Spotlight On: Jen Williams
Ahead of the paperback release of Dog Rose Dirt next week, we spoke to the wonderful Jen Williams about switching up genres, the joys (and surprises) of true crime research, and seeing writing as a long game.
You can pre-order the paperback edition of Dog Rose Dirt from Waterstones, Amazon, or your local bookshop. You can find Jen on Twitter, Instagram, and at her website.
Dog Rose Dirt is a departure from your previous books, which were fantasy novels. Could you tell us about what inspired the switch to thriller and how it changed your writing process?
I had just finished writing The Poison Song, the final volume of the Winnowing Flame trilogy. It had been a big and complex series for me, which I’d used to challenge myself in lots of different ways, and by the end of it I felt completely wrung out. I love writing fantasy but it does require a lot of juggling. Magic systems, world building, battles and history all have to come together to tell a story with a very wide scope. I knew that I needed to take a break from epic fantasy, and there’s that old phrase, ‘a change is as good as a rest’… I’ve always been interested in true crime and have in fact spent years inadvertently doing the research*, so one day Juliet (who also finds this stuff interesting) suggested I write something scary. The opportunity to write a novel that combined my love of folklore, true crime and complicated heroines was too good to resist.
Tackling such a different genre was another interesting challenge – although I’ve spent years reading crime fiction and thrillers I’d not attempted to write one before, and it was a steep learning curve. There are lots of obvious differences of course: crime stories usually take place in our world, for a start, and you can’t use magic or gods to solve problems. The biggest and most interesting change for me was in what you did or didn’t tell the reader. With fantasy novels you have to convince your reader that your outlandish fantasy world is real; you need to get them to suspend their disbelief. One way of doing this is to give them characters they will come to know very well, and through your Frodos and your Sams they experience this fantastical world and come to believe in it. When it comes to thrillers you start off with a world that should be familiar enough to the reader, but this time you are actively withholding information. There are mysteries – about the wider story, and usually about the main character too – that you want the reader to try to solve. You can’t give them all the answers. This was a big change in approach for me, but one I ended up enjoying enormously.
*I realise this makes me sound like I have been doing crimes. I promise that I have not.
Your novel draws inspiration from folklore and true crime – what was the research process for DOG ROSE DIRT like, and was there anything that particularly surprised you?
The research process for Dog Rose Dirt has been going on, in a casual sort of way, for decades – reading Ann Rule books, listening to podcasts, falling down reddit rabbit holes. When I was a receptionist I used to spend the quieter hours trawling Wikipedia for articles about serial killers and missing persons cases; I made sure to delete my browsing history after. Similarly folklore is something I’ve had a passion for since I was a kid. The original title of Dog Rose Dirt was The Barghest, which is a kind of demonic phantom dog. The Barghest is said to haunt lonely places and crossroads, and if it bites you, the wound will never heal… There are quite a few of these monstrous hounds scattered through British folklore, with different regional names, like Striker, Black Shuck, or Padfoot. In Dog Rose Dirt, the serial killer known as the Red Wolf is also a creature that haunts remote country lanes in the middle of the night, so it was fun to layer in all these parallels with this mythic demonic dog.
As for things that surprised me, any kind of serial killer research is peppered with all sorts of unpleasant shocks and surprises: like the fact that Ted Bundy escaped from custody twice, going on to kill more people when he should have been safely locked up; how the Yorkshire Ripper remained at large because the police had convinced themselves he exclusively targeted prostitutes; that Dennis Rader was caught because of a floppy disc.
What was your journey to gaining representation like, and what advice would you give to writers who are submitting to literary agents?
I was very lucky with my publication journey. I had been writing a few fantasy novels and was just about at the stage where I thought it might be worth querying agents, so had started to put together a list of agents I would like to work with – Juliet Mushens was at the top of the list. And then, me being me, I procrastinated over it a lot, because sending out queries is a fairly scary thing to do. I started writing a series of novellas to put up on Amazon just to entertain myself, and then they got a bit of attention from editors, so I very quickly crammed them into a full-sized novel and wrote the ending. A friend mentioned that Juliet was looking for epic fantasy at the time, so I took a chance… and the rest is history.
My main advice for writers looking for representation is to make sure your book is the best it can be before you send it out. Sometimes the first book you write isn’t going to be the book that gets you an agent or a publishing deal, and that’s okay! Writing is a long game – it took me roughly six manuscripts before I felt like my work was strong enough to catch an agent’s attention. Have patience and make sure you enjoy actually doing the work, because if you do get a publishing deal you’re going to be doing an awful lot of it!
What are you working on at the moment? / What are you writing next?
I’m currently editing my second thriller for HarperCollins, which involves a creepy little seaside town in the middle of winter. Like Dog Rose Dirt it’s concerned with the power of stories, and it has a rich seam of weirdness running through it. When I’m not working on that or doing other jobs I’ve been gradually writing another fantasy book. Unrelated to my previous two trilogies, this book follows a living magical weapon with no memory of her life before she gained her abilities. It’s been fun to explore a whole new fantasy world again, and it provides a sharp contrast to the darker places I explore in my crime thrillers.