fair point. Bless Your Heart was a fine alternative. You thought this was a romance novel? Well, bless your heart…

What's in a name?

Along with the title of the book, the publisher questioned all the weird character names. Birdie. Hampton. Poppy. Wade. Auggie. Cash. Kolt. I had to get rid of a few others. That’s the south, however. Or at least in Buckhead, the Beverly Hills of Atlanta. Unusual names, usually old family names, are just the norm. I even know someone named Matthews. With an ‘s’. This is not a story of Johns and Marys.

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

My teenage reader self was a dreamer with a head full of mayhem. It was a swirling cauldron of worry, anger, love, happiness, misery, and angst. I don’t think teenage me would be at all surprised that I wrote a novel about a murder. Murderous thoughts were always lurking below the surface of teenage me! I hope she would just be relieved to know that she made it out of her teenage years and found an outlet in writing for all those feelings.

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

Every character in my novel is some part of me. Male or female. Rich or poor. Killer or victim. It’s as if all of my life was put in a blender and the result is a novel that has bits and pieces of me on every page.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Again, I’m going back to the blender! I’m definitely the person you want on your trivia team. I know a little about a lot. (What is the capital of Bhutan? Thimphu, of course.) I’m a media junkie and take it all in and reformulate it. Having grown up with television being my babysitter, and also being a screenwriter, means that movies and TV and their structure and references influence everything I write.

Visit Leigh Dunlap's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Rossi

Amy Rossi received her MFA from Louisiana State University, and she lives in North Carolina, by way of Massachusetts, with her partner and two dogs. The Cover Girl is her first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The Cover Girl is about just that: the girl on the cover of albums and magazines. The girl who exists in the context of an ad and is a projection of everyone who sees her – and the woman she becomes. It’s the story of an aging model, Birdie Rhodes, who looks back on her relationships with the two people that defined her life: the rock star who made himself her legal guardian after she posed for his album cover at age 15 and her legendary former agent.

This is the third title for the book; it went on submission under Look Away – a nod to the Iggy Pop song about his role in the 70s baby groupie era and the amount of silence that made situations like Birdie’s possible – and it was announced under another. We finally decided on The Cover Girl to give readers that immediate hint that they were getting a book that deals with the modeling industry.

What’s in a name?

When I first started writing, the main character’s name was Libbie, short for Olivia, which I changed to Elizabeth, because it suited her New England WASP background better. The nickname Birdie also did more work in that sense – hinting at that kind of old money tendency toward nicknames that don’t have an obvious root in the given name. Birdie also connotes a more delicate figure, suitable for a tall, thin model.

In the book, 56-year-old Elizabeth has shed young Birdie; it’s easier for her that way. References to her old name help prompt her reckoning – people from her past look at her and still see the girl she has tried to rid herself of, forcing her to realize she cannot keep two halves of her life separate and live wholly.

The rock star who upends Birdie’s life, however, remains nameless. This was my way of keeping the book firmly focused on her. Too often, the Birdies of the world are only considered in relation to the men who harmed them. Those men do not want for additional attention. It doesn’t matter who he is; it matters what he did. By not naming the rock star, I hoped to make it more possible for Birdie, and for readers, to name everything else that happens.

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

Not surprised in the least, and in fact, she’d be thrilled. As a teenager, I was obsessed with classic rock and with all the women I saw on Behind the Music who had been girls with the band, girls whose stories were always the liner notes to someone else’s. I had it in my mind early on that I was going to write about this one day. I also really wanted to be an actress and had gone to weekend classes at a modeling school, so that I ended up writing about these things wouldn’t be a surprise either.

However, as a teenager, I think I did romanticize all those songs about girls my age, so I might not have anticipated my older self wanting to see more accountability in that space.

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

The beginning is definitely harder for me. It’s the entry point, the tone-setter, and it has to be exactly right. It’s also the part that naturally gets fiddled with and overthought the most because it’s the part that has been in existence the longest. At some point in drafting, I knew what the ending of The Cover Girl would be, and when I got there, my writing speed probably tripled. Once I could see that end in sight, I got out of the way and let the story do its thing.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music, for sure. It’s the most common starting point for me. But as someone who came of age at the turn of the millennium, I’m also really influenced by commercialized nostalgia, pop culture, and misremembered or misjudged women. My early teen years were marked by the Clinton impeachment and the explosion and pillorying of pop princesses like Britney Spears. I think that definitely shaped what I am most interested in writing about.

Maybe all of this is to say that I’m deeply influenced by early 2000s VH1: all the rock docs and the construction of a story of the 70s and 80s on the Sunset Strip and the pulling together of a particular narrative of how things were then based on what we choose to bring forward from the past now – and who gets to do the telling.

