The WD Interview: Alyssa Cole
In Alyssa Cole’s newest thriller, One of Us Knows, the lead character Kenetria Nash is the host of what’s known as a “system,” a group of personalities that inhabit the same body. But this is no fantasy novel. This unique situation occurs when an individual has dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder.
From The Perfect Daughter by D. J. Palmer to the TV show “The Crowded Room,” popular media continues to use DID for its tantalizing plot twists and the unique opportunity it presents to explore the expansive possibilities of identity.
One of Alyssa Cole’s primary goals was to not add to the harmful narratives surrounding DID, a mental illness that impacts an estimated 1 percent of the population according to the National Institutes of Health. And in this interview, Cole discusses her efforts to represent the disorder responsibly.
Cole is a New York Times bestselling author who first made a name for herself in contemporary romance. Her debut thriller, When No One Is Watching, won the 2021 Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Paperback Original and the Strand Critics Award for Best Debut.
WD spoke to Cole about One of Us Knows, which was published by William Morrow in April.
Since the main character has DID, you wrote several characters at once who are both autonomous and deeply connected. What was the most challenging aspect of this?
The most difficult thing for me was really trying to be cognizant of DID as a real diagnosis. There are people who have it. From the beginning, even though it became so deeply important to the story, I didn’t want the story to be about it. I wanted it more to be about a group of people who happened to be a DID system figuring out how they interact and learn to trust each other. I didn’t want it to be a sensational aspect. So often in stories with DID—and this is why I chose Ken as the main protagonist apart from liking prickly heroines—every time you see a movie or read a book or a story about the identity that is not written by someone who has it, it’s always: “Surprise! You have DID!” And then: “Surprise! There’s a secret bad guy who is doing something bad just because they’re a sociopath.”
So, I wanted to subvert that and say, here we have this system. They know they’re a system. They’ve already gone through the “surprise we exist part”—what happens after that navigating and what happens when the main person who is causing trouble is also the one that has to get them out of trouble. Making sure that I was accurate within reason and respectful, but also showing all the messy sides of people who are dealing with mental health issues, outside external factors, a pandemic, a recession, and everything else going on.
What was your research into DID like to portray it in a normative way?
I read lots of memoirs, but first, I tried to come up with a basic story because I didn’t want to read someone’s story and then be like, Oh, let me make a story based on this thing. So, I wanted to have the basic structure of what I wanted to happen and then read more information from first-person sources and see if it was within reason. The basic plot did change as I was researching because some things were, not necessarily bad, but I don’t know if it was my place to write something like that. Then other things were like, Oh, OK, so something like this can happen, and I can then add that to the story without it being something fantastical.
So, I read a lot of memoirs; I read first-person accounts on Reddit and other online sources. I read with the grain of salt because I didn’t know who those people were. There are a significant number of people who [are diagnosed with] DID—I feel like 1 percent of the population is a significant amount—and there are a significant number of people who have it and don’t know it, and then there are people who think they have it. For example, reading Reddit isn’t the same as talking to a psychiatrist or something, but at the same time, people know their brains and what’s going on. I have a lot of things that I would not assume someone could talk about better than me just because they have a degree. And even if the person doesn’t actually have DID, they’re using the same brain as the person who has DID to imagine the situation and what they’re going through. …
But I did have a system I consulted with to make sure I wasn’t putting anything that would be harmful to DID systems in pop culture since there are already so many harmful stories out there. They would read through and generally it was like, “Oh yeah, this is how it can happen, or this happened in our system.”
Some of the more fantastical things I won’t reveal because I don’t want to give spoilers were based on something from my childhood, but I didn’t know if it was crossing a line presenting the idea as something supernatural. I did discuss with the person how best to present this idea of how the ghost plays into the story and the idea of interacting with ghosts and what happens with that when you then have neurological differences and mental health issues and playing around with how real is what’s going on.
Do you have any best practices to share about writing characters who have identity components that you don’t share?
For me, I’m always thinking about how people work and also how not to hurt people. There’s one aspect of how would I feel if someone was writing someone similar to me? What are the things I would not want them to talk about? What is a framing that would be uncomfortable for me? I try to think of it to the best of my ability as someone who is not in someone else’s brain, what could be hurtful to someone?
I also then try to think about what are similarities that I would have with this character? Even if it’s not the same thing, what overlapping experiences do I have that I can draw from to better inform their experience?
