Diversity

A Conversation with Rachel Howzell Hall

April 12, 2019 By David Corbett 13 Comments

I heard of Rachel Howzell Hall long before we actually met. I had been told by friends about her Elouise “Lou” Norton novels based in South Central Los Angeles, and found them every bit as smart, grounded, and compelling as advertised. Then I read her now famous 2015 essay, “Colored and Invisible,” where she discussed being one of the few black writers at annual mystery conferences. (This was the inspiration for a six-writer roundtable in Writer’s Digest on the issue of being a writer of color in the crime genre.)

Finally, Rachel and I met face-to-face in 2017 at the Writer’s Digest Novel Writing Conference in Pasadena, and were on a panel together where her self-effacing humor, gracious charm, and [insert superlative adjective] intelligence were impossible to ignore. I got on my knees and begged her to be my friend. (Not literally, but close.)

I also began working to get her to join us at the Book Passage Mystery Writer’s Conference in northern California, where she appeared in 2018 and was so popular with the participants we’d like her to be a permanent fixture—ahem, I mean tenured faculty member—if she’ll have us.

That may be hard, because she’s going to be in high demand now. Her latest novel, They All Fall Down, a standalone thriller that came out three days ago—based loosely on Agatha Chriustie’s iconic And Then There Were None—has been getting sensational reviews (“”[A] master class in strong, first-person voice”–New York Journal of Books), and it just may be that her twenty-year slog to Overnight Success may finally have paid off.

Here–let her tell you about it.

You didn’t start out as a crime-mystery writer at all. What were your first efforts in fiction, and how did that turn out for you?

No, I didn’t start out as a crime writer, but my stories always included elements of the genre—people doing bad things to each other and someone trying to understand motives. I always wrote worlds that were ‘off,’ but back then, I didn’t know to label it as ‘crime.’

In my first published novel A Quiet Storm, there’s drama, psychological suspense and a disappearance. The question that threaded the story was, ‘What happened to Matt?’ And, of course, if I wrote that story now, it would probably have the point-of-view of the detectives who, as it stands, make relatively minor appearances in the story.

But I liked the crime and mystery part of the story the most, I just didn’t know how to pull it off while also figuring out my voice. This led to a period in my career where I couldn’t sell a thing because I liked darker material, with black characters, with my odd sense of humor. Editors didn’t like it, couldn’t figure me out. Some were offended by my humor and some didn’t think my stories were ‘urban’ enough.

Rejection became as common as pigeons to me but while I flirted with the idea of quitting, I didn’t. I let those hours of dejection and depression pass and I went back to it. In the meantime, two of my rejected novels were self-published on Amazon. While they weren’t perfect, the stories are solid and should’ve sold.

But they weren’t urban enough. Heh.

When and why did you decide to turn to crime fiction?

I always wanted to write crime fiction, but I didn’t know if I could. It wasn’t until I went through some life drama of my own that I said, Why not? I decided to attempt a police procedural. If I failed, I failed.

My first intentional dip into the genre was my second self-published novel No One Knows You’re Here. And that’s where we meet Syeeda McKay, who is the best friend of Eloise “Lou” Norton, the detective protagonist of my series. Syeeda is a reporter who is following the story of a serial killer murdering women he finds along Western Avenue in Los Angeles. In real life, that serial murderer was nicknamed the Grim Sleeper. After writing that novel, I was hooked, and I began work on the first book in the Lou Norton series, Land of Shadows.

No One Knows You’re Here is where I found my voice and learned that procedurals required a different type of learning, a different type of writing. I’m still learning—and still fine-tuning my voice. And I’m still being rejected. It’s almost like Groundhog Day with having a writing career. ‘Next book’ is not a sure deal when you’re a midlist writer.

It’s a natural fit for me—I’m always drawn to figuring out why and what led to that Bad Thing. Crime scares me like it scares most people—but I need to know. Crime also has structure—and I like structure. There’s a body—that person got there, someone needs to figure out how and why that body is there and what the repercussions are now that this Bad Thing has happened. Crime stories have romance, suspense, fantasy, sci-fi… There is freedom in crime fiction, and I didn’t want to be pigeonholed in my creativity—there are so many stories to tell.

