Lisa Jackson's Blog - Posts Tagged "youwillpay"

I’ve been asked what was the inspiration for You Will Pay. That’s a good question because in some cases the idea for a new book hits me hard and I immediately write down the plot while the characters take a little more time to develop. Other times I have a character with no plot—this shady assistant DA with an interesting tattoo has been chasing me around for years, for example, but she doesn’t yet have a story—I’m not sure she ever will. But I just can’t forget her.

In the case of Without Mercy, I had an idea for a character immediately and a scenario: A school for troubled teens. That idea came out of an advertisement I heard on the radio and it was a full blown synopsis within days. (Most of the time the story development isn’t that easy.)

As for You Will Pay, the idea sort of percolated for years. My editor wanted a “camp” story. He was envisioning an all girls camp where the campers are stranded with a murderous psycho on the prowl. Good idea. I worked with that, but infused my own memories of camp as a kid (no, there was NO killer running through the woods and lurking at the campfire at the camp I attended.)

But I didn’t just want the story to revolve entirely upon the trauma and hysteria of the camp and campers. I wanted to deal with the counselors and definitely make it coed. Also, I thought it would be cool to find out what happened to the survivors over the intervening years, so I let the mystery remain unsolved.

This is why the book is set in the present as well as the past. I thought it would be fun to write about the characters as teens and then as adults, a group of people bound by their own secrets about what really happened at Camp Horseshoe that fateful summer. That part, the juxtaposition of Then and Now, was a little tricky was a little tricky to pull off, but it was and interesting experience.


And so, after years of thinking about it and a few missteps along the way, You Will Pay was born, or more succinctly, evolved.