Malfunctioning When It Comes To Elevator Pitching by Poppy Gee

 
Low Head Lighthouse, Tasmania 

Give us your elevator pitch for your latest book, then analyze it and tell us why you think it might tempt an agent, editor, or movie producer.

This could be the blog post that gets me kicked off the blog. I love being part of this Blogging Collective and I don't want to leave. But my dilemma is, do I write the truth about what I'm writing, or do I keep up the facade of being a committed crime fiction author? 

I think people prefer the truth. 

Anyone who knows me, knows I have been horrified and distressed as we watch a genocide occur in Palestine, while our media sits nervously on its hands or gleefully cheers it on, and Western political leaders provide support for it. Horribly, it's now culminating in awful scenes with hundreds of people bombed to death in Lebanon this week. 

Last year, I was two weeks away from putting the finishing touch on my ski lodge thriller. I stared at the screen for days on end, and felt nothing. I felt disinterested in the work. I took a break over the Australian summer. This year, I started something new about a doctor, who writes crime fiction, who watches helplessly as medics, hospitals, journalists and aid workers are targeted in Gaza. There's a dual time line, with another storyline set in the 1830s. 

Both story lines are set in George Town, Tasmania, a tiny seaside town on the Tamar river mouth. This was a town settled in 1804, and is Australia's oldest town. It was abandoned by the British colonists as there was no freshwater. Consequently, it remains almost exactly as it would have looked in the 1830s. There's some housing subdivisions, and cafes on the main street, but it retains the original grid layout with the Regent Square in the middle, and faded Georgian homesteads and inns scattered around the harbour and farmlands. Also remaining is the Pilot Station from where expert seamen in small pilot boats still lead big ships up the dangerous river; the convict gaol; the lighthouse; and a beautiful mansion called Marion Villa where a rich pastoralist and his daughters spent their summers. On a nearby hilltop you can climb up to the Semaphore Station, which was how the settlers communicated with flags to other colonial outposts along the river. George Town is a beautiful place, but like most of Tasmania, it's a crime scene where massacres, genocide and displacement of First Nation people occurred. 

I'm curious about how ordinary people live their lives while catastrophic inhumanity occurs in plain sight. How do we reckon with our humanity? I don't know the answer to this question. I'm not trying to answer it. My work-in-progress is also a love letter to Tasmania. My ancestors turned up there in the 1850s, looking for farming opportunities. We didn't learn much about the Palawa people at school. It was only when I went to university that the education curriculum changed. Now, in Lutrawita/Trouwerner/Tasmania, school children learn about the past, about the Palawa people who are the traditional custodians of the land, and who survived the brutality of colonisation and dispossession. I believe Australia is making steady baby steps toward reconciliation. 

Do I think agents/editors/readers will be interested in this novel about such horror? Maybe not, to be honest. But sometimes, writing from the heart with no concern for a commercial outcome, can create the best writing. 

Currently, as a crime writer I've gone off-road without a map. I know I can't write anything else right now. I'll be back once this draft is done, if I'm not lost forever in the wilderness of my sadness. I simply can't write crime as real war crimes play out on my screen every day. Reading, however - crime fiction, stories about women, historical novels, wildly original literary works - has been a balm, an oasis of escape from the world's spiralling chaos, a reprieve from the relentlessly shattering news. And the seed of passion for my ski lodge thriller remains. I've worked on it with my agent for over a decade. One day, I will share it with everyone, and that will be a happy milestone. 

To answer the question of the Blog: How would I convince an editor to love this novel? I'd tell them that the reason I'm so passionate about it is that it's set in a fictional tiny ski resort that resembles one where I spent a lot of time growing up, and that it's a coming-of-age mystery, for both a teen daughter and her mother, as they both realise that the world they live in, is different to the world they thought they live in. Coming-of-age is an interesting theme as it can happen to people at different points in their lives, at any age that they have a reckoning with the truth. My agent believes in it, she's loved it for a long time. (My oh-so-patient agent!) I hope that an editor will fall in love with it enough to publish it, one day. 

Elevator pitch for my ski lodge thriller:
A young man mysteriously dies in an old ski hut in a Tasmanian ski resort. It’s 1994 when homosexuality was illegal, and poppy farmer Enid, and her seventeen-year-old daughter, believe this is one in a series of unresolved gay-hate murders. Troublingly, it seems that someone close to them in their ski lodge is responsible.

