Where I’m Meant to Be: A Guest Post by Mary Kubica

The author of Local Woman Missing and The Other Mrs. is back with a tense and terrifying thriller following one woman’s bizarre case of a traumatic brain injury and a serial killer on the loose. Read on for Mary Kubica’s exclusive essay on writing our Monthly Pick, She’s Not Sorry.

For me, most books start as a small seed of an idea. The genesis is something like: young girl who’s been missing for years has suddenly reappeared (Local Woman Missing), or the woman living across the street is found dead in her home overnight (The Other Mrs.). I’m what people in the book world refer to as a pantser, meaning that once I have that initial idea for a manuscript, I start writing, flying “by the seat of my pants.” I don’t know where the small seed is going to take me, but I dive right in, set the scene, get to know my characters and see where they ultimately lead me, coming up with my twist or twists somewhere along the way.

With my latest, She’s Not Sorry, the experience was completely different. The initial spark for me—the inspiration—was the twist itself, which I won’t go into for fear of spoiling it. This made writing the book a much different experience—to create a story and characters that would suit the twist, and to then essentially work backward to get the story where I needed it to go. Almost every decision I made about this book, from the fact that the protagonist is an ICU nurse, to her recent divorce, to running into an old high school friend at a divorce support group, was made to fit the twist. When the time came to write the big reveal, it was so satisfying, to see the process come full circle, writing the scene that had initially inspired the whole book.

There are so many things I love about writing suspense. I love creating dark atmospheres and building layers upon layers of mystery for myself to solve as I write, knowing that if I’m surprised by my characters’ actions, then a reader will be, too. I love creating authentic characters—everyday, ordinary people just like us—to see how they respond to being thrust into anyone’s worst nightmare.

Despite an early love for mysteries and thrillers (Christopher Pike and V.C. Andrews come to mind), when I started writing, I didn’t immediately gravitate toward the genre. Instead, I wrote women’s fiction for a while, getting excited about an idea only to realize, fifty or one hundred pages into a manuscript, that I’d completely lost interest in the story. I’d set it aside and dream up a new idea—one I’d ultimately lose interest in, too. This process repeated itself over and over again; I knew something was missing, though I couldn’t put my finger on what. It wasn’t until I started adding mystery and thriller elements into an early draft of The Good Girl by accident (not realizing until much later that I was actually writing domestic or psychological suspense) that I became consumed and knew I’d found my niche.

People often ask if I’ll ever write in another genre. Maybe one day, but for now it feels like this is where I’m meant to be.