Cate Holahan's Blog, page 5

Excited to share that Lies She Told received a STARRED review from Kirkus."Holahan (The Widower’s Wife, 2016, etc.) spins asuffocating double nightmare that provides compelling support for her heroine’s rueful article of faith: “To be a writer is to be a life thief.”

Summer for writers means traveling to speak on panels and attend conferences. This summer, I'll be headed to KillerNashville and New York's Thrillerfest. I am also gearing up for BOOKSNJ on Sunday at the Paramus Public Library where I'll be on a 1:00 panel about writing thrillers with NYT Bestselling Psychological Suspense Author Eva Lesko Natiello (The Memory Box) and the incredible Nancy Star.Recently, I had the thrill of speaking on a panel at my alma mater Princeton with other author alums moderated by Oscar nominated screen writer Christina Lazaridi. 

The Widower's Wife was named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2016. 

I have never experienced writer's block. As a journalist, I never had time for it. When I worked for BusinessWeek, I had to write an online story or two each day plus hone a pitch for the magazine--not to mention spend the vast majority of my day reporting. I could not sit and stare at my computer screen wondering how to write the perfect first sentence. I wrote an okay sentence, then another.After I was done, I reworked the lede to be more attention grabbing. I tightened up paragraphs and replaced verbs with more active ones. I stripped out any passive voice. Most of all, I made sure that I was writing the truth as I saw it to the best of my ability. I write novels in the same way. First and foremost, I do the reporting. I research the topics that I want to explore, write up character psych profiles, back stories, and arcs, outline the plot and themes. I write this all up in a book bible. Then, I start the story.Sometimes, the words aren't great. The verb choice is bland. The characters sound mechanical. I end up deleting dialogue, scrapping entire scenes. I'll decide that a day's work was wasted. But, I never stare at the screen waiting for inspiration of the perfect sentence to come to mind. I believe that my fingers will find the sentence if they just keep moving. Writers write. And if we can't think of what we want to say, we write until we figure it out. 

I like difficult women. Females unafraid to say exactly what they are thinking. Girls willing to bend the rules to do their version of the right thing. Strivers. Overachievers.People who will go to battle for what they want and who they love. I like sensitive women. People who get insecure and jealous and angry and sad--the host of negative emotions that we all feel at some point and, too often, are encouraged to compact into our guts and cover with a smile. Above all, I like complicated women. The kind of people who can be forthright, giving and kind in certain situations, but have days when stress makes them dismissive, selfish and dishonest--maybe even with themselves. I like women with chips on their shoulders and things to overcome. Vengeful and forgiving. Kind and selfish. Open-hearted and cagey. These are the women that I write. And, they're not always likable. There is much debate over what makes a heroine in thrillers. Should the good girl be someone with whom the largely female book reading audience can root for the whole way through? Should she be a paragon of morality that has to fight through a dire situation? Or, should she be an amalgamation of positive and negative qualities? The kind of person complicit in her own misfortunes? The recent success of books like Girl On A Train and Gone Girl have shown that readers will relate to fundamentally flawed female leads. Rachel Watson, the protagonist in Girl On A Train, is a raging alcoholic who drinks to the point of blacking out on a regular basis. She throws up on the stairs in a house she shares with a generous friend and is too drunk the next morning to clean it up. If that isn't the roommate from hell, I don't know what is. While author Paula Hawkins gave us some reasons to excuse Rachel's behavior, it's not until the end of the book that we have a full picture which, I think, would make even the hardest hearted readers forgive the main character. Until then, though, Rachel is a hot mess that few people would bother to befriend in real life. For those who haven't read Gone Girl, I won't explain anything about Amy. But I think Gillian Flynn created a truly amazing character who isn't particularly likable in either stage of the book (pre-reveal or post). Plenty of people disagree with me. They want their heroines to be people morally worthy of their emotional attachment. If they're rooting for them to win it's because they unequivocally deserve to. What do you think? 

I write domestic suspense. The bad people in my books are philanderers and emotional abusers, financial manipulators, unreliable narrators with horrific back stories and, in general, people who play fast and loose with the rules. As a helicopter mom of two young kids, I'm kind of a stickler for rules. So how do I write these characters? One way is through emotional substitution. I try to get into the feelings driving a character's actions by thinking of a time that I have felt similarly, albeit not to the same degree. Though I can't relate to the anger my character may be experiencing stalking her husband's girlfriend, I have had times when I've felt betrayed and angry in my life. I overlay these experiences to write my character's emotions in a believable way. The danger of not using such substitution, I think, is that characters' actions can read false. I end up writing a lot of   "he nodded" and "she grimaced" in scenes where the person would more likely be either standing dumbfounded or attempting a smile to cover her disgust. It's too easy to forget how I and other people actually behave in difficult situations without connecting to how I have actually behaved in my own life when under stress. So, while I don't advocate going out and doing drugs in order to write a scene about a person out of control on drugs, I do recommend meditating about a time when life has felt out of control and then substituting in those very real actions and words when writing. 