Blurb*:
A ski club is a strangely intimate place. Every winter weekend fifty people sleep side by side in dormitory bunks, eat breakfast in their pyjamas, ski together, and have lively après ski drinks by the fire. They’re all familiar, yet they don’t really know each other.
 (*I was going to include my full blurb here, but I'm paranoid someone might enter it into AI and produce a similar novel before I get it out there!)

The surest way to convince an editor to acquire my novel is to cross my fingers and toes!

 

... In Space, by Catriona

Give us your elevator pitch for your latest book, then analyze it and tell us why you think it might tempt an agent, editor, or movie producer.

The title of this blog isn't a reference to Artemis II, but rather a nod to the fact that a pitch including the words "in space" is always going to be translated by a movie producer as "One small set. No location filming." But see what I did there? I said "space" when everyone's marvelling at the amazing photographs of the Earth and the Nutella, which doesn't hurt.

Not that I'm any good at that sort of zeitgeist evocation when it matters. Of all the suckage in my suckacious life I suck most at pitches, I reckon. I once said "It's about some people", to an agent. Luckily we were only chatting in a bar and I wasn't actually agent-hunting. Ach, it made her laugh. That's all that matters when you're chatting in a bar. She wasn't to know I'd have said the same thing at PitchFest.

The only kind of pitch I can do at all is the "meets" sort. For the book that's coming out on the 1st of May, THE DEAD ROOM, I went with Sleeping Murder meets Gaslight.

Buy links and other details

Does that work? I've said it to people and got a three-syllable "oo" in reply. You know the one - "oo-OOO-ooo?" - so maybe it does. And it got a publisher to read the synopsis when I put it in a covering letter. So let's say it does. Now, why?

Well, it's going to pull in Agatha Christie fans, mentioning one of her best Miss Marples (imo), and even someone who doesn't know their St Mary Mead from their 221b Baker Street might think "sleeping murder" as a concept sounds like our kind of fun. Similarly, anyone familiar with the 1940s film Gaslight will get that there's psychological trickery in a domestic setting going on here. And, again, younger readers who've never heard of Joseph Cotten or even Ingrid Bergman, will have heard of gaslighting and catch the drift.

Glancing back at the question, though, I see I'm not supposed to be considering potential readers. I'm supposed to be thinking about agents, editors and movie producers. I've mentioned the editor already; I'm never changing agents and it's too scary even to contemplate it; and I'm going to assume that the idea of a film title taking off and coming to define a whole sub-category of dysfunctional behaviour would be catnip to a producer, so reminding them of that time it happened before is a good idea.

The book I'm writing now has a three-way "meets" pitch. I've cast it as The Railway Children meets Rear Window meets The Wicker Man. I'm not sure that would be as successful. Edwardian children's fiction is a long way from enjoying the everlasting relevance of Christie's oeuvre, for a start. 

Rear Window's a good shout, I think. Yes, it's dated but Hitchcock is still cool, as far as I can tell, getting on for fifty years after he died. (At least, the showing of Dial M for Murder in the original 3D, as part of my local art cinema's Hitchcockotober festival last year, was sold out and turning people away.) 

What about The Wicker Man though? The Guardian named it the fourth best horror film of all time but a. that's the Guardian for you and b. this was before The Babadook, Get Out and Sinners. If people hadn't heard of Rear Window or The Wicker Man, my pitch might sound a bit like shading the southern exposure of your house with home-made blinds. And three plucky children in rural England aren't going to help. 

But, assuming editors and producers are familiar with all the references, I think this pitch is a belter. We've got a constrained protagonist, claustrophobia-induced paranoia (or is it?) and an upending of small-town charm that my book jackets have often hinted at but which I've never written about so directly before. I mean, imagine living in the house with the dead room, if you couldn't escape and you couldn't trust your neighbours not to use you as bonfire fuel. 

But that's next year.

Cx 

Going up! (hopefully) by Eric Beetner

 Give us your elevator pitch for your latest book, then analyze it and tell us why you think it might tempt an agent, editor, or movie producer.

