Crime Detective Mystery Thriller Group discussion

After speaking with people who were involved in the group read, I have decided to try a different approach to the Q&A with Elizabeth Little. Rather than setting a date, Elizabeth Little will be using this folder to answer any questions that you may have. She is also reviewing your comments and may discuss those as well.
If you have any questions, please submit them to me before December 1. I will send them to her once you send them to me. She will choose the questions that she wants to answer. Elizabeth Little will start answering questions after December 1. I hope that you will enjoy the discussion.

Excellent news for those of us down under who sleep through the American day

Just wanted to mention that I will be sending questions to Elizabeth Little tomorrow. If you have any, then please submit them to me and I'll send them to her. Please don't wait and ask questions here since that wouldn't be fair to the members who sent me questions and want them answered. Thanks.

Hi everyone! I just wanted to thank you all for submitting so many excellent questions—and for suffering through my book to begin with! I returned from my Thanksgiving holiday with a new set of cold germs, so I might be a little slow in getting the ball rolling here at first, but I promise to get to all the questions by the end of the week.

Thanks again for including me in your discussion, and I look forward to posting here again shortly!

Thanks for writing such an interesting book and participating with our group. I hope you will be feeling better soon!

Hi again everyone! Just as a general note: please feel free to ask follow-ups or make any other comments you'd like! I love discussions, and I'd be delighted to participate as much as my cold, child, and current work-in-progress allow.

Now, on to the questions—this one from Ron!

Did Lorrie Moore have an influence on your writing? If not, then was there anyone that had an influence on your writing?

I love that you picked out Lorrie Moore, because no one else has brought her up (understandably since I’m not exactly in the same league). But she has absolutely had a great deal of influence on my own work, particularly with regard to how she uses humor.

I’m going to quote David Gates’s NYT review of BARK, because I’d just be paraphrasing him if I tried to say this myself:

“Her characters banter and wisecrack their way through their largely mirthless lives in screwball-comedy style, but for them it’s a compulsive tic whose aim is sometimes self-protection (utterance that warns others off and forms a protective shell) and sometimes just to fill the void; the point is its pointlessness.”

Jane’s sense of humor in DEAR DAUGHTER is precisely of this ilk: her wit is a defense mechanism, and the more she jokes typically the worse off she is. I certainly haven’t pulled this off with the skill of Moore—one reader, I think, was quite upset as what to her came across as glibness, which is on me—but it is at least what I intended. I’ve never met a happy comedian or comedy writer, so for me, just as for Moore, humor is deployed for less than humorous reasons.

Other writers whose work was important in helping me develop the tools needed to write DEAR DAUGHTER include Shirley Jackson, Jane Austen, Raymond Chandler, and of course Agatha Christie.

And this question comes from Christine Terrell:

When you get a chance to read for pleasure, who are some of your favorite authors?

I have pretty broad tastes: I’ll read absolutely anything that makes me laugh; anything with a great, goopy love story; and anything with a well-constructed puzzle. But my favorite mystery authors are Dorothy Sayers, Patricia Highsmith, Josephine Tey, Tana French, Minette Walters, Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, and Agatha Christie. I’m also extremely fond of Jane Austen, Robertson Davies, Iris Murdoch, Amy Hempel, Lorrie Moore, Stephen King, Sarah Waters, Charlotte Bronte, Evelyn Waugh, and Shirley Jackson.

(And I haven’t even gotten into my favorite romance authors, who are legion. But I’m trying not to bore you all too much!)

Another question from Christine Terrell, in response to which I have written what is probably a much too long answer!

Did writing come naturally for you or did you learn about the craft in school, through how-to books, by taking writing courses, and/or by other means? Do you write everyday?

Oh gosh, no, it doesn’t come naturally for me at all. It requires constant work and study and effort. In fact I think it’s fair to say that I’ve been working at it since I was a teenager.

The work started in high school. Like many other writers (I suspect), I had that one brilliant and inspirational English teacher who really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the written language and who really encouraged me to explore and experiment, to read widely and write often and be willing to fail.

