Writerly Origins

with Lauren Nossett

“Give me a decent bottle of poison,” Agatha Christie reportedly said, “and I’ll construct the perfect crime.” We can imagine how a knowledge of hemlock and arsenic may have aided Christie in penning poisonous murders in novels like The Five Little Pigs and The Tuesday Night Club, and how Stephen King’s interactions with high school students may have shaped his understanding of the hormone-addled characters in Carrie, but some career trajectories are not as direct. Octavia Butler was a dishwasher and potato chip inspector. Margaret Atwood worked at a coffee shop. And yet the line from potatoes and coffee to speculative fiction is not immediately clear.

Today our Thriller Thursday authors answer two questions: What did you do before you were a writer? And how did you know it was time to dive head first into writing?

Tessa Wegert: “I used to work in ad copywriting and journalism, so writing has always been a big part of my daily life. I wrote short stories as a teen, but didn’t get up the courage to try a novel until I was in my thirties. I was terrified that my story idea wasn’t meaty enough for a full-length novel, but weaving in subplots and backstory to give it heft became one of my favorite parts of the process. I’ve been writing books ever since.”

Lauren Nossett: “I was a college professor, teaching students to analyze literature, while writing my own books in secret. I’d always loved to write and dreamed of publishing a work of fiction, but never imagined I’d be doing it full time. And yet in my first two books, I drew heavily on what I knew—the world of academia—so that it’s clear my first profession influenced my second.”

Danielle Girard: “I was pre-med and spent ten years in finance. We moved from San Francisco to Montana with two young kids after 9/11 and one of the motivations was so that I could write full time. I had imagined I could be so much more prolific, so much better with the extra time and space. It turns out, books are still written one word at a time.”

Katy Hays: “I still do the thing I did before I started writing, which is teach Art History. I’ve basically spent 15 years trying to convince my students that Monet is not the best Impressionist (Camille Pissarro is).”

Greg Wands: “Bartending and deejaying were my bread-and-butter jobs for about fifteen years as I tried my hand at writing short fiction and spec scripts. Having these jobs allowed me to support myself while I figured out what the hell I was doing on the page. When my dad passed away after a long illness, it felt like the time to take a real crack at a novel. My friend Elizabeth Keenan—who had experienced a traumatic year herself around the same time—proposed the idea of a joint project, and we began writing together under the pen name E.G Scott.”

Carter Wilson: “This is a bit of a loaded question, because as we all know many writers are also other things. In addition to writing books, I run two other companies. My firm Unbound Writer offers coaching retreats, one-on-one writing mentoring, and online writing classes. I also have a consulting company focused on the hospitality industry, where I spent decades as an executive.”

Wendy Walker: “I started out as a competitive figure skater. Then I went to college and worked as an investment banker. Then law school and practicing law. Then I was a stay at home mother who wrote in secret, in the back of a minivan while my kids were at preschool. Then I was a lawyer again! Wow—writing all that makes me feel like I need a vacation! The truth is, it took me 17 years to finally become a full-time working writer without another day job, and I think this is true for many of us. Writing is a tough profession. There’s little job security, so many of us have other lives!”

Lynne Constantine: “I was in corporate marketing, writing at night. It took many years to be able to become a full-time writer, but it was always my goal.”

QotW: Have you shifted careers? What’s your dream job?