A WOUND THAT WILL NOT HEAL is the final book in the Carter McCoy trilogy. As Carter faces his final days, a call for help comes from the past. Bree, the girl who set him on his path of vengeance and vigilante justice needs his help. Men posing as ICE agents have kidnapped a friend and left a 12-year old girl abandoned. In what will likely be his final act before succumbing to his disease, Carter travels West to face a homegrown enemy unlike any he’s confronted before. With his dog, Chester, by his side and nothing left to lose, Carter’s last rescue is his most important, and his most poignant.

An agent or publisher? Who knows? Of course, I’d never go out and try to sell someone on the third book in a trilogy. But let’s look at what I do have on my side:

This is my first foray into writing about contemporary “ripped from the headlines” subjects. In this case, men posing as ICE agents and feeling empowered by the current administration to snatch people off the streets. Whether this is a selling point to the book or not remains to be seen. It came out just yesterday as an ebook (print coming soon and audio this summer) so it’s too soon to tell if people will want to read about something that is in their faces every day. It could be that it is exhausting and people just want an escape.

My hope is that they are drawn to a story in which the little guy wins against this monolith of evil we’ve all been facing down for over a year now.

The first book, The Last Few Miles Of Road, sold as a series based on the pitch of an older gentleman who receives a terminal diagnosis and uses that newfound freedom from consequence to go find and kill the man responsible for his daughter’s death. When complications ensue and he gets wrapped up in the troubles of a local girl, he realizes he can help her by eliminating a troublesome person in her life, too. Now armed with a sense of justice and the all-important “nothing left to lose” he goes off to help others in his limited time left.

That was a selling point and that first book even garnered an ITW award nomination and an Anthony award nomination as well as ending up on several “best of” lists for that year.

As has been the unfortunate case with all of the series I’ve written, this is my 4th trilogy, the second book didn’t fare as well. Will taking on a more immediate contemporary story help with book 3? I’ll find out, I guess.

I think the relatively simple setup of Carter McCoy as a character did help that first book sell. He was easy to explain to people, both agents, publishers and also readers. A few book clubs have picked up the book, which is a first for me. I think that speaks to the pitch working to intrigue people enough. 

I do like a simple setup. It’s tempting to want to put all of your brilliant twists and unexpected turns you worked so hard to put into your novel into a synopsis, but the whole point is to tease just enough to get people to take a chance on your book. If you lay it all out you end up giving spoilers and we all hate when a movie trailer gives away too much, right?

You have to set the hook, but not lose all your bait. Is that an expression?

I find that the real hook to any book is the characters. I think it’s why Carter McCoy was an easy sell. I just need people to know who he is, less so what he gets up to in the books. If people want to know more about him, then the machinations of the plot are secondary. 

For a third book, or any book deep into a seres, you do have the luxury of readers who are already up to speed. They trust you and your characters so you can take some chances, stretch from what came before. Maybe try a new tactic and write about something political. 

Character is crucial when talking about Hollywood. Deals are made in packages with star power being the foundation of almost every project. If you wrote a character some actor would kill to play, then you have a much better chance of getting it made. Get Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts on board to portray your creation and you stand a chance. 

I often think the book world could still learn a lot from the movies in terms of efficiency of story pitches. The whole phrase “elevator pitch” is a Hollywood concept and there needs to be a succinct way to sell your story in a 2-3 minute trailer and even on a poster with a line or two and an image. 

Did I do it on this one? Time will tell. All I know is the readers who have found these books have responded more positively than to any of the 30 books I publisher prior. Carter McCoy may go down as my greatest creation. If that’s my legacy, I’ll take it.

As I bid him farewell, I hope I’m not also bidding farewell to my writing career, but I am faced with the first time in over a decade with no new contract and nothing on the horizon. It’s a scary place to be, but nothing I can’t handle. Like Carter, I’ve got nothing really to lose. And that’s a pretty freeing place to be.

Dial P for Pitch

Question: Give us your elevator pitch (a paragraph) for your latest book (or a book of your choosing), then analyze it and tell us why you think it might tempt an agent, editor, or movie producer.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about elevator pitches, it’s this: everyone says they should be short, sharp, and irresistible—and almost nobody agrees on what that actually looks like. It’s easy to confuse pitch with summary or logline.

