Q&A with Emily Winslow

	In ten seconds, what's the plot of The Whole World? Two American girls come to study at Cambridge University. They become best friends, they fall for the same charming grad student...and he disappears. You're American. Why did you set the book in England? I live in Cambridge, England, which is my husband's hometown. I find the city irresistable. The architecture, history and still-living traditions are thrilling, of course, but most of all I'm intrigued by the kind of people this city attracts. Most people I meet here are passionate about what they do, whether it's what they do at their jobs, or in their studies, or their hobbies. The specializations are fascinating. Experts are everywhere here, in the most specific, eccentric niches you can imagine. This is, at heart, a murder mystery. What drew you to that? Murder is an expression of extreme feeling: frustration or desperation or entitlement or anger or fear. It takes the kind of feelings we all struggle with and turns up the volume, not only for the murderer, but for the investigators, the witnesses, everyone. Taking a story to that edge of behavior pushes all the characters. Everyone is exposed. Artistically, that's interesting. Is it a “whodunnit”? Eventually. But first, it's a “what happened?” Is it ever hard to write about crime? Murder is really upsetting to me. Even just coming up with a crime rattles me, and I have to take a few days to come to terms with it. This is *good* I think, both for me as a person (who doesn't want to become blase about horrible things) and for me as a writer. Murder *is* horrible. My sensitivity helps me to take it seriously, in terms of its effect on *everyone* in the book. Being even just near a murder is a terrible, terrible thing. It affects all the characters who are touched by it. One of the scenes in this book is a first-person death scene. I was thrown by it for a long time after writing it. Not just the dying, but all the realizations that the character comes to in the last moments--and half of them are dead-wrong misunderstandings. I was similarly thrown by the epilogue when a character who has acted heroically reveals the price they've paid personally to do good, and how wrecked they are by it. If we're not affected by our characters, who will be? Weren't you a puzzle designer? Yes, and that really helped with structuring the book. For years I wrote logic puzzles for Games magazine. I embedded traditional logic into ever longer and more elaborate stories and formats, always wanting the reader to have a new *kind* of puzzle to solve, not just new data in the same old structure. The editors gave me incredible freedom, with length and with experimentation. In the glory days of the magazine, when the office was in New York City and had a large staff, we'd meet up Friday nights to play games. It was grand. I learned about puzzles through my dad being a game inventor. I was his assistant when I was a little girl. He paid me 25 cents for every time I beat him at one of his own games. Once I earned $7.50 in a single sitting. And an actress? I trained as an actress; I never worked as one. But those years of insular, driven, overwrought, sleep-deprived conservatory education drilled compassion into me. You never knew what character you'd have to identify with next. Not agree with, but identity with. You had to find a way in. I learned how to step into another person's point of view and take on their voice. I put that to use in the book, telling the story through six different narrators. Why so many narrators? Motive is interesting to me. Not just the motives of criminals, but everyone's motives. Situation is not enough. The situation that someone is in love with someone they can't have, or has lost money that they deserve, or whatever, is not sufficient to provoke action until it's combined with who that person is fundamentally, and their current state of stress. I wanted to give the reader an experience of each character that reveals their actions to be near-inevitable, given who they are and how they see the world. What's the significance of the title? The narrators all have limited points of view. Each of them sees their immediate circumstances and personal priorities as the whole world—and they're wrong. What's next? Another crime novel, also set in Cambridge, will be released in summer 2010. I have plans for at least five books in the series, with long arcs and recurring characters. How do you juggle writing and parenting your young children? My husband and I share caring for our children truly equally. In general, he looks after them in the mornings, and I take over at lunchtime. We also share lower standards of housekeeping: the Lego can stay out, the dishes can wait till tomorrow... How did you get your agent? A query letter; that's all. No introduction, no special favors, no tricks or stunts. Just a straightforward query letter and good sample pages. Aspiring writers can get good advice from www.agentquery.com, and from the many good agent blogs on the web (notably pubrants.blogspot.com and nathanbransford.blogspot.com). For more links, see my page for Aspiring Writers. ___________________________________________ Emily Winslow is an American living in Cambridge, England. The Whole World is her first novel.		Home About Emily Winslow About The Whole World

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