One of my all-time favorite books is A Field of Darkness and one of my all-time favorite people is it’s author Cornelia Read. Her voice is so fantastic that I’d read whatever she writes, even if it was a 350-page novel about the Erie Canal. Fortunately, she writes fantastic crime fiction and keeps her Erie Canal content in check.

1. Please tell us about your debut novel.

My first novel was A Field of Darkness, published in 2006 by what was then Time-Warner Books (now Grand Central Publishing.)

2. I’ve read that only 4% of the people who start a novel finish writing it. Why do you think you beat the odds?

I have always been a dabbler, but actually finishing something--a real novel--was due to some intense outside circumstances. I had recently moved to California with my husband emeritus and my twin daughters, and got the first job I’d had since my kids were born—doing editorial work at a dotcom in Oakland. 

It was so great to be working again, while my kids were in school, and it was the best pay I’d ever made--and then the dotcom crash of 2001 hit hard and we were all laid off.

I think I sent out 400 resumes over the next several months for job listings on craigslist, and no one was hiring. And then I saw a guy in Berkeley, Charles King, who wanted to start a mystery-novel writing group.  

I replied to that ad, seven of us met in a Starbucks a couple of weeks later, and I volunteered to write the first submission to the group. We agreed to meet two weeks later at Charles’s apartment, on a Tuesday night. That was one week before 9/11, and I wrote seven pages that ended up being my first chapter.

My younger daughter has very severe autism, and she started going through a very rough patch, behaviorally. My life was really, really circumscribed, and I didn’t get out much because childcare had to be super specialized on her behalf and I couldn’t afford it. 

So, really, the only time I got out on a regular basis was going to Charles’s apartment every other Tuesday night. And I had to be on call at home during school hours, in case my daughter had a meltdown and I had to go get her from school. It was a bit like being quarantined during this pandemic, only everybody else I knew had an actual life and the world was going on full-tilt beyond my tiny backyard. 

I was alone for long stretches of time every weekday, tethered to my house and my landline. I was tired and discouraged and sad, on the verge of turning forty. Somehow that was the perfect neurochemical alchemy to finally write a full manuscript, for me, and the writing group turned out to be a miracle gathering of astonishingly astute readers who were encouraging but also sticklers for making the work better. Super smart, super nice, and amazingly articulate and supportive people. The fates really did me a solid on that one, and I’m still dumbfounded with gratitude.

3. Was your debut novel the first book you wrote? (Any prior efforts hiding on your hard drive?)

I did some longer-form writing projects when I was quite young. In third grade, I wrote, cast, and directed a play—this was so long ago that I had to go to the head office of my elementary school and ask the staff how to make “dittos” on the mimeograph machine, so that everyone in my cast would have a copy to learn their lines. We put it on for the whole school, in the cafeteria. 

The only thing I remember about the actual story is that the protagonist child dies in extremely melodramatic circumstances and is carried across a river by a giant angel.

 In fourth and fifth grade I got caught up in hugely long stories—hand-written in colored magic marker. The first one was about a poor boy who really wants a pony, and gets a pony in the end—after fifty pages of operatic heartache. The second I think was about crime-fighting in a summer camp.

I had wonderful teachers those two years who would just let me sit in a corner and keep writing for hours. My reward was probably getting out of doing math for a few days, still my idea of heaven.

Sixth grade I wrote the diary of child spy, “Call Me Stringbean,” in a tiny three-ring binder I bought at Long’s Drugs in Carmel. She gets recruited by her dad, a CIA agent, to help take down a heroin ring in the Bahamas.

This was complete with special spy sneakers I made with spy tools hidden under the insoles of a pair of my pal Stefanie’s old Keds, and diagrams of the secret underwater cave in a swimming pool that she hides from the bad guys in (which bore a striking resemblance to the cave in my dad’s girlfriend’s pool in, you guessed it, the Bahamas.)

I studied writing as an undergrad at Sarah Lawrence, but never really found my metier there. I started a memoir, actually, in a “first novels” class my senior year. It opened with me waking up in my Dad’s VW camper in Malibu, on spring break from boarding school. He lived in that van for thirteen years. I worked on the manuscript off and on probably over the course of the next ten years. It is AWFUL. Hundreds of unreadable pages with the occasional decent metaphor.