Somewhere along the way, “elevator pitch” became shorthand for a verbal movie trailer: high concept, a couple of comps, maybe a hooky line for a poster. And that can work, if you can pull it off.

I’ve come to think of it differently. A good pitch isn’t a jingle from Don Draper. It’s a spotlight.

I don’t pretend to know what will sell, so I write for myself and hope for the best.

Here are three recent attempts, each trying to answer the same question: how do you get someone to care?

 

EYES TO DECEIT

Pitch:
In 1953, as the CIA and MI6 engineer the overthrow of Iran’s elected leader, American operative Walker is sent to Rome to help coordinate the covert operation. When the coup falters, he must choose between success and his own conscience. Surrounded by ambitious power brokers whose goals constantly shift, Walker begins to suspect he’s not there to win the Cold War—but to survive it.

Logline:
Sent to help topple a foreign government, an American operative watches the mission unravel—and must decide whether he can live with what it takes to finish the job. For readers of le Carré, Furst, Kanon, and Vidich.

Why this might tempt someone:
This pitch leans on the moral dilemma. The historical event gives it weight, but the real hook is smaller: can he live with what he’s doing? Readers respond to character first, geopolitics second. The risk is that stories brushing against real-world events can feel “too political.”

Eyes to Deceit: Company Files 4. Published November 2025. Level Best Books.

 

FOUR ON THE FLOOR

Pitch:
Boston, 1978. Heatwave. Four bodies. One is a journalist with connections powerful enough to shake the city. Vietnam vet and ex-cop Shane Cleary is pushed by politicians and mob interests to uncover the truth before tensions boil over. As he digs into corrupt cops, buried secrets, and a killer who reminds him too much of his past, Cleary realizes he’s back in a war—now fought in alleys and precincts instead of jungles.

Logline:
In a boiling Boston summer, a war-damaged ex-cop pulled into a conspiracy that feels less like a case—and more like the war he thought he’d left behind. Think the questionable morality of Gone Baby Gone with the velocity of Drive.

 

Why this might tempt someone:
This is the cleanest “elevator-y” pitch: clear setup, immediate stakes, familiar genre lane. You can see the movie. The downside is the familiarity of the PI premise—the hook isn’t the concept, it’s the execution and voice.

Four on the Floor: Shane Cleary Mystery 6. Scheduled July 2026. Level Best Books.

 

THE QUIET EAGLE

Pitch:
Cairo, 1956. As global powers maneuver during the Suez Crisis, reluctant American operative Walker is sent into a situation already slipping beyond control. Caught between rival intelligence services, shifting alliances, and two formidable women with agendas of their own, he navigates a shadow war where influence matters more than force. Walker must decide whether he’s witnessing history—or enabling it.

Logline:
Cairo, 1956. Recruited by a former lover, an American operative must navigate shifting alliances in a covert war—where one wrong move could spark an international crisis. This is The Quiet American meets Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

 

Why this might tempt someone:
This pitch sells on tone. The Suez Crisis may not be widely known today, but the story frames how a moment of overlooked history shapes events. The deeper hook is thematic: what happens when empires lose control but pretend they haven’t? It’s atmospheric and subtle—harder to sell, but potentially more memorable if it lands.

The Quiet Eagle: Company Files 5. Scheduled October 2026. Level Best Books.

If there’s a takeaway—other than trying to predict market trends—it’s this: an elevator pitch doesn’t have to do everything. It just has to do one thing clearly enough that someone leans in.

The rest is out of your hands—always was; you just notice it more after hitting send.

 

Wait, I'm ahead? | Tempt agents and publishers with a logline

 While everyone else is talking about how they came to writing, I inadvertently skipped to next week’s topic. It’s a case of deadline brain. It’s like I’m ahead, but I’ve really been lapped. I hope you enjoy a sneak peek to next week!

--

I love the smell of spring especially the flowers blooming in my garden despite my concentrated, but unintentional efforts to send the azaleas to hell, with the tea roses following swiftly behind. Yet, they persevere.

