On Incorporating Other Texts Into Your Fiction
Some of my favorite novels are the ones that are multi-layered and incorporate different texts in which to tell a story. When I set out to write my latest thriller, A Likeable Woman, I had such books in mind that employ this technique: The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides, and Riley Sager’s Home Before Dark.
In The Silent Patient, there is the current thread, told from the POV of Theo, our MC, that unfolds alongside snippets from a diary of a character named Alicia, aka the silent patient—a famous painter who is now locked in a psychiatric hospital in the wake of her husband’s murder. She can’t—or won’t—talk, so the reader follows along Theo’s journey, a doctor who is treating her, as he tries to uncover the truth about what happened that tragic night. Her diary entries, sprinkled throughout, create a simmering tension as they offer clues and reveals as to what might have happened the night of her husband’s murder.
In Riley Sager’s Home Before Dark, the dual narrative alternates between the MC, Maggie’s current storyline and her late father’s “horror memoir,” named, “The House of Horrors.” Maggie has recently returned to the site of a crumbling Victorian mansion in the woods in Vermont—a house her family moved to when she was a young girl then fled in the middle of the night after a mysterious ordeal that’s recounted in her father’s book. The chapters from her father’s memoir ramp up the suspense as the reader is let in on what happened—or did it really?—all those years ago.
Anytime I start out to write a new book, what comes first for me, is voice, and sitting down to begin drafting A Likeable Woman was no different. Like the two thrillers referenced above, it features a dual narrative and timeline. The main storyline is from the POV of Kira, a 30-something woman who fled her insular East Texas town decades ago in the wake of her provocative mother’s mysterious death. She’s finally lured back home, though, when an invitation to a frenemy’s vow renewal party arrives and a series of texts from her grandmother promising she has something of Kira’s mother’s, something that might hold clues to how she died.
Kira’s mom, Sadie, was somewhat of a renegade. She was a stay-at-home mom like all the other mothers in her curtain twitching neighborhood, but she also pushed boundaries, creating art—specifically intricate, feminist-themed batiks—in her backyard shed. She was all set to have her very first show in a local gallery right before her life ended.
Kira was just in her teens at the time, and everyone told her it was a suicide, something that Kira has never believed.
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Sadie’s voice is what came to me first, and I grappled for a little while with how to share it. Should her storyline just be told as a regular chapter, first person, past tense? That didn’t feel immediate enough for me, though. So I settled on writing her point of view as an unpublished memoir, which reads a long letter of sorts to Kira, a guide to how to live your life without regard to being “a likeable woman,” how to push boundaries, not make the same mistakes Sadie made.
When Kira lands back home, her grandmother, good to her word, hands over Sadie’s memoir, and Kira must find pockets of time throughout the weekend as the festivities are going on to read as much as possible. As she reads, she becomes even more convinced that her mother was murdered, and nearly all of the people that she suspects as she devours Sadie’s memoir are present at the party.
I set out to have some of Sadie’s chapters end with cliffhangers and Kira getting pulled away in order to help keep the story moving along, keep readers in suspense as to both what had happened in the past with Sadie, and what might happen to Kira in the present as she gets closer to the truth and danger starts to lurk all around her.
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