To play Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman in the The Pianist, actor Adrien Brody learned how to play piano, practicing for four hours a day. He also gave up his apartment, sold his car and drifted around Europe so that he could identify with Szpilman's isolation. To write a memorable character, I think authors have to be just as willing to lose themselves in their protagonists. A main character's actions and words, the way he or she handles problems and the thoughts that run through his or her head, can't be a thinly veiled version of the author's own responses and musings. Authors must become "method" writers. The Method was developed by famous acting teacher Constantin Stanislavski. It's a way of getting into character that involves an actor doing things in his own life to allow greater identification with a part. Actors playing dancers learn to dance. Charlize Theron gained a bunch of weight and changed her appearance for Monster to get into the head of her hard living, serial killer character. Nicholas Cage walked around the street in facial bandages to understand how isolating those kind of wounds can be to get into his wounded veteran character in Birdy. I tried to employ the method with my first book, Dark Turns. My protagonist was an injured ballerina who takes a gig teaching at a ritzy private school in order to heal and get some distance from a bad breakup. Best laid plans blow up when she discovers a body on campus her first day. I took ballet for over a year to get into my character, Nia Washington's, head. I had never danced--unless you counted calypso and grinding to reggae music at parties. To write her, I needed to do more than imagine myself as in my early twenties and feeling bummed from a breakup (that part didn't require much research). I had to understand what it was like for a person to push themselves physically to the point of pain for a goal. How does doing that change who someone is and how they respond to things? How does a hyper-awareness of your own muscles alter how you respond to physical stimuli?Nia, as a result, is hypersensitive to body language. She picks up on things about relationships in the way people move, how close they stand to one another, whether their weight is inclined towards a person or moving away, that inform how she goes about solving the mystery. She also misses clues that I'd never miss as a much more cynical, thirty-something ex-journalist who spent most of her professional life examining the things people said and their motivations for doing so. Obviously, in a year, I didn't become a ballerina. Three classes a week and I was barely standing like a dancer by the end. But, I did get a taste of performing on stage and a small sense of Nia's world: the nearly myopic focus she had to have for much of her life and the reactions she would have as a result. For my second book, the protagonist, Ana, is a thirty-one-year-old mom facing extreme financial stress after her husband loses his job. The mom part wasn't a stretch for me, but the financial pressures were more difficult to picture. While I could imagine how I'd feel if my house was underwater and there wasn't enough income coming in for the mortgage, I'd never had the stress of being unable to pay a bill. (I'd worked since sophomore year of high school and had been afraid of debt)So, for a few weeks, I gave myself a taste of that stress. I stopped using my credit card and tried to live on twenty percent of my usual amount. I didn't, I'll admit, stop sending my kids to activities--mommy's dedication shouldn't impact their life like that. But I did change how I grocery shopped, stopped entertaining, and tried to go through multiple days without spending a dime. It was extremely difficult. Some writers can get away with not using The Method because they have personally had a life that makes for good storytelling. My friend Brian Thiem is a 25-year-veteran of the Oakland Police Department who retired as commander of the homicide department. He writes about a homicide detective who confronts cases reminiscent of the worst ones he faced on the force. Brian's background is interesting enough to serve as fodder for a compelling series character. He doesn't have to get into the head of a homicide detective. That's who he is. For relatively boring me, though, I need the method to help create richer main characters.To create villains or unreliable narrators who may do worse things than I could ever try out with the method, I use another acting trick called substitution. But that's for another post. 

