By THIRSTY
The day before their novel, The Wife Between Us, was released, the new writing team of Greer
Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen was nervous about their debut effort. A few days
later, their book rocketed to the #2 spot on the New York Times Best Seller list and they were on their way to
becoming 2018’s most famous duo of international bestselling authors.
Hendricks, a long-time editor at Simon &
Schuster, and Pekkanen, an international bestselling author in her own right,
turned out to be “Better Together” as a team of storytellers. One from
Manhattan (Hendricks) and one from outside of Washington, D.C., (Pekkanen),
these two writers figured out how to collaborate across time, distance, storyline
and families to produce a book that has been called, “A fiendishly smart
cat-and-mouse thriller,” by the New York
Times Book Review.
Stay
Thirsty Magazine was thrilled to visit
with the team of Hendricks and Pekkanen in Manhattan to discuss their first
joint venture.
STAY
THIRSTY: Your debut novel The Wife Between Us raced to the #2 spot
on the New York Times Best Seller
list almost immediately after its release. What is it about your book that
propelled it to such a lofty perch so quickly?
GREER
HENDRICKS: Having worked as an editor for
20 years, I know from the trenches how difficult landing on the New York Times Best Seller list can be. My
former boss, Judith Curr, the President and Publisher of Atria Books, always
said the success of a debut begins with the book itself. The first person to
fall in love with The Wife Between Us
was our agent Victoria Sanders, and then our editor, Jennifer Enderlin at St.
Martin’s Press. Jen was evangelical about the book, and shortly after we turned
in the final manuscript, she seemed to have mobilized her entire team to read
it. After our author photo shoot, which was ten months before our book was
scheduled to be published, Sarah and I visited Jen’s office and she introduced
us to many of her colleagues. Even back then it seemed as if the entire company
had already read and fallen in love with the book! Of course, the most
important element to the success of a book is the connection it forms with
readers. St. Martin’s did an incredible job of getting the book to bloggers,
booksellers, and reviewers. And these early readers seemed to really respond to
the story Sarah and I wrote, and the unique way we wrote it. Even before
publication, we had thousands of reviews on Goodreads and the book started
showing up on thousands of readers’ Instagram feeds. All of this is to say, the
book was set up for success. Still, debuting at #2 on the Times list was beyond our wildest dreams,
and I have to believe there was a little bit of magic involved!
STAY
THIRSTY: After more than twenty years
as an editor at Simon & Schuster, how did your experience on the publishing
side inform your decisions in crafting your story? Of all the genres you have
worked with over the years, why did you choose to write a psychological
suspense story?
GREER
HENDRICKS: As an editor I worked on
mostly women’s fiction – and that was also the genre Sarah wrote. However,
prior to book publishing, I studied psychology and attended the Journalism
School at Columbia. Before writing fiction, Sarah was a journalist and had
also studied psychology. When it came time for us to think about our debut, we
laid out all of our favorite books and realized there was a theme – the titles
were psychological in nature and possessed strong female protagonists. Some of
these titles included Before I Go to
Sleep by SJ Watson, What Alice Forgot
by Liane Moriarty, Rebecca, the
classic, by Daphne du Maurier, and The
Good Marriage – a short story by Stephen King. Our joking, working title
was “Good Girl Gone Bad on a Train with a Dragon Tattoo.” We also thought about
TV shows and movies that spoke to us. Our original concept was an intellectual
one: how our memories are colored by the lenses through which we view our
worlds – and how people can share an experience, but carry away markedly
different perspectives and emotions.
STAY
THIRSTY: How important are surprises
and twists in a novel to readers today? What role does discovering the reality
of situations play in the construction and pacing of a thriller?
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| Sarah Pekkanen and Greer Hendricks |
GREER HENDRICKS: Sarah and I spend hours talking and plotting before we begin writing. We are constantly tossing out crazy ideas and pushing each other to make every scene and every character both unique and relatable. Our favorite saying is “WHAT IF….” Twists and turns and surprises are important, but we also want our books to be grounded in reality. It is important to us that our readers connect with our characters’ emotional truths.
STAY
THIRSTY: How did you and Greer arrive
at a process to actually accomplish writing a book together? What rules did you
set before you began your team effort?