 

What I don’t love is being under deadline which made me almost forget to post tonight. I’m in the final edits of the fourth book of my Killing series, A Killing Earth. The third book in the series, A Killing Breath, will be released April 14^th. I need your grace for any typos or misused words in this post, e.g., if ‘concentrated’ and ‘unintentional’ technically works in the same sentence. I didn’t have time to look it up. These final edits are getting all my attention right now, but I’m gladly taking a break to respond to the prompt:

“Give us your elevator pitch (a paragraph) for your latest book (or a book of your choosing), then analyze it and tell us why you think it might tempt an agent, editor, or movie producer.”

My elevator pitch is a logline. After I read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, I changed the way I begin my books. I now write a logline early in the ideation phase. A logline is a 2 or 3 sentence summary that helps me find the heart of my story. You can easily look up how to write one online. The one for Breath is as follows:

Reluctant homicide detective Raven Burns tells herself that police work is just a job. But as she hunts down a serial killer who is murdering her friends, she realizes that police work being just a job is a distant dream, and wading in blood her only reality.

Editors, agents, and even movie producers can immediately discern the genre, identify the protagonist, and pinpoint both the external and internal conflicts. The external conflict is Raven trying to bring a killer to justice; the internal conflict is the struggle to reconcile with or distance herself from a job that is eating her soul. It makes us wonder if Raven, who has been an unsteady protagonist throughout this series, will be able to conquer her internal demons and live a normal life.

After I’m happy with the logline, I then sit down and write a summary as quickly as possible. My goal is to get something on the page I can edit. Here is the final summary of A Killing Breath:

Raven Burns owes her life to the kind souls who looked after her while her father, unbeknownst to them, sowed a path of blood and bodies from California to Louisiana as one of the most notorious serial killers ever known, Floyd “Fire” Burns. When Raven was a girl, Floyd brutally murdered one of those kind souls, Miss Ruth Jefferson, when the woman made the fatal decision to open the door to him on a pitch-black 4th of July night. As Raven learned of her father’s crimes, she vowed to do everything in her power to put men like him away. Decades later Raven’s hunt for a serial killer terrorizing the town leads her right back to that 4th of July night, and a memory that will make her question how much Floyd’s evil has settled in her bones.

If Breath’s logline tempted you, drop me a line in the comments. If you have a logline for a story you are working on or have written, drop those in the comments as well. I’m on deadline, remember? I need the distraction!

The Impossible Dream

What brought you into writing, and what keeps you there?

I don’t rightly remember when or how I got it into my head that I wanted to be a writer, but I can tell you a little about my journey to becoming and remaining one.

For me, it began when I was seven or eight. I wrote a whale of story about a baseball team that saved…well…they saved a whale. Yes, you read that right. The 1967 World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals all pulled together to save a whale that was sick for some reason. (I don’t remember why.) They organized an airlift of the beast, I believe, in order to dump it back into the ocean where it belonged. I even drew pictures. If my memory serves, they suspended the poor animal from an airplane in a huge net. You know, the way whales are always transported. Kind of like this:

All ended well, of course, thanks to Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Roger Maris, et al. But before you ask to see it, forget it. Lucky for me it got lost somewhere in the mists of the past, some sixty years ago.

So that was my start. I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer, though. That wasn’t until I was twelve. That’s when I wrote my first novel, a spectacularly bad World War I adventure. I’m fond of describing it as “110 perfectly fine sheets of paper ruined.” That book, however, was not lost (I have a copy), but it will remain locked away until 100 years after my death, when my heirs will retrieve it and—according to my wishes—use its pages to line the bottom of a birdcage.

I wrote a second novel in college, and a big World War II historical in grad school. At that point, alas, I’d run out of world wars, so it was time to move on and write something else. And then, like so many dreams, mine—the one of being a published writer—fell by the wayside and lay dormant for many years, due in no small measure to the fact my books were plagued by lazy turns of phrase, poor spelling, and a stubborn insistence on rehabilitating the reputation of the much-maligned passive voice. (The preceding sentence goes a long way to explain why my dream of being a writer took so long to come true.)

Yes, I let other things get in the way of my dream. I quit grad school and moved to New York City where I found a job in a photo news agency. Fascinating work that I truly enjoyed, but I was young and impetuous and left it in a fit of pique after a disagreement with the company’s owner.

