Today’s interview is a three-for-one deal: Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White (a.k.a. Team W) join the Cluesletter to chat about their latest collaboration, The Author’s Guide to Murder.
Fans of zany, laugh-out-loud murder mysteries will find something to love in this deadly adventure set in the Scottish Highlands. I would know—I thoroughly enjoyed it!
In the interview to follow, Team W and I discuss the characters, writing a mystery, and how they collaborate on projects.
Connect with Team W on Instagram collectively, and individually: Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, Karen White. Grab a copy of The Author’s Guide to Murder here.
Welcome, Beatriz, Lauren, and Karen! The Author’s Guide to Murder is a quirky, heartwarming murder mystery set in a remote Scottish castle. Authors Cassie, Emma, and Kat are pretending to be best friends writing a book together. But when the host of their writing retreat is found dead, they might just have to solve the crime—if only to clear their own names. How did you craft these characters? Did you take inspiration from anyone in particular, and/or do any of you perhaps feel connected to one character over the others?
Part of the origin story behind this book starts with a question we’re asked often while on book tour: Are you really best friends, or were you put together by your publisher, like the Spice Girls? The answer is yes and no, respectively, but it got us thinking. What if we wrote about three women writers who are put together by their shared editor to write a book together . . . but they secretly hate each other?
We had to give our characters three separate identities—not just different personalities, but distinct backgrounds and writing genres. They also couldn’t be anything like the actual members of Team W to avoid the obvious comparisons. That’s not to say that we didn’t gather bits and pieces of other authors to create Cassie, Emma and Kat, but all sources shall remain secret, of course. And because we created all the characters together, we feel connected to each of them equally—you might say we’ve arranged joint custody!
I’m afraid I have to ask the obvious question: With the three of you working on one novel, how did you organize your input? What tips do you have for maintaining balance on a collaborative writing project?
We always get together at the beginning to plot out and outline our collaborations. We don’t outline our individual books, but it would be very difficult not to have some sort of map for the three of us so that we end up in the same place. Then we retreat to our respective corners of the country and begin writing round-robin. The outline, although detailed, is also left open enough so that each author has room to develop her character within the guardrails of the plot. And if we ever get stuck, we have the other two Ws to bounce ideas back and forth. After we type The End, we meet up again to do the final edits and clean up—and then we break out the prosecco when we email the manuscript to our editor.
It’s easy to maintain balance because our books are always arranged around three viewpoint characters, each of whom get equal page time and are equally important to the plot. We plot the book together and no one knows which character she’ll be writing until after we’ve outlined, which means we’re fully invested in all of the characters. Of course, life always intrudes, but part of being a good working team means we’re honest with each other about what we can do and what we can’t at any given time. We take turns picking up the slack, knowing that it all evens out in the end.
While primarily a mystery, The Author’s Guide to Murder is also a satire on the literary world, a feel-good story about female friendships, and an homage to the Scottish Highlands (and, of course, the romance novels it has inspired). Other than the mystery itself, what were your favorite parts of the book to write?
Is “all of it” a wrong answer? Because in all seriousness, this book was a joy to write for all three of us. We had so much fun with the Scottish setting that we might have gone a little overboard at times, but we think our readers will enjoy the gleeful spirit in which we went over the top. We also relished writing about female friendship for the chance to explore our own experiences of discovering and nurturing our “found family” in each other, while navigating the complexities of the publishing world. Just like Cassie, Emma and Kat, we know the importance of having someone who’s always got your back. (And who also knows where the bodies have been buried.).
Your past collaborations were all historical novels with multiple timelines. What elements of writing a contemporary mystery challenged you, and/or what did you find the most rewarding? How did you approach plotting the crime in the novel?
This was the first time we had all three characters interacting together on the same page, so that we were writing each other’s characters in our scenes. But because we had created and developed Cassie, Emma and Kat together, all three of us had a thorough understanding of their experiences and their motivations, and we trusted each other to bring those characters to life on the page. It wasn’t so much of a challenge as it was a new way to exercise our writing muscles.
As for the plotting, we took inspiration from the world of the cozy mystery—think Murder, She Wrote and Father Brown. While none of us had experience writing in this genre, at least one W is a devoted fan of Golden Age mysteries and their many variations . . . and we had so much fun putting our own spin on the tropes that this might not be our last glimpse of Callie, Emma, and Kat!
Lastly, what are you currently working on? Can we expect more books (perhaps more mysteries) from you three, and/or what are each of you looking forward to?
We’ve started outlining the next collaboration, but it’s still early stages so we can’t really say more about that. Individually, we are all working on individual books. Karen will have two new books out next year, Lauren has a historical true crime mystery out in March, and Beatriz has another Winthrop Island novel hitting bookstores in late summer.
Thanks so much to Beatriz, Lauren, and Karen for the interview. Sleuths, I hope you enjoyed it! If you aren’t already subscribed, please be sure to sign up for the Cluesletter and get author features like this alongside other mystery goodies, delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday.