Keeping the Tension Ticking Way: Author Interview with Ed Markham

My interview today is with an author who works full time Monday through Friday as a freelance magazine writer and editor and devotes his weekends and evenings to his novels. Read on to learn from his writing experiences.

What drew you to writing psychological thrillers? 

I'd been attempting to write something literary for years, and could never get more than 10,000 words into a project without feeling discouraged and bailing out. I was trying to be Richard Ford or Jim Harrison, and that wasn't working. My dad is the kind of guy who reads one or two books a week, mostly thrillers, and he kept encouraging me to give one a shot. I felt from the start I was writing Founders' Keeper for my dad, and that's probably why I ended up making it about a father-son team of FBI investigators. 

Who are your favorite authors in this genre?
I was (and am) a big fan of Thomas Harris and Stephen King, both of whom kind of blur the lines between horror and thrillers. And of course I like a lot of our great contemporary thriller writers like Michael Connelly and Jo Nesbo. So I took my dad's advice and tried writing a thriller, and I realized quickly that I was enjoying myself a lot more and the whole undertaking felt more manageable (though still really daunting). 

How long did it take to write your first draft? 

Probably five months. I remember my wife and I went out to dinner to celebrate. I knew the book needed more work. But just getting to the end and having a complete draft to tighten and clean up felt like a major accomplishment. It still does. 

How many rewrites did you do on it? 

Oh wow, at least a dozen. The first few were on my own, and then feedback from friends and family and prospective agents instigated big rewrites. The draft my wife and I were celebrating that night at dinner is only vaguely recognizable as the book now available on Amazon. 

Founders' Keeper was always about a father-son team chasing a Constitution-obsessed killer, but nearly every detail has been reworked over and over again. My second book, Son of a Gun, was a much smoother effort. By then I (kind of) knew what I was doing, and was able to avoid a lot of the pitfalls I'd fallen into while writing my first book.

What do you think makes for a good thriller?

A lot of it is reader preference. But to even be considered a "thriller," I think there has to be what one agent I spoke with called a "ticking clock" element, or something that urges the characters and plot forward to accomplish or prevent something before it's too late. At the same time, I like a thriller that has some real meat to its middle. You see a lot of books in this genre where, once the initial story and plot are established, it kind of feels like the characters are just running in place and burning pages until everything reaches the big surprise or reveal at the end. I think of it as tap dancing. There's a lot of noise and movement, but nobody's going anywhere. To me, having a cool twist at the end doesn't cut it if the rest of the book was a lot of nothing.

What type of research do you do to give a sense of reality to your stories?
I spend a fair amount of time reading through old transcripts from law enforcement and FBI conferences. Google Maps is a great way to revisit a place and get the feel of it again, or to explore a town or city I haven't visited in person. Wikipedia. Google Scholar. 

Like all authors, I'm lucky to have the internet at my disposal. But sometimes I don't know what I don't know, and I make mistakes. I had a reader point out to me that the thing that spins on top of a helicopter is called a "rotor," not a "propeller," which was embarrassing
(but I appreciated hearing about).

Did you go through the normal process of pitching your book to agents and traditional publishers? What feedback did you get? 
I did try the traditional route. It was really a tough experience. Not altogether horrible, but just difficult. After about six months of querying agents and having no luck, I attended Thrillerfest in New York and pitched my book to about 15 agents. The one I was most interested in connecting with accepted the first few chapters, and then requested the whole book. She read it in two days. We spent an hour on the phone, and she told me she loved it and had publishers in mind for it. But she had a couple minor issues with the ending and wanted me to fix those. I agreed, spent three weeks tuning it up based on her feedback, and sent it back to her. She said she was caught up with some existing client projects, but would read the rewrite as soon as she could. 

Months and months passed, and eventually I had to give up on her because I'd found another agent who wanted to sign me. The new agent was with a great agency, but was very junior and had never represented a thriller author. He was great, and pitched Founders' to all the big publishers. We received a lot of encouraging feedback. But ultimately everyone passed. My agent wanted to pitch some smaller publishers, but I'd heard some horror stories about authors selling the rights to their books for peanuts, and seeing it fail because there wasn't much marketing or resources to support it. 

At that point, publishing on my own seemed like the better choice. All in all, I think I spent about three years querying agents and trying to secure a traditional publishing deal. It was a learning experience, and I don't completely regret it. But it's hard now that I have two young kids to look back at those prime, productive, childless years and wonder how much I could have accomplished focusing on writing new books and publishing them myself. 

