Speaker 1: Hello.
Speaker 2: I think we got disconnected somehow by modern day technology.
What is up with that?
Speaker 1: I know?
Speaker 2: And is that a beautiful accident which goes great with
the title of your book?
Speaker 1: Yes, it does.
Speaker 3: How are you doing this morning, Lourie?
Speaker 1: I'm good. How are you?
Speaker 2: Absolutely fantastic and very excited to share a conversation with
you because you've got something here that's going to create
water cooler conversation, and I often wonder if authors are
still reaching for that.
Speaker 1: Of course, I would like to create as much conversation
as I can.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you know how readers are. They will sit
there and say, oh my god, Lourie, that was a
great book. I like the accident. I took it to
the book club, but they never ask you, Lurie, where
did this come from?
Speaker 1: That is true?
Speaker 3: So where did it come from?
Speaker 1: I will tell you Well. One thing that inspired this
particular story. I've always wanted to write a novel. I
just didn't know what that novel was going to be.
But this particular story was in part inspired by the
fact that there was a tragic accident in my town
around the time that I wrote it, in which a
vanful of adults crashed into a car driven by a
teen and two of the adults died, and while the
teen was not at fault, I couldn't help feeling really
sad for this young person who would have to forever
carry this burden and the knowledge that they had been
in an accident that killed two people. So when I'm
trying to couple with story ideas, I always consider a
series of what ifs, And I started thinking, what if
the teen was responsible for a fatal accident, and what
if heear she decided to keep driving, And what if
someone in their family knew of their involvement? What would
they do with that knowledge? And I would think that
a family member would want to protect one of their own,
But how do you keep a secret like that? So
in my book The Accident, my fifteen year old protagonist
Hannah thinks her brother and her boyfriend were involved in
the fatal hit and run that really has her small
Connecticut town reeling, and the weight of this secret is
really difficult for her to bear.
Speaker 2: As that writer, you've got to live it before we
you do. I can't imagine what you went through inside
your creativity as well as your own ambitions in order
to put a story like this together, because these are
puzzle pieces. You've got to put every what if together
and somehow make it into a full fledged story.
Speaker 1: Yes, that is true, and it took me many, many
years to do so, little bits at a time.
Speaker 2: So now when you say many years, because I mean
I got to be honest with you, I can relate
with you on that because my book Halloween seventy eight
took thirty two years to finally get it in book print.
But the only reason why is because I'm the typical
writer that would hide things underneath their bed or put
it up in the attic and then oh, one day,
one day, one day, one day, and obviously your one
day came up as well, my.
Speaker 1: One day came up. I was a journalist for most
of my writing career, and I always knew in the
back of my head that someday I would write a novel.
And when I started off putting in my fiction writing aside.
I did fiction writing way before I ever became a journalist.
As a kid, I used to write story and I
did some writing in college creative writing. But I started
my career at the New York Times in a reporter
trainee program as a journalist, and I put my fictions
writing aside, and for many years I just did journalism.
And when I turned forty, which seemed like a huge
number to me at the time, I decided that if
I was going to write a novel someday, I had
to get back to fiction writing. So I enrolled in
graduate school at Wesleyan University to study creative writing, and
I was forced every week to write pages, and I
started writing stories and I got back to it, and
since then I've sort of been making that transition into
creative writing.
Speaker 2: Do you feel like you woke up the bear or
is it something It's like, Okay, I'm forty now, I
mean life does begin at the age of forty. I'm
going to begin this journey as an adult child.
Speaker 1: Well, yes, I was. As a kid. I read constantly.
So I loved finding books that, you know, with characters
who sought like me, or were wried about the same
things I worried about, or maybe did things that I
wasn't brave enough to do. And you know, I liked
reading authors that kind of got me. And so now
I kind of want to be that author for young
people who are readers like I was, and aspiring writers
like I was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're doing that quite well. And the reason why
is because you're actually putting things out there where the
reader has got to participate. And I mean it's very
interactive in the way that you give them two versions
of the accident. Which one are the readers going to
line up with first? And if they get it wrong,
will they sit there and just say, ha, okay, I
get it.
Speaker 1: I tried really hard to keep readers guessing for the
entire book. I think that was the hardest part of
craft wise, of writing in this novel, was trying to
keep the mystery going until the very last page, and
according to some of my readers, I managed to do it.
But I you know, my protagonist Hannah only hears bits
and pieces of this conversation in which her brother and
her his best friend who becomes her boyfriend. Over the
course of the novel, she only hears bits and pieces
of the conversation they have that makes it sound like
they were involved in the accident, and so the reader
only hears bits and pieces as well. So the narrator
is sort of unreliable because we know right from the
beginning that she doesn't really know what happens, So we're
trying to figure out right alongside the narrator through the
whole course of the book, Wowow, and her view, you know,
and her perspective is somewhat skewed, because we can sense
that her perspective the accident is somewhat affected by her
attraction to Zach, the brother's friend.
