A Thriller Writer in a Literary World: A Guest Post by David Bell

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: David Bell has all the accoutrements of an accomplished literary writer: he holds a MFA and a PhD, he's a professor of Creative Writing (full, not associate) and his work has been published in literary journals and won or been nominated for distinguished prizes, including the Pushcart.

And yet.

There's something about a dead body, a creaking floorboard, a nasty look over a glass of expensive wine that David Bell can't resist. In fact, he's succumbed to the temptation of genre so much, he's a USA Today bestseller whose latest, KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS, was named a "most anticipated thriller" by She Reads, Crime Reads and the Palm Beach Daily News, among others

Which leaves him with the difficult task of explaining himself, as author Neal Stephenson describes, as a Beowulf writer in a Dante world.

 

Like Connor Nye in my novel KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS, I’m a creative writing professor at a large public university in Kentucky.

 

Let me get this out of the way up front—unlike Connor, I’ve never stolen a manuscript from a student, and I’ve never been implicated in an unsolved murder based on something I’ve published.

 

Not yet anyway.

 

But there is something that has happened to me that happens to Connor in the book. Connor publishes a thriller, a book about the murder of a young woman in a college town. And when his book comes out, some of his colleagues make disparaging comments about the genre he has chosen to write in. Oh, that’s a book you read at the beach. Oh, you probably wrote that really fast. Oh, that’s just a thriller.

 

Yes, I’ve heard all of that in the English department where I teach at Western Kentucky University.

 

That’s not to say all of my fellow professors feel this way. I have a number of colleagues who have been very supportive of my career. They come to my events. They buy my books for themselves or their family members. They read books by other thriller writers. One of them once said to me, “I’m going to read your new book, but I have to read Karin Slaughter’s latest first.”

 

Karin Slaughter is a great writer, so it’s an honor to be in the TBR stack behind her.

 

But how do those negative comments from my colleagues affect me when they come my way? How do I cope? How does any writer handle the occasional jab that sounds like a judgment of the genre they write in?

 

I’ve always told my students that the most important thing they can do as writers is to write what they want to write. Don’t try to write something geared toward a certain audience—or toward a certain teacher. If any writer tries to create that way—oriented toward someone else’s taste—the work will be flat and uninspiring. Only the individual writer can decide what is the right story for them to tell.

 

I grew up reading the classics in school. Grade school, high school, undergraduate, graduate school. I loved many of those books. I found many others to be painfully boring. But when I was free to read on my own, my tastes gravitated toward popular fiction. Thrillers, mysteries, spy novels, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, westerns. I devoured them. And so did many other people. Millions of people in fact.

 

Why? Because those books entertain us. We can get caught up in those stories and lose ourselves in them. And, at their best, they could still deal with serious issues. War, crime, history. Everything.

 

And I decided I wanted to write stories that did the same thing. I believe it’s possible for an entertaining, suspenseful book to also deal with important topics. Reading about serious issues doesn’t have to be like swallowing medicine. We can be entertained and enlightened at the same time.

 

Readers—real readers—get this. They understand what they like, and they don’t need to have their tastes curated by someone else. I write for that audience, not an academic one.

 

So any time one of my colleagues dismisses one of my books as a beach read, I take that as the highest compliment that can be paid. And I hope your copy of my book is splashed with water, filled with sand, and smeared with suntan lotion.

 

About David Bell

David Bell is the USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of 13 novels, including: The Request, Layover, Somebody’s Daughter, Bring Her Home, Since She Went Away, Somebody I Used to Know, The Forgotten Girl, Never Come Back, The Hiding Place, and Cemetery Girl. He lives in Bowling Green with his wife, writer Molly McCafferty. Learn more at davidbellnovels.com/. Friend him on Facebook and follow him on Twitter as @DavidBellNovels.

 

About KillAll Your Darlings

After years of struggling to write following the deaths of his wife and son, English professor Connor Nye publishes his first novel, a thriller about the murder of a young woman.    

There’s just one problem: Connor didn’t write the book. His missing student did. And then she appears on his doorstep, alive and well, threatening to expose him.    

Connor’s problems escalate when the police insist details in the novel implicate him in an unsolved murder from two years ago. Soon Connor discovers the crime is part of a disturbing scandal on campus and faces an impossible dilemma—admit he didn’t write the book and lose his job or keep up the lie and risk everything. When another murder occurs, Connor must clear his name by unraveling the horrifying secrets buried in his student’s manuscript.  

This is a suspenseful, provocative novel about the sexual harassment that still runs rampant in academia—and the lengths those in power will go to cover it up.