suspense formulas, tuk-tuks, mothers & mothering
Caitlin interviews Andromeda about her thriller THE DEEPEST LAKE
Andromeda’s upcoming thriller, THE DEEPEST LAKE, is publishing next week on May 7. It’s just been named as an Amazon Editor’s Pick and has been called “chilling” (Publisher’s Weekly), “spiky” (Booklist), and “mesmerizing” (Angie effing Kim), among a boatload of juicy and well-deserved descriptors.
Set at a luxury memoir-writing workshop on the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, grieving mother Rose goes undercover to investigate her daughter Jules’s mysterious death while working for enigmatic workshop leader Eva.
Inspired by Andrea Bartz’s chat interviews, we thought we’d try the format for an interview about THE DEEPEST LAKE, so you can see how we really talk to each other (when we’re not sending voice notes).
Andromeda: Hello!
Caitlin: oh hello!!
Thanks for doing this. Clears throat
No problem. (cracks knuckles)
Yoga breath
Yoda voice
okay wow focus
I do have a question for you
😂
Shoot
What inspired you to write The Deepest Lake??
Someday I'll write a novel with one lightning-flash inspiration moment, but for now I'll be honest and say The Deepest Lake was inspired on several levels, in different ways, at different times. I had concerns about how writers are treated in workshops going back years, based on disturbing things I'd seen in multiple settings, both private and academic, but I never thought that could be a subject or theme for a psychological thriller—even though anyone who has been workshopped will tell you it is quite the psychological experience! But it wasn't until I had written one suspense draft and started getting familiar with tropes that I realized that an upscale memoir workshop in Lake Atitlán, Guatemala—which I had visited 6 months earlier—could be the setting for a novel involving traumatized woman and a mother seeking the truth about her daughter. When it came together, in late 2019, it came together quickly. Revisions were another matter!
the lightning-flash, whole-novel moment is a unicorn
this is REAL, and I love it!
what was the other suspense draft you'd written? something else?
(pretending I don't already know!)
Yes, the apprentice suspense novel (which I didn't finish) was about a young artist, and it was going to take place in Canada and Italy, which was only one of its weaknesses. The sprawling geography and time didn't provide that tight focus that makes a suspense novel feel more urgent. I think that as a historical and speculative novelist I was used to a large canvas—multiple countries, many decades. My novel, Plum Rains, takes place over a century. But in most cases, it's easier to write a suspense novel if you pull closed the drawstrings of space and time a little. That's my theory at the moment!
What's the scientific formula for that Caitlin—reduce volume, increase pressure?
oooooooo
that is a good formula
You definitely implemented the formula in The Deepest Lake: just two POVs, two times, one place, one big question
it works very well
I'm glad you mentioned "big question," because that's another thing that helps those of us learning to write suspense. Crime structure helps us with this—giving us the question of "whodunnit" or "howdunnit"—and a death is high-stakes. In many apprentice literary novels, the stakes are low, but even more, they are unclear.
the stakes, those are always so tricky for new writers, myself included
Not that you or I only want to write clear murder mysteries!
But I do think suspense helps train us to at least ask, "What ARE the stakes?" A novel that starts with a character simply feeling bad doesn't have a lot of momentum.
but here the stakes are high - Rose's daughter has been declared dead, in a foreign country after an investigation her mother was updated on from a distance. and in Jules’s past POV, the stakes are apparent, because we know SOMETHING is going to happen to her
And we have that fish-out-of-water set-up (glad you pointed that out), which can also raise the pressure and create conflict.
did it take you a while to figure out the stakes in this novel?
where you started with the troubling aspects of memoir-retreat culture, the gorgeous but foreign place you'd been to, etc.?
No, it came to me the moment I was verbally pitching the premise to an editor over lunch—which was before I knew I would actually write it. I was using it as an example of a cleaner structure. The moment I described a mother searching for the truth about her daughter and arriving on the shore of Lake Atitlán, looking out at the place where her daughter, who has been working as an assistant to a famous writer, drowned and was never seen again, my editor said, "That's it."
I was hoping you'd tell this story!
I'll write just about anything if an editor says, "That's it. Go write that."
and you did...but was it an "easier said than done" situation?