 

Next I landed an amazing job at New York University, where I worked in the Italian Department. I began writing again in my spare time, especially during the summers when work was slow. I managed to produce two novels and find an agent to represent me. I was sure I was on my way to realizing my dream. She couldn’t find any takers, however, and she didn’t like the third book I wrote. Ultimately, it was a bad fit with that agent, and we parted brass rags. Still, I thought, now I can get back on the horse, write what I want, and find a new rep. But I hadn’t counted on life getting in the way again.

 

Wouldn’t you know it, I got promoted to director of NYU’s prestigious Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up: helping to build a new, world-class cultural center in the heart of Greenwich Village. Writers, artists, musicians, academics, and me. Wow. I loved it. But it put an end to any hopes of writing more books. There simply was no time.

 

Here’s picture of me in another lifetime, chatting with il mattatore, the great Vittorio Gassman, who made a memorable appearance at the Casa circa 1995. He was a true star and a legend.

The Italian job was great—I even had cocktails with Umberto Eco one Friday afternoon at the Casa—but I was eventually lured away to Los Angeles, where I’d been offered a killer job in the subtitling business. That was a blast. The best job I ever had. At first, I assumed it would only be a couple of years in LA, but it turned into eighteen. Before I’d realized it, I was fifty and had frittered away a half-century waiting for the right time to become a writer to come to me. I decided I had to act quickly or let go of that hope for good.

 

I wrote a new book in my spare time and began searching for an agent. I got lucky and found one after only thirty-nine queries. Surely literary stardom, patches on my elbows, and the realization of my dream lay just ahead. 

 

But that didn’t happen. The book never sold.

 

So I wrote another one, which, when all hope of ever succeeding at this writing thing seemed to be slipping away, my agent sold. The joy was overwhelming. After forty years of hoping and wishing and starting and stopping, wasting precious time and deferring my dream for tomorrow, I’d done it. My Ellie Stone novel made me a published writer. A second book followed, and a third one, sold to the same publisher. Then four more. While I didn’t make any best-seller lists or have hit movies made of my books, I did achieve some critical success. Twenty-one award nominations, including two for the Edgar and five each for the Anthony and Lefty, plus an Agatha and Sue Grafton Memorial nomination for good measure. But I wasn’t always a bridesmaid. I also won two Macavities, an Anthony, and a Barry award along the way. These tokens of recognition soothed the sting of forty years of waiting.

So what keeps me writing today? I’d say it’s the same thing that inspired me all those years while I was chasing success: an impossible dream. To tell stories and tinker with language. And, yes, I’m still dreaming. I advise all aspiring writers to do the same. Keep dreaming and never give up. As I’ve written before in this space, you can only succeed for the first time after your very last failure. Write on.

 

 *****************

THE PRANK…enigmatic and unnerving. The pace never flags for a second. This is some masterly plotting. I loved it.”

—Liz Nugent, author of Strange Sally Diamond

 

THE PRANK. A picture clipped from Playboy magazine, a missing Swiss Army Knife, and a prank gone terribly wrong conspire to make Christmas 1968 a deadly holiday to remember.

 

“The Holdovers meets The Bad Seed,” THE PRANK features a charming but volatile thirteen-year-old named Jimmy Steuben. He befriends his seventh-grade English teacher, Patti Finch, just days after her boyfriend is killed in an electrocution accident while hanging Christmas lights on his roof. Patti desperately needs respite from her grief, and a chance encounter with Jimmy provides just that. Ignoring the dangers of a potential scandal, the mismatched pair begins spending time together over Christmas break. Patti finds solace in Jimmy’s company; Jimmy discovers desire and infatuation. But what Patti doesn’t know is that it was Jimmy who caused the tragic accident that killed her lover.

From two-time Edgar Award finalist, Anthony, Barry, and Macavity award-winner James W. Ziskin, THE PRANK releases July 2026.

PLACEHOLDER—NOT THE OFFICIAL COVER

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From Green Eggs to Dark Alleys

What brought me into writing, and what keeps me there?

By Dietrich

Like a lot of us, it started with picture books. From there, I caught on to reading, growing up with the wonderful stories of Dr. Suess and E.B. White. My coming-of-age years brought new books that pulled me in even deeper: The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Outsiders. Then came the great crime writers who inspired me to write: Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins, James Crumley and Charles Willeford. There was something electric in those pages, and I remember thinking, “Someday, I want to do that.”