SARAH
PEKKANEN: Greer and I had just one rule
when we decided to write a book together: If either of us felt the process was
not enjoyable and wanted to back out, we would be honest with the other and end
the creative partnership. But from day one, we knew we were onto something
special. We are so in tune when it comes to our approaches to writing, and we
both find collaborating to be energizing. We always say that we are “Better
Together” – I even recently bought us matching T-shirts with that logo. The real
trick was to find a logistical way to collaborate, since we live in separate
cities, but knew we wanted to create every line together. The first thing I did
was book a trip to New York, and Greer and I sat hunched together over a single
keyboard, writing what we thought would be the opening scene of our book (it
ended up somewhere toward the end of Act One by the time we finished revising).
STAY
THIRSTY: Often co-authors will write
alternating chapters or characters. Why did you choose another way to produce
this novel?
SARAH
PEKKANEN: We never really considered
doing anything else. When Greer was my editor, we’d go out for three or four
hour dinners and talk about everything: books, relationships, our personal
goals, and the challenges in our lives. We still chat this way nearly every day
before we begin to write, often trying to find a way to channel our feelings or
past experiences into our characters. Because our books constantly evolve as we
work on them, often taking off in unexpected directions, we both need to be in
on the ground floor of every line.
STAY
THIRSTY: You have referred to one
technique for story organization as “homelanding.” What is unique about how you
and Greer worked on this story?
SARAH
PEKKANEN: Every month, we meet in either
New York (where Greer lives) or D.C. (my hometown) and sequester ourselves in a
hotel room. We buy giant Post-It notes and chart out scenes, dialogue, and
themes. I love to make the walls as messy as possible – like Carrie did on the
TV show Homeland – whereas Greer
prefers them to be neat. That’s one of the rare differences in our process. As
for everything else, by this point, Greer and I joke that we have “one brain.”
While writing together in our respective cities, we use Google Docs and Google
Hangouts so that we can both see our manuscript and work together on it in real
time. We’re on the phone talking while we are simultaneously typing, editing,
and jotting down notes in the margins. We speak in an almost “twin language”
when we write, kind of a shorthand, not finishing sentences. It’s a unique
system, and Greer and I have deliberately avoided examining it too closely,
because – and I hope this doesn’t sound too woo-woo – there’s something almost
mystical about it.
STAY
THIRSTY: After writing seven novels on
your own, how difficult or easy was it for you to collaborate on a story and
still make it into a book that has been called “Masterful”?
SARAH
PEKKANEN: The biggest challenge for me
was learning how to shift my approach to writing. While working on solo novels,
I’m alone with my thoughts. The process is utterly internal. Instead of
“thinking through my fingertips,” as I do when I write by myself, I needed to
learn to articulate my thoughts. It was like adding a middle layer to my
existing process. Greer is very analytical and I’m more instinctual – another
of the few differences between us – so we work best together when we carefully
plot out a scene, then begin to write it, and see where the characters take us.
I think we both had to navigate a learning curve, but it wasn’t that steep in
retrospect. Now it’s like second nature to us.
STAY
THIRSTY: Did you anticipate such
success for your first joint effort? Will there be a sequel?
SARAH
PEKKANEN: I never anticipated it.
Truthfully, I fantasized about it, but I know how difficult it is for a book to
break out of the crowded pack vying for readers’ attention. Our publisher did
an unbelievable job of getting the word out on this novel. Greer and I knew
that the book had a real chance of succeeding due to the efforts of the
passionate and hard-working team at St. Martin’s Press. About a half-hour
before the New York Times list was
scheduled to be announced, Greer and I got on the phone and each poured a glass
of wine. We toasted our book, then made a vow: If The Wife Between Us didn’t take off the way everyone hoped, we’d
keep trying. We’d write another. We’d stick together. We’d continue on as a
team. And not just because we wanted success, but because we have found such a
rare, supportive, inspiring collaboration, and we know we truly are better
together.
GREER
HENDRICKS: I echo everything Sarah says! Certainly,
as the momentum for our book seemed to be building, we hoped it would land on
the list. But we never expected it to hit so high. When our publisher called to
tell us the news, I literally wrote down the number 2 on a piece of paper. As
if I would forget it! It just didn’t seem real.
As for a sequel, that’s not in the works. But we
are nearly done with another psychological thriller, tentatively titled “You’re
Invited”, which also features strong female protagonists and kaleidoscope
twists and turns.
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