How do you write? Did you do an outline first? Did you do individual character development before doing the full plot?

I'm a big process guy. I sit down every weeknight at 9 pm and work until I hit 1,000 words. Weekends I do the same thing around midday during my kids' nap times. I did a lot of character planning for my first book. But now the main characters have carried over, so there isn't as much of that. I lightly outline--mostly the first 50 or 100 pages so I know how I'll get rolling. I also try to have a conclusion in mind, though it tends to break down on me halfway through. Personally, I've found it's better to have a premise and an idea of where I'm headed, but to spend most of my time writing, not planning. I get into some trouble this way when I realize after a few days of work that a brilliant idea I had one evening doesn't fit--and needs to be rewritten. But I think letting the story and characters dictate what comes next feels more natural and helps me avoid that tap dancing I mentioned.

What type of publicity do you do to promote your book? What has worked best for you in generating sales?
Like most independent authors, I use sites like BookBub and Robin Reads and many others to get my books out there. Honestly, that's about it. I'm grateful you came to me with this opportunity, because I really haven't been great about marketing my books. I work full-time during the day. And with two kids, I only have a small window of time each day to work on anything relating to my books. I choose to spend that time writing, not marketing.

What do you know now about writing/publishing now that you wished you had known sooner?
A great deal of success in self publishing is about volume and marketing. That's not inherently a good or bad thing. But when I decided to self publish, I had this image of myself writing a book a year, formatting the thing for Kindle, clicking "publish," and waiting for readers to (hopefully) like what they read and spread the word. In reality, I've learned very few authors have much success that way. Some do. But many more find success by churning out a new book every few months and promoting the crap out of it. One way isn't better than the other. But you learn very quickly that the number of books you produce and how much you market them are huge factors when it comes to making money at this.

What is the best advice you've been given about writing or that you've learned that you would like to pass along?

Whether you're writing your first book or your tenth,  daily word goals are indispensable. They're the only way I got through my first book. Even if your goal is modest--say, 250 words a day--all you have to do is hit that number and eventually you'll have a full manuscript in front of you. It's like magic. But to be clear: Editing or revising what you already have DOES NOT COUNT toward your daily goal. You need to write 250 or 500 or 1,000 fresh, piping hot new words every day. 

What other works do you have in the process? 

I've finished a draft of my third book, which is tentatively called Ghosts in the Machine. Like my first two books, it features the same father-son team of FBI investigators. In this book, David and Martin investigate the disappearance of an internet mogul-- a Mark Zuckerberg type. I'm hoping to have it published by the end of July. I'd originally wanted it up by the end of this month, but my wife and I had our second son a few months ago, and that's really slowed me down. (He's not the sound sleeper his big brother was at that age.) 

Thank you, Ed for all your insights about your writing and publishing experiences. If you'd like to get a start on reading his series, here's a link to his website...  EdMarkham.com. 

Writing with a Goal and Getting Results: Author Intervewie with Kelly Loy Gilbert

Lots of people complain that they can't find the time to write, yet you decided to participate in the NaNoWriMo Challenge. How did you cope with the writing schedule to keep on track?  
I didn't sleep much!  I think I averaged 4 hours a night for a few months there.  I also had a good amount of writing time, and it actually took more like three months for a first (and very rough) draft--so I'm in awe of NaNoWriMo participants who can actually get it done in a month.   

Ultimately, though, I think the quality of time is just as important as the quantity of time you can devote to your writing.  There's the writing I do when I'm actually writing, and there's the 'writing' when I'm actually disappearing into wormholes on Wikipedia and calling it research.

Mentally writing is key, too: I think about my characters and my stories when I'm exercising, when I'm grocery shopping, when I'm on my way to work. So, so much of writing happens off the page.

Do you currently have a daily goal for writing?
I don't have a daily goal for word count, mostly because I find it to be so erratic--some days I can write ten thousand words I'm happy with, and other days I can write a sentence, delete it, and repeat for hours on end.  And, in the end, whenever I set deadlines for myself, I look back later and wonder why I got so attached to that particular timeline.

In the article you wrote for the NaNo blog you said you sent your first draft to your agent after the month. How did you manage to have an agent already?
I'd signed with Adriann Ranta, of Wolf Literary, for another novel.  At the time I signed with her, that novel was complete, and I was just beginning to work on City on a Hill. We connected the old-fashioned way: a query letter in her slush pile. 

What do you think made your query stand out in the slush pile?