We joke that the subtitle of our writing group is “A Stinking Pile of Unreadable Crap,” because there are moments when every work-in-progress seems to grovel deservedly in that description, but that manuscript will stay A.S.P. o’ U.C. forever, with the stench of a best-ignored albatross corpse acting as chainsaw-to-the-senses of anyone foolish enough to approach its file cabinet dungeon.

4. What helped you become a better writer? Any books or resources you found helpful?

The writing group, first and foremost. And it’s tough finding a good group. I know some people can write deathless prose in complete isolation, but I really need that exoskeleton of outside structure and deadlines and input; especially hints for when I’m losing people as readers by nattering on about tangential stuff and losing the plot.

We still joke about “the Erie Canal” in the group, because I wrote fifteen pages on the COMPLETE history of the Erie Canal in chapter two of my first draft of Field of Darkness, and it took everyone far too long to convince me that it was painful to read and had to be cut.

But I found a number of different books also super helpful.

The first one is called Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print. I have the first edition, and I see the second edition is now available as an e-book, which is probably great. The second edition is by Renni Brown and Dave King.

Every single thing in that book will make your writing better, swear to god. And I thought I really knew my stuff, having worked as a journalist and editor for years. That book kicked my ass and made my writing far, far better.

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is also essential reading. She will not only make you feel slightly more sane, but get you into the sort of quiet, inspired state it often takes to open the file on your laptop just that one… more… time… when you’d rather be doing ANYTHING but writing. The eternal takeaways from her are that you have to allow yourself to write a Shitty First Draft, and you only have to write enough each day to fill some impossibly tiny measurement of picture frame. 

I need to be reminded of those two things on a daily, or even hourly basis. I’m of the Dorothy Parker school, basically: “I hate writing. I love having written.”

The third essential book is David Corbett’s The Art of Character: Creating Memorable Characters for Fiction, Film, and TV. I mean, first of all, David is a scathingly talented novelist, and his fiction is a master class in and of itself, but this book should be required reading for any genre writer, and I wish to hell more literary novelists would also get a clue and learn his wisdom by heart. My reading life would be vastly improved if that were so.

Also? You should read all the books. Read books like breathing, like eating junk food at the county fair, like your life depends on it. Your life as a writer does depend on it—input from your most beloved genre and everything else you can lay your hands on. Cereal boxes, IKEA instructions, books you loved as a kid or as a self-important angsty teen. Re-read, too. See what still works for you and what doesn’t.

I don’t say this so you can “write to the market,” but because you need to fill yourself with words and beauty and structure and things that are so good they make you gasp and, frankly, so awful you wonder that the page doesn’t burst into flames from sheer horror at its inky defilement.

Some days you’ll need to be inspired by a lofty example, and some days you’ll need to realized, “holy shit, if THIS got published, I can write something that has a chance.”

5. What was your process like getting an agent?

I started looking for an agent in 2005, when I’d completed a third-ish draft of Field of Darkness. Now, this is going to sound super old-school, because most reputable agents at that point didn’t accept email submissions. I had a good friend, the novelist Robert Clark Young, who shared a list of good agents with me that he’d compiled over the course of his own journey to getting his debut novel published.

I’d also met some good agents via the Book Passage Mystery Writers conference, which is an annual event you should totally go to if you want to learn the business.

So, I took Bob’s list of about 50 agents and researched each one—knocked off a few names of those who weren’t interested in crime fiction, and then wrote a really specific and personal query letter to every person on that list.

A number of people—first the writing group, then published friends—read over the core part of the letter for me and made suggestions. Bob’s was, “you don’t tell an agent you’re a good writer, you write a good letter and show them you’re a good writer.” I thought you had to be a little brash at first, like writing a cover letter for a job you want.

If the person had a client whose work I admired, I wrote “your client so-and-so’s work is amazing,” or whatever. I suggested three successful writers with whose work I hoped mine might have something in common… phrasing it something like, “I hope that my work will appeal to readers who enjoy Susan Isaacs, Nelson DeMille’s Gold Coast, and blah-somebody-I-can’t-remember-blah.”

