A Conversation with Suspense Novelist LS Hawker

We are delighted to welcome author LS Hawker to Omnimystery News today.

LS's debut published novel is The Drowning Game (Witness Impulse; November 2015 trade paperback and ebook formats) and we recently had the opportunity to spend some time with her talking about it.

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Omnimystery News: How challenging was it for you to find the right voice for the main character of The Drowning Game?

Photo provided courtesy of
LS Hawker

LS Hawker: I'm going to twist this question a little, because before The Drowning Game, I had never written a female protag before, except for my first novel, which I wrote at age 14. After that I always wrote from the male perspective. (One of my critique partners coined a new genre for what I wrote: Dick Lit.) So switching to female was a challenge but apparently it works for me.

I started writing from the male viewpoint for one simple reason: I could not seem to take myself out of the stories I was writing. Every single time, my main character turned into a Mary Sue, the worst kind — me, only smarter, cooler, taller, better looking. I just couldn't stop it. So out of desperation I turned to writing men, and what a relief! My characters became deeper, more distinctive and interesting. I was able to take myself out of the stories. And the lasting effect is that I can write female main characters now without Mary Sueing them.

OMN: Which comes first: a book's plot or the main characters?

LSH: Plot comes first. My husband and I usually sit on our backyard deck, pour some alcoholic beverages, light up some cigars, and what-if to our heart's delight. The characters are then shaped by their circumstances in ways I couldn't have imagined before starting to write.

OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experience have you included in your books?

LSH: I've been extremely fortunate in my life to experience a lot of crazy things, so many of my own experiences find their way into my novels. I often base characters on real people — usually people I like. But I have a specific antagonist who's based on a friend's ex-boyfriend who was so vile I reveled in turning him into a villain (he didn't need much help).

OMN: Tell us a little more about your writing process.

LSH: In the past, I've let the story develop as I write, but since getting my three-book contract with HarperCollins Witness Impulse, I've had to alter my process. The novel that got me my agent and three-book contract was already finished and polished to a high sheen before I submitted it. But I had about four months to write the second one.

Before my contract, I would let my characters wander, hang out, and talk for hours with each other, discovering who they were so I could. When I was writing The Drowning Game, I wrote about 170,000 words to get to the final 89,000. So many scenes never made it to the final cut, because Petty and Dekker had a lot of living to do before I could nail down the highlights. With the second one, I had to be more disciplined in my approach, but I still wrote at least 50,000 additional words that didn't make it into the final version.

OMN: Where do you most often find yourself writing?

LSH: My office for many years kind of looked like a nineteen-year-old boy's dorm room (minus the piles of dirty clothes and old pizza boxes). It had mismatched bookshelves, piles of paper everywhere, and a kitschy desk. Early last year (just before I got my agent and book contract — coincidence? I think not!) I bought a white bookcase that covers the back wall, which now holds all my beloved books, as well as my rhinestone tiara, Dali clock, wax lips, plague doctor mask, and other treasures.

My walls are covered with brightly colored art and a few treasured record album covers (David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, Talking Heads' Speaking in Tongues, the B52s' Wild Planet, the Rolling Stones' Some Girls, Elvis Costello's Armed Forces, and Little Feat's Down on the Farm). Paintings by both my friend Lori Elliott-Bartle and my late grandmother are on display, and a border covering the perimeter of the room includes thumbnails of about 500 of my record album covers. Unfortunately, there's not enough space to display them all (about 4500). My ceiling is covered in Christmas lights, and my desk has an electric lift so that I can sit or stand to write (I wrote most of my second contracted novel, Body and Bone, standing up). There are two guitars, pillows on a bright-red area rug, and candles everywhere. I love my office with an almost overwhelming passion. It truly is where the magic happens.

OMN: What are some of your outside interests?

LSH: In case you couldn't tell from my office décor, I am a music lover. I worked in radio for a while in my twenties, and one of the stations that employed me played '30s, '40s, and '50s music, which was a fabulous education. I have a large collection of vinyl record albums, and my digital collection has over 160,000 songs, just like Body and Bone's main character. She has a satellite radio show, and I got to live vicariously through her during the writing. I love technology a little too much — I never met a piece of software or app that I didn't like.

OMN: What is the best advice — and harshest criticism — you've received as an author? And what might you say to aspiring writers?

LSH: The best advice I received was from a best-selling critique partner. I came from a literary background — workshops in college, and I'd gotten it in my mind that the only worthwhile writing was literary writing. He told me I could let that go. He told me I should write what I want to read, and what others want to read. That there was no shame in commercial fiction. It changed my life. After hearing that, I started writing suspense, and I've never looked back.