I think good editors and agents don't want to put pressure on us, but it helps me to know there is an audience waiting, and a possible deadline. But getting to your "easier said than done" question, the writing was wonderfully easy. I've never had so much fun drafting a book. Then I had lots of eyes on it, lots of suggestions, and I ended up writing two completely different versions of the book. Different tone, different plot, different resolution. I don't think this was a bad thing. It felt more like being in a writing room (for movies or TV) and forcing oneself to limber up and say, "There are many ways to tell this story!" In the end, I was given the choice to pick which version I wanted to continue revising with my editor, and I chose the one that was less grim, more surprising, more redemptive, more fun for me as the writer. It's a little over the top, deliberately. People who are used to thrillers may not think so, but people who are used to realism and literary fiction may think so. It was a choice. The choice also gave me a chance to play with tropes and indulge in a little satire, which one reviewer has noted but which might go unnoticed by some readers, and that’s fine!
I love that, and I had been wanting to ask about your two endings but wasn't sure if I should, because I always get squirrely about talking about the end of a book, especially a thriller or other suspense!
you went there for me!
Yes and in this case it's not just the last pages but literally the last third of the book. Completely different.
once you made a decision, was it easy to move forward and commit?
Yes. Because the version I chose was also the more recent one, and I'd put so much darn work into changing things up! It would have been horrible to choose version A and then see reviews later saying, "This was boring. It's just about grief. Nothing happened after the midpoint." Instead I chose version B.
This is actually a really interesting topic, Caitlin, and it goes beyond my book. Readers are so accustomed to seeing a finished book as if it were the enactment of some platonic ideal—as if only one version could exist. But as writers, if we allow ourselves to remember all the crossroads, we know that every book has dozens of possible versions, really. Learning to choose and then shut the door behind you is probably necessary or a writer could go insane.
I think I really agree with you—I may be misremembering what he was saying, but I think I remember a Stephen King interview or maybe piece from On Writing, and he talked about stories being like fossils you uncover, which is a really romantic idea, but to me it makes it sound like there's no decisionmaking, no alternate options, and in my experience it's never been like that!
Oh, that's interesting. The fossil idea, or a Michelangelo image—the story as the object residing in a block of marble and the sculptor just has to chip away. That has never been my experience. I change themes, characterization, events, names, everything. If I had to choose different metaphors they'd be closer to pottery, weaving, cooking or gardening, rather than fossil excavation or sculpting.
When you were in Guatemala for the retreat, did you have an interest or inkling that you might set a story in Guatemala one day?
Not at all. I spent a lot of time there thinking about the power of story--and the danger of having one's story taken away, and the kind of person who seem driven to control other people AND their stories—and I briefly wondered if I'd write a nonfiction essay about it. But then I realized it's something I have started weaving into quite a bit of my fiction, across the genres--the danger of experts who really aren't so expert (BEHAVE), the danger of falling under the sway of a cultish leader or a simplistic idea (THE DETOUR, THE SPANISH BOW). I'm clearly not a fan of authority figures, but worst of all are the authority figures who mean well and don't realize what they don't know. If you'd asked me, in Guatemala, if I'd keep working on that theme in fiction, I'd say probably not. But the questions and the specifics of things I'd seen over the years kept nagging at me.
I am relatively new to writing but this seems to be quite common—we may wander into different forms of writing, or genres, etc., but we have themes that dog us through life!
Yes, and we never say everything we meant to say, or we continue to absorb from culture and our lives and see how new events and ideas contribute to or complicate the first idea.
As a younger writer, I would have been worried thinking I might dwell on the same idea in multiple books but now I see it is both natural and marvelous.
Writing is how we make sense of the world.
Yes, and I read this tiny little book called Deep Writing once, by a therapist & writer, and he says we each have themes of our life, and you just can't avoid it!
I believe that's Eric Maisel. I re-read a few of his books about writing every few years when I start doubting life and art!
That's him!
So on the Guatemala-as-setting piece, then, HOW did you manage to make the setting SO real and rich if you weren't taking copious notes?!
I think it's so much easier when you're traveling than when you're in your home environment, because in a new place there is this constant internal monologue that happens as you notice and try to imagine how you'd describe it. Lake Atitlán, surrounded by volcanoes, is indeed a phenomenal landscape. The water is constantly changing colors, and when I was there, wildfires were turning the skies orange and brown at times, and sending these coppery shadows over the lake. At the same time, it's not the tropics. [correction from Andromeda’s biologist husband hours after posting: yes, it is the tropics. Okay okay! It’s not tropical feeling.] It's at a higher elevation, inland, and it's actually cool and sometimes windy.
One of my main characters, Eva Marshall, the famous writer, insists it's a magical place, and in some ways I agree, though I also think we outsiders have a tendency to exoticize a place by calling it "magical" when what we mean is simply that it's unfamiliar to us. As a further note, it's easier to sell a place to visitors if you promise it is a magical, life-changing place where you will be reborn. The selling of that particular dream is an undercurrent (no pun intended) of The Deepest Lake.
