Written by Mia Alaniz & Joy Wang
“Just keep going, keep writing all the time. If you do that, you will get there.” —Kelsey Cox
How do thrillers, political dramas, and ghost stories continue to captivate us, and what essential craft choices make them so resonant? October’s Third Thursday took place at Austin’s BookPeople, where Writers’ League of Texas Program Director Sarah Renee Beach hosted a panel with authors Kelsey Cox (Party of Liars), Maya Golden Bethany (The Senator), and John A. McDermott (The Last Spirits of Manhattan) to explore the power of twists, chills, and suspense in their works. Together, they discussed how structure, character development, and the art of strategically withholding information can heighten the reader’s tension and keep them turning pages late into the night.
This Third Thursday panel kicked off with Kelsey Cox, who shared her process of crafting mystery through a careful balance of twists, timing, and character insight. Cox opened with a confession: she wrote the last line of her novel before she had figured out the beginning. “You have to find your story,” she insisted, reminding the audience that writing often involves an inkling of intuition and then reverse-engineering the rest of your story. For Cox, that journey began with the thrill of the puzzle: red herrings, unsettling moments, small details that readers will only recognize in hindsight.
Withholding information is an art form for Cox. She pays close attention to what readers notice first and what they forget. “If I don’t want you to think about a clue too hard, I’ll give it to you early,” she said. Cox often writes with specific audiences in mind, imagining how her sister or mother would react to a plot twist. This practice allows her to weave red herrings into the narrative while still remaining mindful of the broader emotional act. At the center of her storytelling lies an interest in morally gray characters, especially women who may have been “erased” by society or circumstance. Starting with archetypes like the “lovesick teen” and the “bitter ex-wife,” Cox invited us to question the stories we tell about others and how easily those labels can crumble when we begin listening more closely.
Though she considered her novel The Senator a “thrill,” Maya Golden Bethany did not want every action to be jam-packed. Sometimes characters might just be at a desk, in an office, or — in her novel’s case — the Senate Chambers. Inspired by the TV show Scandal, by Bethany’s twenty-year-long career in journalism, and by Bethany’s grandparents’ own experiences in a carcinogen-filled sacrifice zone, The Senator follows a promising young senator as the promises and dreams he’s sold to his constituents start to fall apart. So for Bethany, the “thrill” aspect of a novel can be explored more in morally gray characters, the “muddy villains” whose motivations a reader must seek to understand. “Even if they’re terrible people, they still have that element of humanity to them,” Bethany says. She posits that antagonists are just those that go proudly against the status quo and probe at rigid social norms; readers simply are not privy yet to their interior information, how the character has become the way they are and why they have convinced themselves that their actions are right. And that unknowingness is always an excitement, a thrill, an innate “part of the human experience.”
To better understand how her characters have developed their senses of self and morality, Bethany wrote stories for each one, including many details that didn’t make it into the novel itself. She also tracked each chapter with index cards, paying special attention to character interactions, red herrings, and plot twists. She most of all recommends for writers to “get input from people [they] trust,” whether that be an agent, editor, and beta reader.
John A. McDermott describes the ghosts of his “chill” novel The Last Spirits of Manhattan as not always super spooky, sometimes even friendly. A love letter “to grief and to missing things and to family, but also to starting over,” The Last Spirits of Manhattan is based on a real party that Alfred Hitchcock had thrown in McDermott’s great-grandmother’s New York house. His cast of characters blends together the supernatural and the real, keeping the newcomer protagonist (as well as the readers) second-guessing whom she can trust as she digs further and further into her family’s old secrets. The ghosts, by McDermott’s hands, were dialed to different rules, dimensions of movement, and levels of “handiness.” Though he did not often incorporate heavy action scenes like bombings or shoot-outs, McDermott did try to keep creatively and humorously thinking of what could compel a character to act, such as “the tragedy of broken teacup.” Keeping the action going from the beginning was always McDermott’s plan; his first sentences were his actual first sentences in writing.
To get into the mindset for the rollercoaster drama, multiple narrators, and screenplays that his novel juggled, McDermott indeed studied many Hitchcock/Addams/Fonda films, as well as screwball comedies like Topper (1937) and Bringing Up Baby (1938). He agreed with Cox on writing to a single person, joking that he married his best editor. To ensure all the novel’s information wasn’t just readily available to her, his other readers, and his own characters then, McDermott had to figure out the actual layout of the house to physically and emotionally separate his characters. Ultimately, though, it was being part of the Writers’ League — taking classes, meeting other writers, and attending the Agents & Editors Conference — that truly helped propel the novel process for him. “You need community, you need people who are going to support you,” McDermott concludes.
The insight of this debut novelist panel was wonderful to witness. Cox redefined womanhood and motherhood in even her own eyes when giving voice to lost women; Bethany highlighted the significance of empathy in this day and age with her character development focus; and McDermott, self-described “incurably hopeful person,” found a way to both honor the past and celebrate a burgeoning future. The stories of craft were so delightful and miraculous as well: Cox was cleaning up peas her children had spilled when she realized she wanted to write about women who had been erased; Bethany was researching perhaps a bit too precisely into the locations, workplace layouts, and other intimate details of politicians’ lives in 2021; McDermott was met with an immediate and abrupt “I don’t do ghosts” when first querying his novel, yet was able to connect with an agent the next year. Perhaps best taken away from their experiences is to simply never give up writing. As McDermott notes: “I’m sixty years old and a debut novelist. Publishing is not a marathon but a sprint!”
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Continue to support our authors by purchasing their recent releases. You can check out Kelsey Cox’s Party of Liars, Maya Golden Bethany’s The Senator, and John A. McDermott’s The Last Spirits of Manhattan here.
For more insight into writing and publishing, please join the Writers’ League of Texas on November 20 for November Third Thursday: “First, Second, and Third: Points of View.”