The harshest criticism I ever received was back in college at one of these high-tone workshops. I'd written a short story that prompted another student to write in her critique, "This person's mind is so small she probably likes Norman Rockwell." It makes me laugh now, how this critique had nothing whatsoever to do with my writing and everything to do with her smug, hipstery assessment of my personal character. As far as harsh writing criticism goes, I had one editor tell me my characters were one-dimensional. A contest judge said that he couldn't imagine anyone but stoners who live in their parents' basements wanting to read anything I wrote. That was pretty harsh.

One of the lessons I learned from the best-selling author didn't sink in until many years later. I struggled for a long time to get published. I won all kinds of contests and competitions, kept coming this close to getting an agent or contract, my critique group at the time couldn't explain why I couldn't get published. I collected — and this is no exaggeration — more than 100 rejection letters from the manuscript I wrote before my big break.

My husband Andy asked me one day, "So are you going to start taking this writing thing seriously, or what?" I was stung by this — I was nothing if not deadly serious about it, but his question stimulated an internal inventory, and I had an epiphany.

What follows shames me to admit, but by outing myself I hope it will help other writers. For years I relied on one thing: my "talent." I was a good writer and I knew it. I lounged on this talent pillow, lamenting, stubbornly clinging to the ridiculous notion that the publishing industry was too obtuse to recognize my brilliance, the bastards.

The epiphany was this: I (bizarrely) expected the publishing industry to conform to me instead of the other way around. Underlying that was my real problem: I was lazy. I didn't work on my craft. I didn't follow the standards of the various genres I was writing in. I didn't build my scenes and chapters with an arc. I read plenty of books and took workshops, but I didn't apply what I'd learned.

It was like — yeah, I can cook. I throw some ingredients in a pot, and it usually turns out pretty well because I have a sense what tastes good. But I didn't measure precisely, I substituted incompatible ingredients, I let things cook too long. But it was good enough, so why work at it? Because the guests I served food to didn't like it. It didn't taste like it was supposed to.

If you want to get published, you are writing for other people, people who have expectations. They want their coq au vin not to taste like Chateaubriand, no matter how good it is. So I started following recipes, watching the technique of other excellent, successful cooks, doing things the right way and suddenly, it all came together. So my advice is listen to the editors and agents. Listen to the experts. Study how they do things. Deconstruct how they put sentences, paragraphs, and scenes together and study why they make your heart pound, or make you cry, or make you laugh. It's competitive out there, and it takes hard work to break in.

OMN: How did your books come to be titled?

LSH: This has been a hard lesson for me. Another shame-faced confession: I have always titled my novels after Neil Young song titles. I'm a huge fan, obviously, and it felt like a theme for me, a calling card. But when I sold what came to be called The Drowning Game, I found out that it was not to be. The original title was Deep Forbidden Lake, after a song from 1976's Decade. I loved that title. But my publisher did not. Too romancey, they said, because of the word "forbidden". Oh, how I kicked and screamed (not literally — I'm not completely stupid), but my publisher wants titles that are similar in tone to what they consider my comp authors. Again, not stupid, so I gave in. They definitely know what they're doing!

With my second book, I didn't even bother with a hard title, because I knew I'd get attached to it and be sad when they nixed it. The marketing team came up with a title that I absolutely HATED, which threw me into a panic. I'm crap with titles that aren't based on song titles, so I asked my critique group for help. Based on the themes in the book, one of my critique partners came up with Body and Bone, from The Three Billy Goats Gruff. HarperCollins went for it, thank God.

OMN: What's next for you?

LSH: My second novel, Body and Bone (available for pre-order now), comes out on May 3. I'm at work on my third which will come out early in 2017.

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LS Hawker grew up in suburban Denver, indulging her worrisome obsession with true-crime books, and writing stories about anthropomorphic fruit and juvenile delinquents. She wrote her first novel at 14.

Armed with a B.S. in journalism from the University of Kansas, she had a radio show called "People Are So Stupid," edited a trade magazine, and worked as a traveling Kmart portrait photographer, but never lost her passion for fiction writing.

She's got a hilarious, supportive husband, two brilliant daughters, and a massive music collection. She lives in Colorado but considers Kansas her spiritual homeland.

For more information about the author, please visit her website at LSHawker.com and her author page on Goodreads, or find her on Facebook and Twitter.

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The Drowning Game by LS Hawker

A Novel of Suspense

Publisher: Witness Impulse

Petty Moshen spent eighteen years of her life as a prisoner in her own home, training with military precision for everything, ready for anything. She can disarm, dismember, and kill — and now, for the first time ever, she is free.

Her paranoid father is dead, his extreme dominance and rules a thing of the past, but his influence remains as strong as ever. When his final will reveals a future more terrible than her captive past, Petty knows she must escape — by whatever means necessary.

But when Petty learns the truth behind her father's madness — and her own family — the reality is worse than anything she could have imagined. On the road and in over her head, Petty's fight for her life has just begun.

— The Drowning Game by LS Hawker. Click here to take a Look Inside the book.