I was helped along by my passion for foreign languages. I have found that the study of foreign languages helps me better understand the structure of English. This is particularly true if you study Latin or Greek, which are taught in a very structured, grammatically precise manner that will leave you in little doubt about when to use who or whom. (Although p.s. I fully support ignoring that rule.) You have to know how the language works if you want to make it work for you, and being a big dork about language has helped me do this.

In college I took zero—zero!—English literature classes (I don’t know how I got away with that, honestly), which almost certainly turned out later to be a handicap, but I made up for it somewhat by working for two years as a travel writer and editor, which impressed upon me the importance of a strong work ethic and a healthy respect for deadlines. I also learned how important it is to learn to treat writing not just as a precious artistic creation to be polished and coddled indefinitely. It’s also a product that you want other people to read. Sometimes a piece doesn’t need to be perfect—it needs to be finished.

Later I worked in publishing, because I thought it totally impractical to actually try to be a writer—and also I was convinced that I sucked. Turns out that what I really sucked at was being an assistant, but I learned a lot along the way about how the business works, and most importantly about what makes the difference between a publishable work and an unpublishable one. And what I discovered, more or less, that the difference almost always came down to “voice.” The manuscripts that felt alive, that had their own unique character, those were the manuscripts that agents leapt to request. I began to dedicate myself to the development of my own voice at this point, largely through a now-discontinued blog, which gave me the freedom to play around and to get immediate feedback.

Since 2006 I’ve been writing full-time. (And yes, I try to write every day.) To build on what I’ve learned so far, I frequently consult dozens of how-tos. Stephen King’s ON WRITING is, in my mind, the gold standard, but surprisingly an incredibly useful guide for me was WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES. It’s great! Don’t let the silly yellow cover scare you off. When I made the transition from nonfiction to fiction, I also did a semester of an MFA (before my schedule got in the way) and took a night class at a local university. I had great teachers, but really these were primarily useful in that they forced me to show other people my work. It was so scary to switch to fiction! The classes helped me face those fears.

I guess what I’m saying is: I try to learn about craft by any means necessary.

I don’t think that writers usually have an innate “talent.” Certainly there is genius floating around, but for most of us I think it comes down to hard work. If I do have a day when the writing just seems to flow, or when for a few minutes it really does seem to come naturally, that’s only the fleeting result of years of toil.

Luckily I like toil.

Not surprised to learn you've done Latin & Greek. Dear Daughter seems to have a Greek tragedy plot.

Bill wrote: "Not surprised to learn you've done Latin & Greek. Dear Daughter seems to have a Greek tragedy plot."

Great answers to my questions, Elizabeth! Thank you for taking the time to answer.

This question comes from Laurie Cameron!

Hi Elizabeth,

I enjoyed your book very much. Couldn't put it down until I was finished. One question I have, how did you create your characters, in particular, your heroine. Did you base her on someone you knew or was she totally a figment of your imagination?

Best,
Laurie

Thanks so much, Laurie! I’m so glad you enjoyed the book.

I did my best to craft characters that are wholly fictional—which isn’t to say that they’re wholly imagined. DEAR DAUGHTER is very consciously genre fiction, and from the start I was working from and playing with existing dramatic and mystery archetypes. As a result, the fundamental essence of each character was influenced by familiar cultural touchstones. Leo, for instance, has some Philip Marlowe in him; Noah is not unlike Jimmy Stewart’s character in The Philadelphia Story. Jane’s a little bit Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and a little bit Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. I started in this manner for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to be sure to include characters who would be somewhat familiar to mystery readers, both for their own reading pleasure and also so I could then upend their expectations later.

But second, I wanted to make it easier on me. By looking to existing characters and archetypes I got a heck of a head start.

Although, of course, there was still plenty of work to be done after that: I used Scrivener’s character templates to help sketch out the basics (appearance, background, motivation); I put together character-specific playlists to help me really internalize their personalities; I wrote lots and lots of dialogue, scenes I knew I’d never actually include in the book, just to help me figure out how each character talked, what words they’d use, what kind of jokes they’d make.

But the strangest thing happened. Because then, just when I thought I had them totally figured out ... I’d write a scene and learn something new and surprising about them, and I’d find myself having them do things I’d never have predicted.

I’d heard a lot of writers say that before—that their characters have wills of their own—but I’d never believed them. It always sounded like a nice gloss on poor planning. But I absolutely found this to be true while I was writing DEAR DAUGHTER. Noah, for example, was supposed to go away after the second chapter, never to return, but obviously he wasn’t having that. (And not only did he come back, but now he’s the narrator of my second book ... which I’ll tell you all more about later!)

So in some ways I’m not sure if you can say that I really created these characters ... because at many points it felt like they were creating themselves.

As for Jane ... well, I’ll get more into her development in a bit. A lot of you have asked about her likability (or lack thereof!), and that aspect of her character and why I made the choices I made deserves its own post.

Christine wrote: "Great answers to my questions, Elizabeth! Thank you for taking the time to answer."

Oh, it's my pleasure! And I'll definitely be addressing your other questions over the course of the week. Thanks so much for giving me so many great things to thing about!

Bill wrote: "Not surprised to learn you've done Latin & Greek. Dear Daughter seems to have a Greek tragedy plot."

I certainly think about the Poetics a lot, particularly in the earlier stages of a project, so it's extremely flattering and pleasing that you would identify in DEAR DAUGHTER elements of Greek tragedy! (I love your question about the role of flaw vs. fate, by the way, and I hope I'll have my thoughts for you on that ready soon!)

Another question from Ron!

One of my favorite pulp fiction writers is Craig Rice. It was said in her biography that she would lock herself in a room and just write her book and then it would be published. What is your writing process?

While I don’t think my process is nearly so extreme, I’d be lying if I said there weren’t locked rooms involved occasionally!

I’ve learned over the years that routine is very important for me, so I try to do the same thing every day. (Which isn’t always possible, what with a young child and a husband who works weird hours.) But ideally I get my kid off to school and then go straight to the coffee shop where I like to work. Each morning I get the same coffee, the same croissant, and sit at the same table ... which actually sounds a little compulsive now that I write that out, but it helps get my thoughts settled and in order and ready to work.

Then I open up Scrivener and get going.

I don’t write in order. With both DEAR DAUGHTER and my current WIP I start off with fairly detailed outlines based on a very conventional three-act dramatic structure. (Although with DEAR DAUGHTER things diverged pretty wildly over the course of writing it. I don’t know yet whether that will be true with the current book.) This allows me to work on any scene in the book I want, because I know in advance how it will fit in with the larger story. So if I get bored with one section of the book—which happens often—I can just skip ahead instead of getting bogged down.

Typically the first thing I write in each scene is the dialogue, because that’s the easiest part for me and it also reveals the emotional energy of a given encounter, which I later reinforce through internal narration and descriptions of body language and physiological response. So: I always do the people first. Only after will I get to the descriptions of the physical world—not because they’re unimportant, but because I always want them to be reflections of the narrator’s psychological state, so I need to get that locked down first.

I usually work through lunch, and then around 3 or so I go for a run or a long walk and think over what I’ve written. Often I play out new scenes in my head as I’m going, which probably looks absolutely ridiculous to the other runners, because I tend to make the facial expressions I imagine my characters do. (There’s lots of scowling involved.) This part of my day is really important, because, frankly, the physical exertion limits my higher reasoning powers, which can really get in my way sometimes. Overthinking is sometimes much worse than not thinking.

Then I pick up my son and get back to being a mom ... provided I’m not near my deadline, in which case I do absolutely go into a room somewhere and lock the door and work late into the night.

Bill, Christine, and Carla all asked about the possibility of a sequel, and although I can’t go into too much detail, I can tell you that yes: the next book is a kind of continuation of DEAR DAUGHTER. This time, though, Noah (Jane’s long-suffering lawyer) is the narrator.

As Noah is preparing Jane’s appeal, he's called back home to Mississippi: His brother-in-law has up and run off to join a cult, and his pregnant sister-in-law needs Noah to get him out.

Noah begins to investigate the cult, going increasingly uneasy as he begins to suspect that its members aren’t all there of their own free will. Of particular concern to him is a member named Emmaline, with whom he has developed a tentative friendship ... and who looks an awful lot like a girl who was kidnapped fifteen years ago. Soon he finds himself joining the cult himself in an effort to save his brother, Emmaline, and anyone else who needs saving. (Which, Noah being Noah, he considers to be pretty much everybody.)

As if this weren’t difficult enough, Noah has a whole host of other problems: Jane’s still stuck in prison; his career is otherwise in the toilet; his sister-in-law is a holy terror; and the only police contact he has who will talk to him anymore is Leo, who hates his guts.

.... then there’s another abduction.

Or that’s how the story looks at the moment, anyway. As with DEAR DAUGHTER, I expect this will all change between now and shipping the manuscript off to the printers!

Elizabeth wrote: "Bill, Christine, and Carla all asked about the possibility of a sequel, and although I can’t go into too much detail, I can tell you that yes: the next book is a kind of continuation of DEAR DAUGHT..." (Oh, and this next book will be coming out sometime in 2016, exact date TBD but probably summer! And coming next year is the paperback of DEAR DAUGHTER, as well as a bunch of foreign editions for any of you who are interested in that!)

And another question from Christine:

I loved Jane's wit. Do you personally have some of that same humor?

I wish! I’m very much one of those people who always thinks of the perfect thing to say five days after the fact—which makes me a dull conversationalist but well suited to writing!

I subscribe to the Elmore Leonard school of thought, which is that every character should be able to make you laugh, whether good or bad, smart or stupid, so I was always going to give Jane lots of jokes. I want my readers to laugh, to be entertained.

But also I knew that some people weren’t exactly going to love Jane, and I thought that humor would help make her more palatable to those readers. As Chris Rock said recently, “If the person's funny, you will like them no matter what. If they're unfunny, f— them. That's just the rules of comedy.” I personally couldn’t agree with this more—which is perhaps a sign of some shallowness on my part. I’ll find myself rooting for even the most hideous (fictional) villains if they can just make me laugh.

(And also, as I mentioned before, I find that comedy is almost always an emotional defense mechanism, so it made psychological sense for Jane to be extra funny.)

Ron, Carla, and Christine (and legions of other readers!) have asked and commented on Jane’s likability—or lack thereof. So here are probably too many words on that subject!

I didn’t set out to make Jane explicitly likable or unlikable. First of all, I think that’s impossible. Nothing is universally likable, with the possible exception of The Princess Bride. I would never be able to calibrate a character that everyone loved.

But also, I wanted Jane to be a believable product of her fairly unbelievable circumstances, and that meant she was never going to be the kind of person everyone wants to hang out with. She grew up lonely and angry and spoiled, and then she marinated in the poisonous slop of Beverly Hills. And then to top it off she was thrown in jail! Not exactly a recipe for kindness or charm. Plus, she’s extremely guarded and too smart for her own good, so she has defense mechanisms galore. She hides her vulnerabilities behind sass and swear words.

There’s also a deliberate, provocative side to her more off-putting behavior. She knows that it will get her attention. As Jane herself says, “[W]hen it comes to fame, there’s no difference between being loved and being hated. One’s just much easier to do. If you can stand it.”

Also, since Jane is telling her own story, her narration is wildly biased, both consciously and subconsciously. And no one finds Jane less likable than Jane herself, so she’s not about to paint herself in the prettiest light. The self-loathing in her is strong.

So, to my mind, Jane’s unlikability is actually in some ways by Jane’s own design, not mine.

I’m not worried, per se, that some readers haven’t taken a shine to her, and I wouldn’t go back and change that given the opportunity. It wouldn’t be true to her character, and in this particular case it wouldn’t serve the story either. If Jane were universally outwardly likable, then the press and public certainly wouldn’t have it out for her. And it wouldn’t be difficult at all for her to play nice when she investigates her mother’s past in Ardelle. In fact, she probably wouldn’t have been convicted to begin with!

All this being said, I personally don’t find Jane to be inwardly unlikable in the slightest, and in fact I’m somewhat protective of her, so I do get a little bummed when I’ve failed to bring readers around to her side of things by the end of the book (or worse, when readers aren't able to enjoy the book at all because of their reaction to Jane). Because I know that beneath her celebutante shell, Jane is just so sad and lost and lonely and broken! So how, I lament, haven’t I managed to make my readers care for Jane like I do!

Well, the answer, I think, is that I spent more than a year with her chattering away in my head, so I know her better than anyone. And all this might not have actually made it onto the page due to my own writerly shortcomings. (Which I try to forgive myself for as this was the first fiction I’ve ever written.) So this is definitely something I’m trying to consider as I write the next book: to make sure that my characters are as fully drawn on the page as they are in my head, no matter how subjective the narration.

I don’t expect it to be as much as issue with the next book as it was with this one, though. As a character Noah is just more fundamentally likable than Jane ... but that isn’t to say that I won’t play a bit with the idea of what it means to be likable, and whether or not being likable is the same as being good.

It's good to have an answer like this because I can see characters in a better way. It gives me a better perception now when I'm reading since I can see this point about developing characters in a story. Thanks for this answer. I think it's a good one.

I am looking forward to the sequel. :)

I also will be waiting for the sequel. Thank you for all the wonderful answers, it was interesting for me to see what the writing process is. I am not a writer so I hadn't a clue. I enjoyed reading your book.

Today I’m going to start with a question from Bill!

For me Jane is clearly a tragic hero - someone like Antigone or Cassandra. But I keep waffling whether her tragedy is a result of character flaws - of making bad decisions such as getting off the train in McCook & stealing the truck, going into Ardelle without backup, having sex with Leo, etc.? Or should we regard Jane as simply a victim of Fate, that she was doomed from the beginning?

This is a fascinating question! So fascinating that I worry that this DayQuil is going to hinder my ability to answer it intelligently, but I’ll give it a shot.

I absolutely agree that Jane is a tragic hero, and that was definitely a conscious decision on my part. I find it incredibly interesting that you would look to good old-fashioned Greek tragedy, because dramatic structure aside, I was thinking primarily of Classic Noir when I wrote this. But I think your insight is a hugely keen one—until you asked it I don’t think I ever considered the debt that Noir owes to classic tragedy, or if I did I underestimated it.

In fact, I think there’s probably a paper to be written here, but for our purposes I’m going to limit my thoughts to a discussion of “Fate.” Noir, for me, is ultimately an examination of the ways in which individual agency is so often thwarted by institutional and societal dysfunction, and that’s exactly what I intended to do with DEAR DAUGHTER. Jane, while certainly a deeply troubled character who makes, as you noted, some seriously dumb or at the very least questionable choices. (Which, as an aside, I think is in keeping with her very big brain. The smartest people I’ve ever met have always been the ones most likely to be real knuckleheads.) But while these choices certainly made her life harder, in my mind her root problems were the product of external forces.

So, yes, I think she is in a way a victim of Fate. Except for me, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos are instead the money-driven media, the noble but flawed criminal justice system, the role and perception of women in America. And maybe there we have an important parallel between the two traditions, between Noir and classic tragedy: both concern themselves with the powerlessness that comes from being a tiny piece of a divine or societal whole?

Wow, that sounds depressing. Perhaps that’s the real reason I added so many jokes....

Ron wrote: "It's good to have an answer like this because I can see characters in a better way. It gives me a better perception now when I'm reading since I can see this point about developing characters in ..."

I'm so glad you found it interesting! Thanks for slogging through my ramblings!

Skeetor wrote: "I am looking forward to the sequel. :)"

I'm delighted to hear that! I hope it turns out to be as fun to read as it has been so far to write.