When someday finally arrived, I didn’t jump straight into novels. I started with short stories—testing the waters, experimenting with different genres, voices and styles. When the first short was published, I was on Cloud Nine. It felt like I had cracked open a door. So I kept writing, building confidence and finding my way. The shift to crime fiction felt natural enough. I loved the tension and pace, the flawed characters making bad choices, and all those moral gray areas. 

My first novel, Ride the Lightning, came out in 2014, and I was on that cloud again. And the love of telling stories has stayed with me ever since, and it keeps me pulling me back to the blank page.

Every story begins with a spark—an image, a “what if,” or a bit of history that won’t let go. From there, it’s a matter of chasing that spark through the research, false starts, revisions and the slow build until everything finally clicks. 

Since that first crime novel, I’ve found real satisfaction in digging into different eras—like the Dust Bowl for Call Down the Thunder, or life in the Midwest during the bygone days of Dirty Little War. I enjoy putting my own twist on true stories in books like Under an Outlaw Moon and Crooked, exploring the raw power of nature in House of Blazes, and capturing the raw energy of the punk music scene in Zero Avenue. There’s something special about creating characters and selecting the right historical details that bring each world alive as the story unfolds. When it all comes together, it’s the best feeling.

The love of reading has never faded. Over the years, I’ve added many more authors and genres to the mix: James Lee Burke, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Harper Lee, and countless others.

But what keeps me coming back most of all is hearing from someone that a book of mine stayed with them, took them by surprise, made them laugh, or kept them up late turning pages. That’s the best fuel any writer could ask for.

Writing Helps

 

Terry here with our question of the week: 

 What brought you into writing, and what keeps you there? 

 I recently went through a period of distress. I’ve been politically invested my whole life, and this is such a disastrous time in politics, that I feel a continuing sense of tragedy and loss. I feel as if the things that I hold most important in the political landscape have been trashed. It’s as if a band of crazy people have come into my house and torn up all the photos I cherish, broken keepsakes, thrown sand in the appliances, smashed windows, gouged deep gashes in the floors, ripped carpets into bits, torn pages out of books, slashed art…destruction on a massive, personal scale. I know people who have lost their homes to fires, and it’s tragic, but this is a different tragedy because it is perpetrated by people I thought I had some connection to. If I didn’t agree with them, I at least respected them. No more. I’m in a wilderness created by people who don’t value the things I value. They don’t care about dignity, truth, kindness, or decency. So…I’ve been in a funk. 

 What saved me is writing. It has always saved me. Becoming immersed in a story has always been a way of keeping myself on an even keel. Long before I was published, I wrote stories, snippets of stories, descriptions of real experiences, fantasies, and dreams. Eventually, I began channeling the snippets into books, and eventually I learned the craft well enough so that the books became publishable. It isn’t as if I was writing as therapy, but instead learning to tell the story of the world as I experience it. 

Sometimes people ask why I write crime fiction. The easy answer is that there is a reckoning at the end of a crime novel. Justice gets served. But one of my favorite Kirkus reviews said, “A favorite of fans who like their police procedurals with a strong ethical center.” Writing crime fiction, for me, isn’t just about justice being served, but about the decisions people make, and why. It’s about Samuel Craddock seeing even criminals as human beings with a story that has led them to a dark place. In one of the books he even speculates that a killer carries a burden knowing he or she has made a wrong choice and that they will feel some relief at being brought to justice. 

 My parents always had books around. We were on a very limited budget because my dad went to college only after I was a toddler. He went to school by day, and worked after class and on weekends. Money was very tight. But there were two things my parents didn’t scrimp on. My mother had a piano, and she belonged to a book-of-the-month club. And at every occasion for gifts, I got books. Kid’s books. The Bobbsey Twins. Nancy Drew. The Hardy Boys. But I didn’t stick to those books I was an avid reader and I read my mother’s books as well. I never remember either of my parents taking note of what I was reading or telling me I was too young to read anything. 

So I knew about stories. I don’t remember when I first thought I could write. My dad wrote a story that was published when he was in college, and he was very proud of it, so that may have been what led me to believe that, I too, could write a story. I remember as a child making up plots. We lived on a farm when I was in the second and third grade, which meant I had plenty of alone time to tell myself stories. I vividly remember once walking in a plowed field and thinking about what I could find there that might be interesting enough to tell a story about. 