So when you’re growing up and there are not a lot of books that have people who are like you, and then you pick up a book and there’s a character who is supposed to be you, my main goal if someone like that picks up one of my books and sees a character like that, I want them to put down the book feeling happy. Even if they have some quibbles with certain things, they feel well-represented and glad that they read the book.
I’m certain some people will not like it and some people will like it, but my main goal is to try, to the best of my ability at the very least, to not be harmful to someone, and at the best, to try to explore their humanity the same way I would want my own explored and not as a trend or a trope or here’s some diversity spice sprinkled onto it. My characters are fictional, but I want them to feel as fully formed and human to someone who has a similar background as I would want to feel reading about someone like myself.
Can you talk about writing characters who are actively deceiving or lying to each other? How do you keep them true to themselves while deciding what hints to give the readers about their true character and their reliability?
For some reason, I really enjoy writing this, and in reality, I hate lying, and I’m super strict about it. I feel like there’s some relation somewhere in my brain between examining all the different ways that people can lie to each other and themselves and also a neurodivergent sense of being able to tell when people are lying and having to figure out: Is this malicious? Do they know they’re lying? Are they lying or are they just hiding something, because that’s not lying?
On some level, I’m subconsciously parsing what is true at all times. Then I really enjoy the dynamic between people [who] are not necessarily maliciously lying. The things I find more interesting are the ways that we lie to ourselves, that we lie to other people to protect ourselves or to protect other people. The ways that people learn to trust one another and [are] learning to trust themselves. I think the lying is also a way to work toward characters discovering how to trust.
I don’t like stories where the lying leads to the character being completely invalidated in their ability to believe in themselves. People lie just to get through the day, even if it’s not malicious.
Talk about trust, then. The main characters are figuring out who to trust in the outer world while learning how to trust themselves.
When I first started writing it, I was thinking of the DID system as a ragtag band of misfits in one body and how they would have to learn to work together, as well as how that dynamic plays out in similar stories or group dynamics, except, in this one, they’re all stuck together. Because they are in one body, I thought it would be a great way to examine both the idea of self and the idea of community and the way that trust is so necessary for the equilibrium with yourself and within a community. With Ken, what does it mean when someone does not trust themselves so much that they can’t see who they are? Even if they’re not necessarily a good person, I wanted it also to be like, is the bad guy always really a bad guy?
There’s conflict happening in the characters’ inner world and outer world at the same time. How do you manage pacing and timing between the two?
Yeah, that was hard. I generally write stories—whether it’s a romance or thriller or sci-fi—whatever mystery is happening, it’s generally burning slowly and then explodes at the end. And with locked-room mysteries, often they’ll get to it right in the beginning and then spend the entire rest of the book exploring it. But because there are two mysteries here—two locked-room mysteries—it was going to have to be different. At the beginning, we’re getting more of the inner world mystery from one point of view and the outer world mystery is more slow burning. Then we get more explosive towards the end.
There is a variant story where both would’ve been happening at the same time, but I felt like it would’ve been too much because there were so many points of view and different things going on.
Also, when I was first thinking of the book, the inner world story was going to be the secondary story, but I was like, the emotional and human connection between the characters was more important to me than the external actions going on. They were still relevant and important to the story, but secondary to what the characters needed to achieve internally.
For writers who like to weave different storylines into the same book, there’s a tension of which one should take the lead. Sometimes this can change the genre of the story. Do you have that conflict, or do you usually know from the beginning which storyline is going to be the most prominent and which genre it will fall into?
I generally know from the beginning. Sometimes I try to add elements that don’t pan out, but then they aren’t necessary to the story. For example, I have a book called A Duke by Default, and it’s a contemporary royalty romance set in Scotland. There’s a secret love child of the Duke, and there is a slight background story of someone trying to buy the real estate in the neighborhood and the neighborhood people are like, “Oh no, what are we going to do?” Part of the reason this guy who hates the monarchy and doesn’t want anything to do with it decides to take on this role is because he can then protect this community. I wanted that gentrification subplot to be bigger, but it was not the story for it. And that gentrification subplot then went on to be applied in a more relevant story where it could be the centerpiece in When No One Is Watching.
For me, I have the story and the characters, and sometimes they have to change the situation, but usually that doesn’t change the genre of the story. It’s more so, this situation is more fitting for something else, so we’re going to have to get rid of that for now or downplay it for now, and then maybe I’ll be able to come back to it later or maybe it just wasn’t meant to be in this one.
Conflict between romantic interests is often used to portray unconscious attraction or attraction that the characters are fighting against. How do you keep this conflict from getting stale or annoying as the book progresses?