My first room in New York City had three walls. Two were respectable structures. Up-to-code. Load bearing. Real beams hid behind their sheetrock. The third and longest wall was an expanse of plasterboard bolted in place with temporary T-nuts. This hypotenuse separated my sleeping space from the shared living area. Hammering from a nearby construction project threatened to bring the whole thing down.The apartment was located in a “luxury” building, one of the first high-rises to be erected in then up-and-coming Hell’s Kitchen. It could be seen from the other bank of the Hudson River, a stone and glass sentinel casting a dark shadow towards Jersey, guarding midtown from the likes of me. It didn’t matter that the building wanted nine month’s rent up front to lease to someone with my less-than-impressive salary or that, as I’d soon discover, no man taller than six-feet could lay down on my single bed without squeezing his feet into one of the room’s tight angles. I happily signed over all the money that I’d saved from summer newspaper internships and high school jobs. I had to live in Manhattan. To a kid raised in suburban New Jersey, New York City is the promised land of adulthood. The middle class town where I grew up was one of those quiet villages where baby boomers went to breed. Its Cape Cod homes and tightly-fenced backyards where my friends and I spent our after-school hours were little more than cell blocks for locked-down teenagers. Our parents had exiled us here to keep us from the exciting, grown-up world. They said they wanted nothing to happen to us. They meant they wanted us in a controlled, monitored environment.“The city” was where adults fled their steady job of policing the progeny. My dad and my friends’ folks all worked in the city. They celebrated birthdays, anniversaries and other important events in the city. They saw shows there. Plays. Musicals. They went to the city to drink elaborate cocktails over which they no doubt had the kind of for-adult-ears-only conversations that made them whisper whenever the kids were moping around. Ten miles away was the greatest place on earth. And like a meatpacking dance club, my bridge and tunnel teenage crew was not getting in without a 21-plus ID and feigned social sophistication.My friends and I practiced for our inevitable landing in “the city” back in high school. Whenever we met strangers (read: boys from neighboring towns milling around at the mall), we’d pretend not-to-be-from Jersey. I’d mention that I was born in Queens, glossing over the fact that I had zero memories of living there. My friends and I would drop restaurants we’d been to once as though we went there all the time and mention museum exhibits we’d seen (omitting that we’d been with our parents). Most importantly, we’d watch these new people to see whether they bought our grownup personas and then assure each other that they did, despite any eye rolling. I graduated college in June. That September, sitting on the single bed, two feet shorter than the one I’d had in my dorm, I felt prouder of myself than ever before. I was an adult renting a Manhattan apartment. I’d arrived.The glow doesn’t easily wear off a place initially viewed through rose-colored glasses. It took more than seven years of living in “the city” to admit that, for all the freedom, culture and excitement it offered, I often found it lonely and cold. I had friends and a roommate whom I loved. But we worked long hours to pay for our increasingly pricey apartments in more hip neighborhoods that left us, often, exhausted. The truth is, meeting new and interesting people loses its luster after the thousandth time you’ve dolled up to impress strangers and found yourself answering the same getting-to-know-you questionnaire, yuppie millennial version: What do you do? Do you like it? Where did you go to school? When did you graduate? Did you know John?Most of the time after a night out in “the city,” I realized that I would have been happier spending the night in with my existing friends and boyfriend. However, I couldn’t admit it to myself. Moving to Manhattan had initially been a way of proving I’d reached adulthood. Leaving it would prove that I’d become old.For awhile, I tried convincing myself that every frustration or embarrassing thing that happened to me in the city was actually a stamp of youthful hipness. Just drove around for an hour—again—to find a parking space and then got into a screaming match on the street with the driver behind me who pulled up to my bumper as I was parallel parking. I’m so New York. Got into that chi chi club in Tribeca that only lets in models, but left almost immediately when they wouldn’t let in one of the guys in our party. I AM SOOO New York. Drank way too much at the basement bar down the street and vomited neon orange into the gray snow piled outside my West Village apartment. Nailing my twenties in New York! A taxi driver hit me in the crosswalk on a Sunday then sped away once he realized he’d probably only banged up my legs. What a quintessential New York story!Eventually, I couldn’t fake it anymore. My roommate and I moved in with our respective boyfriends. We got married and each began thinking about kids. The more I thought about children, the more I couldn’t imagine living in a place crawling with strangers. It wasn’t that I feared people whom I didn’t know and wanted my kids to grow up sheltered. It was that I was tired of being alone and auditioning for new friends. I wanted neighbors who didn’t move every other year in search of cheaper rents or better areas. A sense of community.I moved back to the New Jersey suburbs. I know all my neighbors and now have a group of families with whom I’ve grown close. Our kids play together during the day. We have cocktail parties and backyard BBQs and block parties where we blast Kidz bop over too-expensive speaker systems purchased in New York. We all came from Manhattan and once swore we’d never die in the suburbs. I’ve never felt so at home.

I was on Stribling New York being interviewed by Rob Taub. Here's the linkhttps://soundcloud.com/user-162777451...