Please welcome guest poster Karin Slaughter to Writer Unboxed. Karin is an internationally bestselling author of crime fiction and suspense, author of 11 novels that have sold upward of 17 million copies globally. Karin’s upcoming release BROKEN, is another nailbiter, and sure to add to her list of bestsellers. When Special Agent Will Trent arrives in Grant County, he finds a police department determined to protect its own and far too many unanswered questions about a prisoner’s death. He doesn’t understand why Officer Lena Adams is hiding secrets from him. He doesn’t understand her role in the death of Grant County’s popular police chief. He doesn’t understand why that man’s widow, Dr. Sara Linton, needs him now more than ever to help her crack this case.

Karin graciously agreed to share how she approaches crafting her suspense novels. Enjoy!

Writers are often asked a reliable set of questions at every tour stop: where do you get your ideas? What are your writing habits? One that always gives me pause is the question about writer’s block. I suppose I’ve had this affliction before, but I have never been one to let myself get too freaked out if I don’t feel like writing. The fact is that creativity isn’t a tap that can be turned on and off. Once you allow yourself to accept this, I think it takes some of the stress off. It’s also important to differentiate between not being in the mood to write and abject laziness, a disease that exists on the same gene as creativity (at least that’s what I tell myself when I’m watching Oprah instead of working on the next Great American Novel). In college, when I didn’t want to work on a paper, I would set the kitchen timer for thirty minutes and tell myself I was going to write for that full thirty minutes no matter how crappy or stupid the result. I still use that trick, and I have never found myself stopping when the buzzer goes off. 

Before I start a book, I always know how it’s going to start and how it’s going to end. Since I’m writing thrillers, I think it’s a good idea to know who the bad guy is, or at least the main bad guy. Sometimes you can be surprised by accomplices along the way, but if I was writing a how-to for would-be thriller writers, I’d advise folks to know straight out of the gate who did it, because readers can usually tell if you didn’t figure it out until the last twenty pages. It’s usually around the two hundred page that I feel myself start to slow down. Fortunately, given my genre, I can usually kill someone to keep the story moving. 

But, it’s not all about the murders. Broken, my latest novel, takes on some social themes that are important to me. Folks who think genre fiction is all about the guts should take a closer look. Good crime fiction has always been about tearing off the scab of the social condition. Domestic violence, child abuse, human trafficking, drug abuse — crime fiction authors were writing about these subjects well before we were delivered literary opuses on the subject. In Broken, I talk about the trap of rural poverty and how it can bring smart people to desperate measures. I’ve combined my two series Grant County and Will Trent so that I can give the readers two sides of the coin. Will lives in Atlanta, an international city that serves as the capital of the south. Grant County is as rural as south Georgia can get. Seeing my small town through Will’s eyes was like creating it all over again from scratch. Will and the reader can’t trust anyone, especially the local law enforcement, who are engaged in a massive cover-up. Sara Linton is back in town for the first time in four years and the town, and Sara, are markedly different since her absence. The fun parts of bringing all these people together is to see what kind of mess they can make, and figure out how they can pull themselves out. It’s the sort of story that had me still in love long after the buzzer went off.

Photo by Alison Rosa.

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