This DEFINITELY came through in the book—it was such a perfect setting for so much of what you wanted to say. Did you find yourself omitting or changing parts of the setting, as you remember it, to better serve the story?
Only in one sense: I will admit that I made the lake seem more dangerous than it felt to me, personally. But I'm a water person! (My first book was a kayak guide and I do long-distance open water swimming now.) Having said that, what I describe about Lake Atitlán—the depth of it, and the fact that body reclamation is difficult—is absolutely true, as demonstrated by a disappearance that occurred after I was done writing. Even more disturbing, given Guatemala's long civil war, is wondering how many other people may have disappeared into it.
a lighter question I have coming out of your experience at the retreat: did you ride a tuk tuk
I can't decide if it sounds SO fun or SO scary
I loved riding in tuk-tuks! They're three-wheel motorcycles, like auto-rickshaws, open to the elements, and readers may recognize the term from Southeast Asia. (Why do Guatemalans use an Asian term? No idea.) Drivers decorate their tuk-tuks differently and it's such a wonderful, cheap way to ride around, although it is also a bit bone-jarring and dusty.
maybe because "tuk-tuk" is so pleasing!!
The scene from the book that has stuck with me the most viscerally, for whatever reason (okay, I know the reason), is in Jules's point of view, before she has disappeared. She's hanging out with a young retreat guest, missing her mom, and they decide to start howling like wolves, calling out to their mothers. This scene just really, really got me, both as a daughter and now as the mother of a daughter. Do you remember how you came up with that scene?
I hate when writers say that characters take over—I really do. But Jules is on the dock with her friend, and they've both been drinking mimosas and tequila for hours, watching the sun go down, and Jules has texted her mom off and on all day, but only cryptically. Meanwhile what the reader knows (that Jules can't) is that her mother will be trying to understand those texts forever. Jules and Zahara just did what they needed to do, and as the author, I just wished Rose could see it, and hear it, and know how much her daughter loved her and needed her in that moment. And it's ridiculous to say, but I tear up about that scene. And my daughter, who was exactly Jules's age when I wrote The Deepest Lake—and who is one of my best editors, and a writer herself—did, too, when she read it. So I let Jules speak to Rose, and I hoped Rose could hear it somehow, and I let myself speak to my daughter at the same time, letting her know that I love her and I can hear her even when we're not together.
No I teared up too reading it, it REALLY got me. It felt very real, so I believe you that Jules took over and it became a very real experience to write that scene
I'm so glad. I would love to know I made some readers cry. Seriously!
Speaking of what readers think, I went on the goodreads page just to take a peek, mostly because I know you're in the can’t-help-but-look-at-early-reviews camp of authors, and one of the top ones calls The Deepest Lake "a thriller that actually has a story to tell." Is that your dream review, or just mine??
That's really great. Yes. I'll take that.
Did you think about your own mother while working on the book, or more about your daughters and your role as their mother?
I thought about my mother when she dropped me at the airport as I left on a solo trip (not my first) to Yucatan, Mexico when I was 17, and how she was willing to be proud of me for being an independent traveler—and also willing to keep her worries to herself, so that I wouldn't be burdened by them. And I thought even more about my daughter, who literally circled the world (Africa to Europe to Australia) while I was writing the book.
oof, so you were raised by a brave mom, which maybe helped you become a brave mom
Still teary!
(My mom is no longer alive.)
A hard copy arrived in the mail a couple days ago, and my mom has already stolen it
I'm excited for her to read it. It really is a great mother-daughter story
It's funny because one very kind reviewer from one of the trade reviews mentioned something about Rose being right—i.e., I guess, that Jules shouldn't have endangered herself by traveling—and I appreciate the very positive review but I wanted to call back, No, Jules wasn't wrong to travel! And even Rose realizes that. We have to let them go. We must.
please stop saying such emotional things, my child is almost three and I cannot handle this
Join Andromeda on May 13, 2024, at 6PM CT, 7PM ET, while she talks with two other Soho heavy-hitters about their thrillers! RSVP here.
Happy mother’s day this weekend, y’all! Any mom books on your roster?
What a great interview! I can’t wait to read this book. And I so appreciate this part: “As a younger writer, I would have been worried thinking I might dwell on the same idea in multiple books but now I see it is both natural and marvelous.”
I’m revising my third novel right now and noticing themes and ideas that are similar to the previous two I’ve worked on. I have definitely worried that I’m just circling the drain on the same ideas but approaching them from different angles. Glad to hear we all have our obsessions that sneak into our work!
Well with The Deepest Lake wasn't already on my TBR list, it certainly is now. Mothers and daughters get me every time.