 It wasn’t until the fifth grade, when I read a classic sci-fi short story that I suddenly thought, “I could do that. I could a write a story like that.” I can’t remember actually following through at that time. But I do remember writing a story in middle school (which we called junior high school in those days) that my teacher read aloud. I was completely hooked after that, and began to scribble pieces of stories. 

 The rest is history!

The ones who brought me here... - By Matthew Greene

What brought you into writing, and what keeps you there?

Great question—who can I blame for all this? 

I'm kidding, of course. I'm incredibly grateful to be a working writer, and can only imagine what I'd have ended up doing otherwise. (I remembering hearing Harlan Coben say if he hadn't become a novelist, he would have been a duvet cover, and that's always stuck with me.) In true "butterfly effect" fashion, I could point to any number of things that nudged me in this direction.

But, in light of some recent news about teacher strikes in California (y'all, can we just pay these folks what they deserve?) I'd like to take this opportunity to highlight three extraordinary educators. Within the course of what probably felt like an ordinary day's work, each of them had a profound impact on my life and future career. 

This is not an exhaustive list, but as many teachers have urged me to do over the years, I will try to keep it brief.

Ms. Heard - Fourth Grade

Any teacher who inspires a nine-year-old boy to linger after the bell rings deserves some kind of medal. And Ms. Heard deserves that and more. It's not exactly rare to find a teacher who cares as deeply as she did, but it's a gift nonetheless. I always saw Ms. Heard as a very serious person, someone who possessed more knowledge than my little child-sized brain could possibly hold. Of course, I was just precocious enough to take this as a challenge. I am sure, looking back, that the last thing Ms. Heard wanted to do after a long day of wrangling fourth graders was to make chit chat with the young nerd who wouldn't leave the classroom. But she always treated me like I was interesting, like I had something to say. Her attention made me see myself differently. It made me believe in myself. Ms. Heard encouraged me to be creative and thoughtful at a time when I would have traded any burgeoning storytelling talent for the ability to blend in with the other boys. But I had a teacher—a smart, savvy, occasionally intimidating teacher—who made me believe that a weirdo like me was worthy of attention.

Ms. Schlaman - AP Literature

If childhood is a tricky time to navigate, teenage years can be downright deadly. By the time my young, overachieving self landed in Ms. Schlaman's classroom my senior year of high school, I'd turned into a full-fledged drama kid with dreams of singing on a Broadway stage. But something sparked for me as I met Ms. Schlaman, dissecting great works of literature and exploring a part of my brain I didn't even know existed. She embodied the joy that comes from rigor, treating my writing with a seriousness I didn't believe it deserved. When I took the stage in the school musical (not to brag, but I was the lead) she was there to support. Little did she know, she was quietly guiding me to something better. When the opportunity came to enter an essay contest for a sizable scholarship, she helped me through more rounds of rewrites than I bet she bargained for. On the eve of the deadline, I asked if she thought my essay was good enough to impress the judges. Her response: "You're impressive." Those two words—spoken to an insecure, closeted, self-loathing teen—did more for me than any scholarship ever could.

Eric Samuelsen - Playwriting 100

It took one year of college to realize that my plan to major in musical theatre performance was woefully misguided. My sophomore year found me in Eric Samuelsen's Intro to Playwriting class, a course I registered for on a whim. In the first session, he asked us to come back in two days with a short play. I stayed up all night to write a dark comedy about carpool moms, and I grimaced through every second of hearing my words out loud in class. Eric asked me to visit during office hours, and I prepared myself for a brutal reality check. What I got, though, was a warm smile, a friendly chuckle about my audacious script, and a simple bit of encouragement: "You could do this, you know." Unbeknownst to him, I'd had a blast churning out those first few pages, and I was looking for permission to call myself a writer. Eric gave me that and so much more. Playwriting evolved into other forms, eventually leading to my debut novel. None of which would have happened without him.

So, what keeps me writing? At least part of my answer would be a deep desire to make these people proud. (Along with the many other fabulous educators I didn't have room to mention.) At my first book release event back in Sacramento, I was honored to have so many former teachers in attendance. These are the people who steered my life, and I'm sure I'm one of many who feel that way.

So, here's to the teachers. May we finally pay them what they're worth.