“I didn’t know I wanted to write about haunted water, but it’s a theme I return to every time I write a short story or start a new novel. If it’s got a tentacle, or a water ghost, or a near-drowning, I’m probably going to write about it.” -Leslie Lutz

Leslie Lutz lives in Fort Worth, Texas with her husband and author, Russell Lutz. She is the author of Fractured Tide, a young adult horror novel and winner of the 2018 Frisco First Chapter Contest. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in several journals, including Orca Literary Journal, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, Typishly, The Lyric, and Raintown Review. Leslie is affiliated with several professional writing organizations: International Thriller Writers, Horror Writers Association, Editorial Freelancers Association, and the DFW Writers’ Workshop. When she’s not writing, you can find her watching B-horror movies, scuba diving, or taking care of chickens.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Leslie about her work, her writing process, and publishing. She explains why it is important for YA fiction to appeal to multiple age groups after I confess my fascination with her book. She also divulges how her personal experiences manifest in her fiction and how joining writers’ critique groups has helped improve her work.

Trina Peterson (TP): I had not read a YA horror novel before, and Fractured Tide blew away my expectations. My gray hair would betray me if I tried to feign membership in your target audience, but I couldn't put it down. There are some heavy themes in the book. When you begin a new project, do you have themes in mind, or do they emerge as the story comes together?

Leslie Lutz (LL): I'm glad it resonated with you because I'm writing YA with crossover appeal. Many YA readers today are above the age of 18, so YA authors straddle two audiences. We want the book to be in libraries for teens and for adults to enjoy it too. It’s sometimes tricky to make it scary without having the librarians throw it out of a school library.

Regarding theme, I'm a bit of a pantser. When I started writing Fractured Tide, I had recently moved to Texas from Seattle, and I was missing the water. I wanted to be in the water, even if only in my head. I was also into B-horror movies: beasts in the woods, Jaws, and krakens. I thought a scuba survival story with a monster would be fun, and that's where things started. I was reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, an epistolary novel, in which the narrator writes letters to his lover, and I was fascinated by the idea that you could write a story in which, for the narrator, there is an audience of only one. I thought about who my protagonist would be writing to and why. She's stranded in the middle of nowhere, so why would she write these letters—essentially messages in bottles—to her dad? I realized she wants to save him in more ways than one: she wants to connect to this person she lost and for him to understand her. It was finding out how you can forgive someone who's broken and who has hurt you. He's not all bad. Part of that premise came from time I spent volunteering at a women's prison. I taught GED classes, and that totally changed my opinion about prisoner stereotypes, about who gets incarcerated and what it means to be so.

TP: In what ways did your ideas about prisoners change?

LL: These women wrote essays for me about a memorable day. Many wrote about their first day of prison, but others wrote about their children and the day they gave birth, about how much love they have for them and how excited they were to get out and see them again. There are basic stereotypes about prisoners in YA: the father or mother in prison who's a terrible parent or the completely innocent parent, wrongfully convicted. It's really binary. We weren't getting those middle stories of a functional relationship between two people who care about each other—the dimension of real humanity. Nobody is all bad or all good. What about the ones who did it, whatever it was, but they just made a mistake like many of the women I met during my teaching experience? They were paying their debt to society, and they were going to get out one day.

TP: Hearing your experience with those women offers a deeper understanding of your approach with the father in Fractured Tide and what made it easier for you to accomplish that so successfully. Your website mentions the scuba ranch in Dallas at which you trained. Is the silo training atmosphere there a common scuba training scenario? That showed up in your book too.

LL: I don't know how common it is, but part of training far from the coast is you do it in lakes. They dug a 60-foot hole in Dallas so they can offer advanced certification. They put a silo structure in the hole, and once you get down 30 feet, the silt layer blocks out the light. By the time I was at the bottom of the silo, I would shine my dive light on my instrument and all I could see was like a soup. I couldn't read the numbers. Sometimes I could see the instructor's light if he was close enough, but it's like being in fog when you turn on the high beams.

TP: That sounds terrifying. What made you decide your protagonist would find her Zen at the bottom of the silo?