I thought I would be lucky to get personalized rejection letters from a couple of those agents, and I’d cry over pizza and Rolling Rock and go off to research another list of fifty.

I was really, really lucky. Eight of them asked to see the full manuscript, and four wanted to represent me. [Editor’s note: she didn’t get really, really lucky. She’s just really, really talented.]

It was a lot of postage. And toner. And printer paper. And boxes. Seriously a lot. I got to be very friendly with the lady who ran the mail-service office in Berkeley. Email is a boon to brike struggling novelists everywhere.

6. How did you celebrate when you learned your book would be published?

Takeout sushi and really good champagne. It was amazing.

7. What was the most exciting moment involving the publication of your debut novel? (The moment you first saw the cover? The call when you learned when it was being published? When you cashed your advance check?)

All of those things were amazing, and it’s important to stop yourself at each moment that something good happens and just bathe in it. Because damn, you worked hard to get to the end of the first draft, and the second, and the query letters, and EVERYTHING it takes. Those rite-of-passage moments are few and hard-earned, and don’t skimp on them because you’re worried about the Next Hurdle Thing. There will always be a Next Hurdle Thing and rushing through joy won’t make it easier. Jacqueline Winspear told me, at that point, “Don’t be the bride who doesn’t get to enjoy her wedding. Allow yourself to revel.”

 Also, if you get an advance check, buy yourself something that matters. Just one thing… no matter what the number is on that check. I went to Union Square in San Francisco with my very dear friend Rae and bought myself a pair of black men’s Gucci loafers. They were $500, and I still have them. And every time I look in my closet I see them and think, “hey, writing got you those shoes, and they are for dancing in on the days you most think you suck—and even days when you don’t.”

But I have to say that the coolest thing that came out of writing my first novel is that I got an email from my agent a few months before the pub date, saying, “hey, there’s this actor who wants to option your book. His name is Peter Riegert. Should I give him your email address?” 

And, well… just about two years ago, Peter and I got married in the Shakespeare garden in Central Park, on Shakespeare’s birthday. So my whole life changed for the better because Charles King wanted to start a writing group in Berkeley in 2001… that’s insane. But the good kind of insane.

8. What’s your best advice for someone who wants to be published?

Writing can be a lonely, discouraging, and exhausting thing—if you’re doing it right. Challenge yourself, but do your best to find your tribe. You need people who will egg you on and have the courage to give you honest feedback.

Also, don’t be a dick. Courtesy goes a long, long way and the world is smaller than you ever could have imagined. Tip your waitress, compliment fellow writers when they do something great or kind, and buy the first round whenever you can.

9. What are you currently reading? Or, what's one of the best novels you've read lately?

 I’m on a huge jag of reading Seanan McGuire’s complete works. She is totally amazeballs and I’m so glad she’s prolific—I started with her Wayward Children series, then onto Middlegame, and now I’m reading her October Daye series. She’s the perfect blend of amazingly smart/funny/engaging fantasy with just a frisson of horror.

I also highly recommend Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library. My God, so gorgeous… the kind of perfect book that just might save your life.

10. What are you working on now? Any projects coming out soon?

I just got asked to write a story for an anthology that sounds really fun, and I’m doing the long slog on a time-travel thriller set in 19th-Century (and 21st) Upper Manhattan—it’s based on a familial murder-suicide that happened in 1883, and the working title is Blood Harmony.

In a way, it’s a spinoff of my crime series (Madeline Dare twenty years down the road and way more compassionate. Mostly.)

It’s a big book to get my head around, and I’m loving the research involved. “Out soon” is probably not a great descriptor for my work, though. I’m slow and lazy, especially while trying to figure out the mechanics of the first draft. Plus, there’s that whole “Erie Canal” tendency. I’m an over-writer until I find my way, and still so grateful to have my writing group besties weighing in.

We’ve been at this almost twenty-one years together… pretty soon the group will be old enough to order its own martini, without a fake ID.

And we’ll raise the glass to our founder, Charles King. He was a wonderful man who died too damn young, and we all miss the hell out of him.

If you want to know more about Cornelia, follow her on Facebook.