I was querying a character-driven literary fiction novel, which is tough to write a query for because a plot synopsis is going to feel flat.  I went through what felt like endless iterations of the query letter, because I wanted the characters' personalities and a sense of lyrical writing (the book is about a musician) to shine through.  

 

Having interned at a literary agency in another life, I know that a lot of queries coming into the slush pile are automatic rejects--unprofessional, querying for something the agent doesn't represent, etc.--and I think just following guidelines and querying for a book that's been edited and ready to submit puts you several steps ahead of most.

The agency site on their guides for submission states... "To submit a project, please send a query letter along with a 50-page writing sample. " Did you do that? 

I did send the 50-page sample with my query--I love when agents ask for sample pages, because writing a query is such a different skill than writing a manuscript, and I'd always rather read a story itself than a description of it!  

How long did it take to get that response of we'd like to represent you?

I sent my query and sample to Adriann's slush pile and heard back three weeks later.  At the time Adriann requested the rest of the manuscript.  I was also beginning to work through some revisions suggestions from another agent, so I sent what I had and, once Adriann had read it, we discussed revisions over the phone.  

 

After that, I spent about two months revising and then sent that one off, and a month later Adriann made a formal offer of representation.  From there, I had about a week to make a decision--I had a few other offers, and while I always thought that would be a great position to be in, it was actually kind of agonizing! But I felt extremely confident in Adriann and Wolf Literary, and so I (very excitedly!) accepted Adriann's offer.  All told, it was three to four months from query to contract.

The book you wrote for that challenge was City on a Hill. How many re-writes did you do from that original rough draft to its being approved for publication?
I wrote one very, very rough draft, tore it apart completely and built it back up in a way that made it all but unrecognizable to anyone but me, and then did one more (much less intense) revision.   

When we write it’s easy to fall in love with our own stories. Then the book is critiqued and edited. How did your ego fare during the editing process?
That's so true: I always fall in love with a story while I'm writing, and then as soon as I've sent it off to someone to read I panic and think how much is wrong with it.  

The thing that's been the most useful to me is to remember that a reader can tell you her reactions, and, because no one else is inside the story the way you are, it's your job as the writer to evaluate what that means.  If I hear specific advice about how to fix something, I often step back and try to think of it more as the reader telling me there's a hole somewhere, or something isn't holding together, and what does that mean in terms of the whole story, and what are ways I can work with it?

How did you go about finding a publisher? How many sources did you/your agent pitch?
My fantastic agent did all the pitching to publishers, and having been through querying myself, I can only imagine the kind of effort that goes into the process.  The book found a home in its first round out on submission, which was thrilling.  I've heard it's typical for an agent to pitch to around 8-12 editors per round, and if I remember right our first round fell into that range.

Your novel will be published by Disney-Hyperion in Spring/Summer 2014. Why do you think it was a fit for that publisher?
Funny, I ask myself that same question ALL THE TIME.  (It still kind of feels too good to be true.)  My agent deserves a ton of credit for knowing it would be a good fit.  When I spoke to my editor, one thing she mentioned resonating with her was the universal experience of questioning your parents--what they've taught you, what you always believed about them, where that leaves you. 

Now that the book is being published, what do you wish you had known sooner about the process?

I wish I'd had a more accurate of idea of the way time works in publishing--I think I could have saved a lot of mental energy that way.  To a writer waiting on an email, three days might feel like an eternity, but several weeks might feel really fast to an overbooked editor.  

I also had all these arbitrary deadlines for myself along the way (I must have a draft finished within x months, I must have an agent by the time I'm x years old) that really didn't matter at all, and I might have been easier on myself if I'd just accepted that things happen on their own timeline, and in the end that's perfectly fine.

What is the best advice you’ve been given about writing that you would like to pass along?
I had a fantastic mentor, Nona Caspers, who always advised writers to "lift up what's strong and in motion"––in other words, when writing and revising, to focus on the moments in a story where something was really happening and to continually push themselves deeper into those places.  Your stories go a lot further that way; there's only so far you can go when you're just focusing on getting rid of bad parts. A competent manuscript is one thing, but it takes more than just criticism to make it into something that's living and gripping and transcendent.

What other works do you have in the process? Would you like to share the details?
I'm working on another novel, and it's slowly (and I do mean slowly) starting to take shape.  I just finished up a section from one of my main character's life in high school, when she began writing to a prisoner in secret, and right now my two main characters are at a Bible College in California in the seventies.  
Sounds like an interesting story! If you would like to contact Kelly to learn more about her writing or buy her books, here's how you can do that...
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