What inspired you to write an iconic African-American woman detective protagonist? What did you see as the unique challenges from a writing perspective on bringing her to life on the page?

I wanted a new perspective. When I made a determination to write crime, I read everything I could. None of those books talked about the part of Los Angeles where I lived or featured a young black woman like me. I wanted to write those stories, and I wanted to tell readers about events that happened to my friends and me in our part of the city. I wanted a character who was accessible, someone who understood the city and knew its history.

All writers face obstacles, but African-American women writers face unique ones. What were the biggest hurdles you had to overcome as your career advanced?

The biggest obstacle is that we don’t see ourselves. Everyone learns from example. For the longest time, there were no leading black characters in mystery and crime. Alice and Toni and Zora—they wrote important stories, but not the ones I wanted to write. Octavia was close but she was horror science-fiction. This field was white and male or female and cozy with accidental detectives solving crimes in between knitting circles or baking cupcakes.

I came to crime fiction as a first-hand observer, as someone directly affected by the results. Less than six degrees of separation lay between me and those who were either victims or perpetrators.

Really, we are now in a world where for some, weed is okay–Miley Cyrus’s mom was photographed standing before an open safe filled with bags of weed. How many black and brown men are in jail for the same thing?

So. The culture surrounding this genre was an obstacle. Even now, I hold my tongue and roll my eyes as I listen to people joke sometimes about murder—being punny about death (and I’m not saying that you can’t be humorous especially since editors didn’t get my humor. No, I mean, I have issues with treating the dead disrespectfully). There is gallows humor and there’s disregard and making light of the worst thing that can happen.

And!

There are only so many stories in the world but it’s how you tell them and who your leads are. There were editors who saw nothing special about Lou Norton. Oh, just another detective story. That may be true for that story, but I think overall, I think Lou’s story is different. Her relationships with her colleagues, with her family and friends, even with the victims and perps are different because of who she is, what she grew up with. Yes, the detective story may be a trope but when it’s a person of color, they bring different backgrounds, different ways of interaction with the community. My experience as a black woman in Los Angeles is totally different than Michael Connelly’s, and as a result Lou Norton is not Harry Bosch. And that’s a wonderful thing.

What prompted your decision to move away from a hard-boiled detective series and write not just a standalone, but a standalone inspired by perhaps one of the least hard-boiled—and most revered—writers in the genre, Agatha Christie?

After writing two Lou Norton novels, I just wanted to do something a little different. The story has been on my mind for a long time and after I had a set of four Lou Norton novels under my belt the moment arrived when I could actually write it. The idea of sin, especially as a crime writer, is always on my mind. Agatha Christie’s story And Then There Were None is one of the greatest stories about sin and punishment.

Did you feel any particular need to demonstrate your range as a writer, i.e., to prove you could not be easily pigeonholed? Or were you simply hoping something totally different would lift your profile?

Just like I read almost everything, I want to write those stories that appeal to me. This one story, a thriller, just happened to be that. I couldn’t fit this story into the Lou Norton universe—it would’ve been too much like the movie Se7en. I wrote They All Fall Down because I wanted to tell the story—whether it sold or not, I didn’t care. It was just in me and needed to come out. I was blessed that my editor also loved it and wanted to publish it. Sometimes, that’s when your best work comes out—when you are writing it for you and no one else. I wanted to see a black woman leading a story that is always thought of as a very white, very European story.

We taught a class on character together at last year’s Book Passage Mystery Conference, and you had an amazing exercise that used random prompts to get students to think outside the box. Could you let our readers know about that exercise, and explain why you find it so useful? [Read more…]

The Bi-Cultural Writer

April 8, 2019 By Rheea Mukherjee 10 Comments

I’ve spent my life living between India and the U.S.A. One blog post can’t begin to describe the challenges, privileges, lows, and highs of it all. I can, however, talk about being a bi-cultural writer and writing in various global dialects through one language. I am a weird kind of third-culture kid. I was born in the U.S and finished elementary school there. Then I did middle and high school in India and returned to the U.S for another 8 years where I finished college and my Master’s degree. I’ve since been back to Bangalore, India since 2011.

First, let me tell you about my accent. I code shift – my accent and cultural references can change according to country, and who I’m talking with. I still get teased about it.

