The Path Stays Rocky: Looking Back From Book Five

Any other job would get easier over time, but not writing books.

With the February release of The Lucky One, my fifth novel, I’m coming clean on a question I get often. The question goes: Isn’t it easier now that you’ve done it a couple of times? 

It is. 

And it’s not. 

For the first novel, you have all the time there is, or at least all the time you can chisel out for yourself. Few people are waiting for that book; many will be surprised if you ever finish it. You can take years. You should probably take years.

In my case, I got serious about writing in 2006, started a short story in 2007 that turned into a novel, which turned into a drawer novel in 2010 and was pushed aside by another project that finally got me an agent in 2012 and a book contract and a spot on a bookshelf in 2014. 

That doesn’t sound easy, and it wasn’t. That was eight years of fairly consistent effort. In another life, in eight years, I could be called a doctor.

The next book would be published exactly one year after the first one.

Take that in for a second. Eight years. Then one.

I had been planning ahead for such an eventuality, of course. I started working on my second novel the moment I sent my first out on submission to agents, and worked on it all through the process of getting The Black Hour published. (Also, let’s be clear, this is a great problem to have. I know that.) 

Writing my second book, Little Pretty Things, in fact was a little easier than writing the book before it—maybe because I knew better how a novel was constructed. I’d done it badly once and then another not so badly. I had done it and suspected I could do it again. 

However, I distinctly remember that even with this new confidence, writing my second novel had its frustrations. I remember finding out that the book was up for pre-sale online… as I was literally sitting at home, still writing the first draft. So I would not use the word easy, no. It took two years.

At that point, shopping around for a way to increase my output, I turned to the book draft I had stuffed into “the drawer.” (The drawer is just a file on my laptop called “The Drawer.”) Surely rewriting a novel already drafted would be faster than writing a full book from scratch?

We’ll never know. Revising what would become The Day I Died, my third novel, was not easy in any way. (From short story to novel on the shelf, it took ten years, thankfully not continuous.) Neither was the fourth, Under a Dark Sky, or now the fifth, The Lucky One. Or the book I’ve written that you will know about in a few months. That one nearly stripped the skin off my bones.

They’re all standalones. In the mystery community, there’s this subtle argument waging about whether it’s “better” to write standalones or to write a series. We all look across the barrier between us and think maybe the other side has it all figured out. “Better” isn’t a metric I can define for you—it has to do with marketing and brand and reader loyalty and possibly with how mystery fiction awards are handed out—but what I would wager is that neither is “easier.”

Some series authors will marvel that standalone authors can jump from place to place and character to character. But then some standalone authors might marvel at how series authors can make a series character fresh and interesting after so many books. I know I do. 

What I can say about choosing standalones over series is that I have to play to my strengths, and avoid my own weaknesses. My weakness is my low bar for getting bored. You could trip over it. 

And so the next book gets to be built upon its own shiny new idea, with a different character and a new problem, a new location. Maybe I challenge myself with some kind of craft problem. For The Lucky One, I had two protagonists sharing the story, two women who would be too similar told in a dual first-person voice. I decided to work in third-person, which in this length I had never attempted successfully.

Maybe I could have made it easier on myself, you’re thinking. 

Yes. Sometimes I think that, too. 

But why do we do this? Is it the hardest job? Is it ditch-digging? No. But it also isn’t the easiest job, having to work with thoughts and feelings during a turbulent time in the world and in our lives, having to put together a story that keeps attention in these distracted times. We do this job, though, because we get satisfaction from having done it well, for having made something that didn’t exist, that couldn’t have existed without us. We get satisfaction from having stretched ourselves just a little, at having found a bit more capacity than we knew we had. 

Writing novel after novel and trying for different results gets achingly close to the definition of insanity. But I’ll take that chance and, probably, so will you. If you love it enough, no one will be able to talk you out of it.

—

LORI RADER-DAY is the Edgar Award-nominated and Anthony Award- and Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning author of The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour. She co-chairs the mystery conference Murder and Mayhem in Chicago and serves as the national president of Sisters in Crime, a professional organization for all those who love crime fiction.

THE LUCKY ONE

A Goodreads and Crimereads Most Anticipated Thriller of 2020!

“Another harrowing nightmare by a master of the sleepless night.” —Kirkus Reviews

“…quite literally impossible to stop thinking about—even long after the final pages are turned.” — BOLOBooks.com

“This might well be my favorite Rader-Day so far: a brilliant premise intriguingly developed, totally believable characters and a climax that took my breath away.”

—Ann Cleeves, New York Times bestselling author of The Shetland and Vera Series

“I was riveted from page one by this complex, psychologically astute tale of betrayal and hope with twists that keep coming up until the final breathtaking reveal.”

—Hallie Ephron, New York Times bestselling author of Careful What You Wish For

As a child, Alice was stolen from her front yard in a tiny Indiana community, but against the odds, her policeman father tracked her down within twenty-four hours and rescued her from harm. In the aftermath of the crime, her family decided to move to Chicago and close the door on that horrible day. Yet Alice hasn’t forgotten. She devotes her spare time volunteering for a true-crime website called The Doe Pages, scrolling through pages upon pages of missing and unidentified people, searching for clues that could help reunite families with their missing loved ones. When a face appears on Alice’s screen that she recognizes, she’s stunned to realize it’s the same man who kidnapped her decades ago. The post is deleted as quickly as it appeared, leaving Alice with more questions than answers. 

Embarking on a search for the truth, she enlists the help of some amateur sleuths from The Doe Pages to connect the dots and find her kidnapper before he hurts someone else. Then Alice crosses paths with Merrily Cruz, another woman who’s been hunting for answers of her own. Together, they begin to unravel a dark, painful web of lies that will change what they thought they knew—and could cost them everything. 

Twisting and compulsively readable, THE LUCKY ONE is Lori Rader-Day’s most emotionally and psychologically stirring mystery yet. In uncovering the sordid pasts of her intertwining characters, Lori not only takes her readers on a thrilling ride, she deftly explores the depth of the lies we all tell ourselves in order to feel safe. 

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