LL: For Sia [the protagonist], it’s sort of like an adrenaline addiction. She avoids the pain of her life by blocking it out. In a survival story, there's a fear of death. But she's not that afraid of it; she's almost drawn to it. It's oblivion, and it's forgetting. She would take risks that would be necessary for the story, but the problem was figuring out the stakes of the novel. If she doesn't care whether she lives, then the stakes aren't high enough. That's how she ended up with a little brother. Not only did she want him to live, but she wanted a different life for him—not to be broken like she is. I wanted her to be a daredevil, active in the story. That's a problem I've had before, and it's a problem a lot of new writers have: the main character is an observer rather than the one pushing the action. Sia had to take chances and rush into danger but not for the cliché reason of bravery, rather for this thrill addiction.

TP: Your website hints at haunted water in a desert for your next book. Can you tell me more?

LL: The next book is inspired by Mineral Wells, a famous Texas town known for healing water. It’s about a teenage psychic who lives with his older brother. The protagonist reads tea leaves, and the brother warns him to stop, that he's dipping into a well too deep and will come up with something dangerous. There is a spring on his property, and the mystery around the water's healing powers and how it changes the main character is a huge reveal at the end of the book. Originally, there was going to be scuba diving in the story, but a friend of mine asked if I really wanted to be the scuba diving author [laughs]. She suggested broadening my brand instead of being the person who always does scuba.

TP: You're fortunate to have a friend who will say the tough things like that. How do I get one?

LL: Yes, the DFW [Dallas-Fort Worth] Writer's Workshop members are constructive and helpful. They offer opinions on why something won't sell and suggestions about how to change it. When you give your stuff to a non-writer friend, they don't know what to say other than, "Good job. You're trying so hard." Even if they don't love it, they don't know how to tell you. But another writer can tell you the hard truth.

TP: I am always hesitant to give my work to people I care about and who I know care about me, who aren't writers. That puts a lot of pressure on them. Do you recommend, especially to new writers, joining a workshop?

LL: Yes. I've been in three groups. The first was too small; they were supportive, but there were four of us. We were unstructured and spent way too much time chatting. Nobody was really willing to give the hard advice. The second group required an application, and it was okay, but I needed a broader group of opinions. There are different kinds of groups. For instance, the Writer's League of Texas focuses on bringing in speakers. There's a certain point, though, at which you need to stop listening to all the advice and just do it. Let people read it, critique it, and do it again. Write again and again. The process of writing and critiquing is important. I plateaued before I joined the DFW Writer's Workshop. I’d gotten pretty good but wasn't attracting agents. I collected 120 rejections on three books.

TP: That is not an abnormal number of rejections, correct?

LL: Correct. I wondered how to get from good to great. How do you draw attention when there are so many good writers out there? Everything changed when I joined the critique group because somebody would say, "Hey, I really like your first two pages. Here's where I got bored and here's why." That was helpful. I was focusing on setting, because I love to describe it, and I was shying away from describing emotion. Other writers picked up on that and indicated they had no idea what my character was feeling.

TP: When I read your short story, "Ross Barnett," I noticed your setting was a very heavy hitter. So much emotion is wrapped up in it and projected onto the characters. Did your workshop experience help you accomplish that?

LL: Yes, that was one of the big things I learned to do. I love atmospheric horror, and I didn't want to stop describing these places that are so important to me. The more I examined my favorite writers, especially in YA, I saw how they did a lot in a very small space. Readers have no patience, especially the ones under 18. They want characterization, action, and fast pacing. Instead of describing setting directly, I thought about how I could describe the way a character feels about it. That gave me two bangs for my buck. I struggle with slow pace in the middle of things. During editing, I examine every line and think about how I can make it do two things instead of one. Everything becomes tighter.

TP: I got a strong Huck Finn vibe from "Ross Barnett.” Was that a conscious effort?

LL: I wasn't thinking about Huck Finn, but that was the neighborhood where I grew up. I spent five years as a kid on a little Mississippi reservoir you could get lost on. I spent so much time out there doing Huck Finn things, but my character, Macy, in "Ross Barnett" is based on somebody I knew there who had a rough life. It's those kinds of places where there's this sheen of respectability. Everybody pretends everything's fine, but there is all this stuff happening in the shadows nobody wants to look at or admit. Kids see it; they see the unfairness of it, and they're less willing to put up with it.

TP: Here’s another instance where you drew from your life experience, much like you did in Fractured Tide. Is this a natural reflex for you? As writers, we hear, "Write what you know," all the time. Have you written non-fiction too?

