T.J. Newman at Murder by the Book
Fresh off the publication of her third thriller, Worst Case Scenario, author T.J. Newman landed at Houston’s Murder by the Book on Thursday evening for her first visit to the independent bookstore. Local journalists, Natalie J. Harms, interviewed the former flight attendant and what emerged was a lively discussion of the book, her processes, and the winding road she took to becoming a published author.
The Key is the Research
It’s the question every author fields: where did you get the idea for [Current Book]. Newman told the story of how she researched her first thriller, Falling. She asked pilots about their biggest fears. One commented that it was a commercial airliner crashing into a nuclear power plant. When Newman took the position nearly any one of us would take—there are contingencies built on contingencies to prevent that—the pilot merely said, “That’s what they want you to think.”
Newman commented that she front-loads her process with research, but her books are thrillers. As a result, one of her challenges is how to convey the necessary information to regular folks who read her books. I’ll let you in on how: she has various characters populate her story who themselves don’t know the information. Thus, the experts in her book get to deliver an info dump. But the dump is not large. It’s digestible, just enough for the character (and reader) to understand the situation and move forward.
A funny anecdote she told involved a reader whose husband actually works in a nuclear power plant. After he read the book, his comment on her research was simple: “Spot on.” Great for Newman. Kinda bad for the rest of us (because of how easy this kind of thing can happen).
The Small Town Setting Was Critical, and It Opened Up the Story
When asked why set the book in a small Minnesota town, Newman said that a big city would have all the resources necessary to contain the situation. Small towns don’t, especially a small town that’s been forgotten. But what makes this novel special is the reminder that what happens to a small town can ripple out to everyone, especially when it involves a potential global disaster. It’s a reminder that we’re all in this world together.
The Writing Process and How It Changed
Newman said that action scenes are more challenging for her to write. There are many emotional scenes in this book, and while they were tough to write, action scenes involve a different type of discipline. The prose, she said, should be sparse, giving what’s happening on the page room to breathe.
And she trusts the audience. “You know what an explosion looks like,” she said. “All I have to do is provide the trigger.”
She namedropped Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm as a book with this sparse style of action. Also she was hired to adapt her first novel, Falling, into a screenplay. She faced a seemingly daunting task: how do you condense a 300-page book into a 100-page script that’s all action with little-to-no internal thoughts of the characters? It changed how she wrote Worst Case Scenario. She said there was a relentless editor perched on her shoulder during the writing process, driving home the point that she trusts the audience to fill in the blanks.
Many writing books and classes say that a good story begins with characters. For Newman, it is plot first. The roles are defined and the characters step up and populate the story. As someone who has written both ways, I don’t have a preference, but I know when we writers are deep into our stories—the kind of depth where we cannot stop thinking about the story or the people in it—our characters come to life in ways we could never have imagined without the plot.
A Respect for Where She Is and How She Got There
Barely three years ago, Newman was a flight attendant on the red eye from Los Angeles to New York. A musical theater student who tried to make it on Broadway and ended up back in her growing-up house, Newman took a job at a local Phoenix bookstore and it was then where her dream of becoming a published author became a goal.
She wrote Falling on those red-eye flights, on napkins and notepads and an iPad. She endured over forty rejections before someone said yes. And the whirlwind of her life took off. But she knows how much of a privilege it is to have “writer” as her job description. You can hear it in the way she speaks, the way she carries herself, and how she interacts with her fans.
The last question of the evening came from John, one of the good folks at the bookstore (and my “professor” in Cozy College). He asked Newman what surprised her now that she’s a published author that she didn’t know when she worked as a bookseller. Her answer was special.
A writer has an idea and goes through the long process of getting the book ideated, written, and edited. Then there’s the publishing side of things with cover concepts and promotions. The bookseller is the final baton pass from author to reader. The bookseller is the person who knows you, who might literally put a book in your hands and say, “You’ll like this” or “You have to read this.”
That is magical. And that’s why I love independent bookstores because you get to know the people who work there and they know you.
T.J. Newman is a gifted writer, and based on her first three novels, she has landed on a rarified personal list: I will read everything she writes. You should add her to your list as well. She is also a wonderful interviewee and if you get a chance to see her at a book event, grab that opportunity. You’ll be glad you did.
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