Because of my experience, I see English as two very different kinds of languages: Indian English and American English. On the macro level you might think it’s just the accent that’s different, but there are more nuanced differences that are a result of specific cultural backgrounds and responses to very different realities and environments. I admit, it’s easier for me to write for a specific cultural audience. That’s why I’ve been involved with the way I think about writing for a global audience. How do I hold a place in a specific narrative and allow for people from all kinds of backgrounds to find a point of similarity to their own reality? Over the years, I’ve done a lot of relearning and decolonizing. Here are 3 important things I have learnt as a bicultural writer.

Letting Go Of Italicizing Culturally Specific Words

Growing up, I’d read Indian authors italicize or explain very Indian terms in strange ways. I acknowledge that for many non-Indian readers, if I made one reference too many to terms or concepts uniquely Indian, I would risk losing them, and worse, boring them. That said, using western-centric explanations and using italics takes away from the authenticity of the environment. I’d read ‘samosa’ with descriptions like seasoned potato filled pastry, and I’d chuckle. This is not because the description is inaccurate; in fact, it is probably the best way to explain what it is in English to a western audience, but it’s not how people raised in India would think of it.

I found authors who were owning their language with the English they spoke, offering more of a realistic picture of life in such a setting. Many Indians grew up reading British and American books with descriptions of food items we had never tasted in the 80s and 90s, and we had to make do with the names and imagine what they were. In fact, my father had grown up reading Archie Comics in India and assumed pizza to be a sweet dish. When he came to America in the late 70s he was shocked that pizza was savory! We never got explanations and we’re probably all the richer for it. While the world is a lot more globalized now and many readers are more exposed to cross-cultural habits and foods, there are still things that will be very specific to a culture and environment. It’s also the age of the internet where terms and cultural usage are just a Google search away. As long as you are being sensitive to your readers there is no reason to exoticize the culture you are writing from with explanations and italics. This however, is a strong stance to take and I know there are people who disagree, it’s just my evolving opinion of the matter.

Knowing When to Use Culture-specific Idioms and Expressions [Read more…]

10+

Whose Character Is It Anyway?

March 29, 2019 By John J Kelley 73 Comments

Photo by Pexels via Pixabay Free License

Recently my latest creative pursuit, a departure from my stalled work in progress, has started bumping against a writerly controversy about which I had previously been only vaguely aware, that of authors receiving sharp pushback on their characters and in some cases their entire story concept because of perceived cultural disrespect or disregard. And though my pursuit has to date been a personal one, I still found myself chafing under what at first seemed arbitrary and potentially insurmountable barriers. You see, my current exercises involve crafting scenes in which I seek to embody characters unlike myself, with life experiences far removed from my own. In doing so I imagine their worlds, borne of research and admittedly from instinct too, as with any fiction. On one level the exercise is simply a creative challenge. But it is has also become an emotional touchstone since my attempts to “walk a mile in their shoes” have reawakened my empathy in an increasingly isolating world. Makes for good stuff, huh?

You would think so, or at least I did. But my joy in this new pursuit has since tempered. You see, last week I stumbled upon a New York Times article about author Amélie Wen Zhao withdrawing her debut novel, Blood Heir, from publication following accusations of insensitivity and outright racism in her portrayal of a fantasy world in which characters born with special powers are enslaved. Though Zhao, a Chinese immigrant, has explained the inspiration for the novel stemmed in part from largely overlooked indentured servitude prevalent across Asia as well as her personal experience as an outsider, criticisms soon overtook the initial positive reception of advance readers, leading to her decision to withdraw the novel prior to its scheduled June release.

Not having an advance copy myself, I cannot assess the full veracity of the complaints. Yet the situation immediately struck me as unfair. After all, an author chose to forego a publishing dream pursued for most of her young life right at the cusp of its fruition. In the days since, I have devoured reports of other recent works withdrawn from publication, both before and after their market releases. And though I now have more insight into the issues at play, my feelings remain torn. So I turn to you, fellow Unboxers, to help unravel the decidedly thorny matter of the degree to which writers should shape their creations to meet the expectations – or demands? – of potential readers.
[Read more…]

12+

Mining Reader Reviews for Story Gold

February 5, 2019 By Nancy Johnson 25 Comments

If you’re already a published author, you may not want to do this. It can be painful. Since my novel isn’t published yet, I can do it for you. When my author friends read their Goodreads and Amazon reviews, they often do it with one eye open. Some give up after their first one-star reviews.