Visit Amy Rossi's website.

Writers Read: Amy Rossi.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mara Williams

Mara Williams drafted her first novel in third grade on a spiral notebook—a love story about a golden retriever and the stray dog who admired her from beyond the picket fence. Now she writes about strong, messy women finding their way in the world. Williams has a BA in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, takes creative writing from Stanford Continuing Studies, and actively engages in writing groups and critique circles. Williams’s novel The Second Chance Playlist was a winner of the 2024 Emily Contest. When not writing or reading, Williams can be found enjoying California’s beaches, redwoods, and trails with her husband, three kids, and disobedient dog.

Her new novel is The Truth Is in the Detours.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I find that titles either arrive immediately while drafting or are endlessly evasive. The Truth Is in the Detours was the tenth title for this book. I tried on several while drafting, none of which quite fit. When my editor bought it, she suggested a new title, so we changed it again. Further into the editing process, we decided the new title didn’t capture the wit and lightness. So, I went back to the drawing board and suggested The Truth Is in the Detours. It captures the spirit of the book with a bit of whimsy and a nod to the major themes but isn’t literal. My characters embark on a road trip in search of the truth related to a family secret, but they also discover truths about themselves and what they mean to each other.

What's in a name?

My main character is named Ophelia. It’s a name I’ve always loved because of the softness of the sounds and melodic syllables. However, because of its literary legacy, it’s not a name I would be brave enough to give to my child. So, in creating a character who had been abandoned and lied to by her parents, I thought it fitting that she would be given a beautiful name with a painful history. The book isn’t a direct nod to Shakespeare, but the Hamlet reference is stitched into cultural consciousness, so the name hints at her tragic origin. Her journey and character growth are about subverting that expectation. My other main character is Beauregard, although he now goes by Beau. I wanted a mouthful of a name that could embarrass an awkward, nerdy teen, but would evolve with him as he grew into himself.

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

My teenage self would be very proud but not surprised. I’ve wanted to be an author as long as I can remember. I was an avid reader as a kid, and I was always searching for books like this one. At the time, I didn’t know how to find an assortment of rich, emotional, funny books with a central love story. I read a lot of Maeve Binchy as a teen and loved the layers of storytelling that wove romantic threads into family dramas. I’ve written exactly the book I would have devoured as a teen and young adult.

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

Beginnings are, without question, harder to write. I will rewrite an opening chapter a few dozen times to get it right. The opening pages have to do so much heavy lifting—character development, scene setting, intrigue, while providing the exact amount of context. But until it’s complete, it’s not always clear where the book should start. However, I always know how a book will end. By the last third of the book, my fingers can’t keep up with my brain. The ending writes itself. By then, the characters have the wheel and are steering me downhill at a breakneck pace. After the first draft, I rarely change the ending beyond minor tweaks. But the beginning is an invitation to the book, and an introduction to the characters the reader will have to commit to for three hundred pages. It requires a lot more finesse than a first draft can offer it. For this one, however, the opening scene and first line outlived my endless revisions.

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

Typically, I do share some personality traits with my protagonists. However, with The Truth Is in the Detours, I was looking to stretch myself. My point of view character, Ophelia Dahl, couldn’t be more dissimilar to me, so writing her was both liberating and challenging. She’s flippant where I’m earnest. She’s impulsive while I’m measured. She struggles to apply herself to a particular goal, while I’m often too persistent even when I should cut my losses.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am inspired by my family and reality. There’s a reason for the cliché that the truth is stranger than fiction. So, I pay attention to life’s absurdities and splendor and create a catalogue of small and big moments to draw from. Characters and stakes are always pure fiction, but the details and texture are often inspired by real life. For example, The Truth Is in the Detours was inspired by a real-life moment. When my husband and I were newlyweds, we bought his childhood home and launched a DIY renovation to make it our own. The catch was that we had to clean out a lifetime’s worth of memories, debris, and clutter. I found my late mother-in-law’s wedding gown in a sideboard in my dining room. Later, I found my husband’s original birth certificate in between the pages of the Pennysaver in a dresser drawer. There’s much to learn about the things people choose to keep—either by choice or avoidance. Each artifact has a story to tell. But I began to wonder about the fictional possibilities. What if we found a secret inside a hand-carved Chinese antique chest—instead of fifteen years of youth soccer photos? What if we uncovered evidence that a missing loved one was still alive—instead of cherished mementos saved after their passing? What if we found mysterious legal documents rather than boxes of old copies of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and dance recital programs? The first line of The Truth Is in the Detours is “It’s been an hour since the truth fell out of an accordion file,” which arrived in my head like a premonition long before I sat down to write the book.

Visit Mara Williams's website.

--Marshal Zeringue