LL: I've written nonfiction for me, for journaling, but I've never tried to publish personal essays. I admire people who do it because you must be brave to put yourself out there. I feel like fiction is a mask we wear. It’s like a masquerade party and we're saying, "No, it's not me! It's someone else!" [laughs]. People who know me well will know it's me in some of those parts. Although, you can't base a character too closely on a living person who will be mad at you. And let's say you're basing a villain on somebody who has harmed you. You can get a blind spot because it's hard for you to think from their point of view. You don't want to justify anything they've done. But you have to be able to understand their point of view, so they sound like a real person. Villains never think they're villains. They think they're the good person, with very few exceptions. Jeffrey Dahmer knew he was bad, but most villains think the ends justify the means. If you're basing your antagonist on a real person, you must do that hard emotional work. If you haven't dealt with the trauma, you're not going to be able to write that character. It's going to be flat. That happened to me, and when I started seeing things from her point of view, it made the book better.

TP: Let's talk publishing. There are several ways to publish these days. What are your thoughts on those options?

LL: There are four basic routes: self-publishing, small press publishing, University press publishing, and going the traditional route with an agent and a big publishing house. They're all very different. It's important to understand yourself and know what you're capable of doing. I have a friend who has done very well with self-publishing. But a lot of people who go that route don't realize how much marketing is involved, and all the time spent marketing is time you're not writing. So, you better love marketing. I knew that running my own business and marketing myself as a brand were not what I was interested in doing. That's why I have no problem paying my agent a cut of everything if that means I get to spend more time writing. Time is just as important to me as money.

TP: What specific benefits do you get from an agent and a traditional publishing house?

LL: In general, you're not going to get your work in front of any big five publishers without an agent. Some of the mid-sized, independent publishers will look at unagented manuscripts, but they preference work from agents. When my publisher, Blink—an imprint of Harper Collins—had a sudden restructuring in the middle of my editing process, my agent navigated all the problems that arose from that. I have a fabulous agent. They're not all great. A good agent isn't just selling your book and stepping away like a real estate agent. He or she is with you through the editing process. It's a partnership. The agent's cut is anywhere between 10-20%, depending on the agent, and honestly, it's money well spent.

TP: You also publish poetry. Which did you write first, poetry or prose?

LL: I wrote prose first, a literary fiction novel in college. I was writing in isolation without getting any feedback, and, after collecting 55 rejections on that manuscript, I put it aside to write something else for a while. I started writing poetry because it's easy to finish. I knew I had a problem putting stuff off and taking forever, so what if I only had to finish a page? I knew I could do that, so I started writing poems and submitting them. I found that it was good, as a prose writer, to tackle poetry because it forced me to be more economical—to really think about the way things sound and work on compression. I wrote form poetry, and the constriction of form was helpful. Having zero rules can be a recipe for chaos, but if you have a form, it forces you to be creative inside the form. Writing an entire book in the form of letters to a single person presented some challenges, like the point when my narrator is supposed to kiss the boy. A girl is never going to describe a kiss to her father, but I wanted people to feel it. So, I had to create a metaphor with which she could relay that moment to her father. Describing the scuba gear also presented a challenge because one diver would not be describing familiar gear to another diver. To explain it to the readers, I had to get creative. For instance, Sia says she inflated the BCD so this guy didn't drop like a stone to the bottom of the ocean. My point was to show the audience these things inflate without breaking from the form of the letters.

TP: You did a great job with that because, as a layman, the scuba information I needed as a reader was there, was accessible, and yet seemed natural within those constraints of the letters to her father. Although, readers always have a Google machine in their hands these days. They can find more information immediately when they are confused. Knowing that, though, doesn’t always eliminate the doubt we have when we’re writing, right?

LL: Yes, especially with emotional subtext and a crossover audience. Sometimes I want to imply something and wonder if the reader will get it, so I write an extra line. Then a beta reader will say, "Cut that line! We got it. You don't need that." Again, that's where a good critique group comes in. It's like a trust fall; you can close your eyes and say, "Catch me," which gives you the freedom to try anything. If it's terrible, they are willing to tell you.

Leslie Lutz: https://lesliekarenlutz.com/

Book: Fractured Tide

Trina Peterson is a Maine native transplanted to Wisconsin where she lives with her husband and two sons. She's a Navy veteran, small business owner, Mountainview MFA student, and—most importantly—a proponent of the Oxford comma.