Some of the bad reviews from readers will say DNF as in “did not finish.” This is about as crushing as seeing NSF on your bank statement after you’ve bounced a check. Yet there are people who force a bad book down like cold medicine. As if it’s a test of character to endure every book they begin.

Still, we know that every bad review doesn’t equate to a bad book. Maybe the reader was ticked off standing in the 15 items or less line at the grocery store behind someone with 16 items in the cart. When I peruse reviews, I find a more likely answer as to why people dismiss certain books. Bias that has nothing to do with storytelling or literary merit can sink a reader’s assessment of a book fast. For example, they’re pro-life and one of the characters had an abortion, so they abhor the book. That’s an actual critique I saw once on Goodreads. Not a helpful review.

I’ll put my critique partner and beta readers up against yours any day. They are literary luminaries in my admittedly biased estimation. Still, when I’m in revision mode, I turn to book reviews to understand what keeps readers turning pages and reading a novel when they could be doing a million other things. I pore over the reviews for books I’ve read so I can go back to the text and understand why the reader stayed engaged or slogged through or just stopped reading. I wade through poor reviews look for recurring themes and issues raised by multiple people. A silly, errant thought occurred to me: If I can avoid all the things readers hate, they’ll love my book. Okay, maybe not, but I’ve found some valuable nuggets and some doozies, too, in the cavern of comments.

Lack of emotion and poor character development can flatten a book.

Reviewers often say, “I didn’t understand the character’s motivation.” We’ve all heard that the stakes in the story must be clear, urgent, and high. This matters to readers. Even more importantly, they want to connect with the characters and feel something. Often, they point out that highly stylized, experimental writing and story structure can work well, but not if it keeps the reader at a distance, sacrificing emotional intimacy with the characters. Another problem stemmed from characters not growing or transforming over the course of the book. [Read more…]

Writing What You Don’t Believe

January 11, 2019 By David Corbett 26 Comments

No, this isn’t about writing dishonestly. Quite the contrary.

I’m returning to a topic I’ve touched on before, but with a different slant this time around. Please bear with me.

We live in an era of such extreme social and political division that if often seems tensions cannot resolve without matters coming to blows—or blood. The increasing number of mass shootings underscores this point, as does online acrimony and the testimony of virtually every retiring senator, regardless of party, that something is broken in our current political culture.

Writers are not in the division biz. We’re in the understanding biz. Every book in some sense attempts to address a truth that the writer felt was previously overlooked, undervalued, or misunderstood.

Truth, though, is a tricky critter. It conjures analogies to greased pigs and invisible songbirds.

Let me lay my cards on the table: I do not believe truth exists objectively, like this desk in front of me or the moon. I’m schooled in this position by a long line of American Pragmatists, most notably William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty.

James famously said, “What’s true is what works,” and earned the eternal scorn of European philosophers whose belief in truth was very much grounded in Platonic and Kantian idealism and mathematical certainty.

But James’s point was really quite profound. He was implicitly asking: How do we know something is true? And his response was: When we use it, we tend to be more successful than not.

So when I say a book—and for our purposes here, I mean a work of fiction—attempts to address a truth previously overlooked, undervalued, or misunderstood, what I mean is that the writer, in posing the crucial story question, What if…? in some way hopes to show that certain ways of acting in the world—whether believed to be conventionally “right” or “wrong”— achieve their desired ends or don’t.

Does courage always win the day? Honesty? Love? Faith? Family? Or are we better off embracing skepticism, enlightened (or naked) self-interest, moral flexibility, violence, power? Is there a middle ground? If so, who does it favor? Do we, as novelists, even have to decide? Or is our job to show how all of these inclinations collide and interact and contaminate each other in the endless scrum known as human life?

Milan Kundera, in The Art of the Novel, refers to “the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood…the wisdom of the novel.”

Fair enough. But how do I honestly go about creating and portraying characters whose beliefs are not just different from mine, but utterly repellent to me?

[Read more…]