Some things that people see as the inciting incident, I see as the resolution because the interesting stuff happens before, and it builds up to all of that instead of immediate violence and dissent. I see conflict as the resolution because I’m a person who, if there’s a conflict in front of me, will address it immediately. So sometimes particular conflict-driven stories don’t work for me because I’m not going through all of that. If there’s a lack of emotional aspects, and it’s external conflict, it’s like, this could be ended in several direct ways. …
The way that I approach conflict is I try to think of the emotional perspective and background of each character and then what is abrasive when they rub against the emotional background and personality and everything else of the characters that they’re around. This can, of course, be a bigger thing if it’s a life-and-death situation. For example, I don’t particularly enjoy “enemies to lovers” stories unless it’s fantasy or historical, but I love “misunderstanding to lovers,” obviously.
In one of my romances, A Prince on Paper, the hero and the heroine have a fake relationship. He is a redheaded step-prince, and she is the cousin of a newly married princess, and throughout the book, he hides behind his playboy façade. And she’s playing a royalty romance otome game [a story-based video game] and romancing him in the game. Throughout the book, she’s getting these phone notifications and, as it goes on, he starts to get more and more jealous because he thinks that she’s talking to another guy. Then at the end, when everything comes to a head, he realizes that she’s playing a game with a fake version of himself. Even though, on the surface, it’s a silly conflict for him, it’s deeply emotional because he is like, “This is the one person who sees me for who I am.” Then he has to wonder, Does she really see me?
There’s another way to tell that story where he gets mad, and he explodes because he’s jealous and thinks she’s cheating. Then when he finds out it’s a game, that conflict is over because that’s the superficial conflict of “I like you and I don’t want you to be with anyone else.” But for this particular couple, I thought it would be more interesting if the idea of she’s cheating on him with a game version of himself, which is the façade that he presents to everyone else, and him having to question if she likes that version of him better. So, I always try to think of the possible straightforward conflict between these two people or between these systems or between this person and this system, and then what is below that conflict that would make it personal for these particular characters. What is the specific thing that would harm them more so than the general conflict of possible cheating or possible misunderstanding?
You often use texts, chat forums, and other written correspondence in your books. Can you talk about that?
So many of us spend a lot of our time texting because our friends are all over the place or we’re busy and not seeing them every day. I just want to see it incorporated more into stories because I feel like it’s realistic. There’s a difference in the way people write and the way people talk to each other, even if the general feeling is the same. It’s just a different way to show interaction and provide a deeper understanding of the characters. What are they writing to themselves in a journal that they’re not telling other people? How do they text as opposed to how do they talk to someone?
Either showing a deeper understanding of a particular character when no one is watching or, to some extent in this book, a deeper understanding of a situation and the ways that the written word, whether it’s a letter or a text or an email, can shift the course of the story or shift your understanding of what’s going on. It can also just be there to provide a deeper understanding of the world.
You watch a lot of anime. Has it taught you anything about portraying emotion or a character’s character?
The biggest thing that it’s done for me is influence how I saw conflict, climax, and resolution in stories. I’ve been watching anime and reading manga since I was very, very young, but I didn’t know the name for the structure that you’ll find in a lot of anime and manga. Recently I found out it’s called kishōtenketsu, and it’s a story without conflict.
It’s a four-act structure, and the third act is usually called the twist. That’s where you learn something that makes you completely reframe everything that you thought you knew, and then you go onto the resolution. The twist doesn’t have to be something explosive. It can be a minor thing that changes how you view everything. Even though I don’t think my writing exactly uses this [structure], it’s been strongly influenced by it and the idea of how little details can change everything.
Do you have any final advice for other writers?
I have taken creative writing classes, and I’ve taught them, as well. But the most important thing is to see those things as a tool that is helping to shape your writing skills and style and not as something your writing style has to conform to.
Often, there’s this idea that you have to take writing classes and learn all of these rules, and I don’t think that’s true. The biggest thing is to read a lot so you can innately understand story structure. This even comes from watching movies and TV and thinking about why it was great and what points did it hit and what aspects of it resonated with you, and then how would you incorporate not the exact thing from the show, but the feeling and the craft into your own work.
You can be writing something and then you can be like, “Oh no, this doesn’t feel right.” You don’t know if it’s because you are missing a certain plot point or a certain story beat if you haven’t studied those things. Education is good, and taking classes is good, but in my opinion, reading is the most important thing. And reading to understand how the book makes you feel at certain points, not just to consume it.
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