Lynn wrote: "I also will be waiting for the sequel. Thank you for all the wonderful answers, it was interesting for me to see what the writing process is. I am not a writer so I hadn't a clue. I enjoyed readin..."

Oh, no need to thank me—this is great fun. (And a readerly perspective is just as helpful to a writer as a writerly perspective is to a reader!)

Ron and Bill (and, as with the likability question, many other readers) have asked about the ending, which has proven to be quite divisive!

... which in retrospect I suppose I should have expected. But in my mind it was always the only way the book could end. Even when I wasn’t completely certain of the identity of the killer or the details of the denouement, I knew that Jane was going to end up in prison. As I mentioned in my response, just above, to Bill’s question, the fundamental philosophy I was working with here was a pretty pessimistic one: that an individual is always going to be ground down by the system.

(By the way, there were actually originally two killers—the current-day accomplice was Rue! Thank god I changed my mind on that one.)

During their final confrontation, when Jane wonders how Stanton could ever get away with killing her, he says, “You think Janie Jenkins really needs a weapon to be considered a threat? Reasonable grounds are a given, my dear.” In the world of DEAR DAUGHTER—and it’s totally up for debate if this actually resembles the real world or is simply a result of my being super depressed about the world events of the past few years—the public perception of Jane has damned her from the start. There could be seemingly incontrovertible proof of her innocence and she would still be convicted.

Innocent people are convicted all the time—after all, Jane was innocent the first time, too.

So, again, for me, given the rules of this world that I created, it’s the only way this part of the story could have ended. But I actually don’t think it’s an unhappy ending! Jane has been freed from the torture of not knowing whether she killed her mother; she has come to a more complete understanding of the challenges her mother faced, which go a long way toward explaining their fraught relationship; she’s made friends for the first time in her life. And she’s wrested her own identity back from the public narrative that had been steering it for so long. Yes, she ends up back where she was physically. Spiritually and emotionally, however, it’s an entirely different story.

Or at least that’s how I see it anyway. :)

All this said, I totally understand why some readers were disappointed with the ending. I’ve thrown books across the room myself when their endings didn’t match my expectations! (Have you guys read Tana French’s IN THE WOODS? Amazing book, utterly maddening ending that made me screech. I only realized later how bold and perfect it is. Much later.) It’s my ending, though, and I’m sticking to it! But ... while I don’t wish I’d done anything differently story-wise, I sort of wish I’d made it clear that the book isn’t a standalone, because I think that might have eased the blow a bit.

(Although maybe then people would have been annoyed by the cliff-hanger!)

Interesting perspective about Jane. Something I didn't think of until I read this. It's good to get into the head of Jane through you so I can see this now. Didn't think of it before. Thanks on that.
I was happy with the ending since I don't think the courts are predictable. I probably would have been upset if there was a trial since I don't want to read about trials in fiction books.
I know that everyone has heard me say this before too but I liked In The Woods. No problem for me the the ending. Nothing compares with the ending of Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. I did throw the book across the livingroom when I finished it.

Ron wrote: "Interesting perspective about Jane. Something I didn't think of until I read this. It's good to get into the head of Jane through you so I can see this now. Didn't think of it before. Thanks on..."

Ha! I didn't quite throw Shutter Island across the room, but I definitely came close. I'm actually starting to get a bit annoyed just remembering it!

I just wanted to say congratulations Elizabeth on having Dear Daughter on Oprah's list of great books to read on that long plane ride. I was glad to see that in the email I received from the Oprah Book Club today.

I'll go along with that. Congrats.

Elizabeth, what an interesting and enlightening Q&A. Thank you so much for being with us. I can only dream to have similar opportunities to discuss all my reads with the author. I look forward to your next book!!

Elizabeth wrote: "Elizabeth wrote: "Bill, Christine, and Carla all asked about the possibility of a sequel, and although I can’t go into too much detail, I can tell you that yes: the next book is a kind of continuat..."

Totally late to the party/thread, but adding my own enthusiastic OMG YAY to the sequel news. Awesome.