Speaker 2: Darn Zach, that darned Zach trouble maker. Keep away from
him on Thursdays. Stay away from Zack exactly. Now, is
this a true story? Is this something that came to
you through your imagination?
Speaker 1: This is totally a made up story on the only
true parts of it, I guess are the fact that,
you know, that accident sort of made me think about
this topic. I was, at point a parent of teenage drivers,
and when you're a parent of teenage drivers, you go
to those dark places sometimes and worry about what all
the terrible things that could happen, and how your kids
could get hurt and they could indeverently hurt other people.
But other than that, I you know, my book is
also a lot about family dynamics and the relationships within
the family and with Hannah's friends and with her first boyfriend.
And you know, I'm a mother and a sister, and
a daughter, and a friend and a wife. And so
I've been in all these roles of the different characters
in my book. So I know what it's like to
be to be that person, and so I inject a
little bit of that into what I write and then
just try to put my mind into the minds of
the characters and what they might think in that kind
of situation.
Speaker 3: Please do not move.
Speaker 2: There's more with Lori Miller Case coming up next, the
name of her book, The Accident. We're back, Lori Miller Case.
How much of this book? And I'm going to ask
you a very deep question, and I'll explain to you
how much of this book has actually taken place. And
the reason why I bring that up is because when
I wrote Halloween seventy eight in nineteen seventy eight, it
was written about a group of guys who got together
to form a band. There was a car accident at
that point in time. There was not a car accident
since that time, there was a car accident. In your writing.
How much have you written something down and it has
actually happened down the path? Because you are a receiver
of a future that most people cannot explain.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, I haven't really thought about that. I don't
know that the things that I wrote in this book
have actually happened. I mean, I'm sure similar things that
happen have happened. I know. You know, teens are often
dealing with divided loyalties, which is something that happens in
this book. It deals with divided loyalties. I think teens
also often deal with conflicting loyalties between say their family
and their parents and their friends, or their parents and
a love interest, or even their friends and a love interest.
I think also teens often have to grapple with moral
dilemmas that require making really difficult decisions. And that is,
you know, at the heart of this book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the part that I want to command
you on, is the fact that you do deal with
the upside downs to twist, suspends and stumbles, the fumbles
and discouragements. I mean, you handle that perfectly. And I
can just see a reader young or even my age,
they're going to pick this up going, oh God, oh God,
I can relate with this.
Speaker 1: Oh well, thank you very much. That's what I was
going for.
Speaker 3: Well, that just means you're one of us.
Speaker 2: That's the thing about it is that you know, yes
you've been a journalist, yes you made that crossover into
novel writing and things, but you write in a way
that's very us Well, thank you.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate that. It was interesting because I did
a panel for a writing workshop recently and I was
talking to the teen librarian and she said that fifty
percent of the people who take out YA books at
the library are actually adults. So I think there's something
even in adults that are geared towards young readers that
hits accord with older readers as well, because they were
at one time that age and they and they are
you know, parents or loved ones or siblings or whatever
of other people in their life, just like the characters
in this book are.
Speaker 2: I go to imagine on here in Charlotte, which is
for the young adults as well as even younger than that,
and you are spot on about the older people because
when you go into the YA section there, I am
going talk to them, talk to them, talk to them,
talk to them, talk to them. And they're sitting there going, oh,
I haven't read this book yet. Oh my god, look
at this book. Oh yeah, you're setting the older generation
up for something that they want to read. They didn't
have it. I didn't have it when I was the
you know, the age of a ya reader today. What
I had was a weekly reader.
Speaker 1: Right, We didn't have the young adult category. I mean
there were writers like you know, there were writers when
I growing up, like Judy Bloom who would have been
classified as young adults now. I mean if it was
if she was writing now, you know, the Outsiders would
have been probably classified as young adult. I mean, there
were a lot of the books we read that might
have been classified as young adult today, but it just
wasn't really a category back then. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, what we had was are you there? God, it's
me Margaret, And that was the book that everybody was
checking out. So you never got your hands on.
Speaker 1: It exactly unless you're lucky enough to own it.
Speaker 2: Or isn't that the true? So now, when you put
a book like this together, what was the process of
editing like? Because I always want to keep in mind
that listener who is a writer and who does hide things,
I call him writer hiders is what I call them.
And the thing is is that it's going to take
authors like yourself to get them out of hiding. The
process though, has to involve editing, not my favorite thing
to do, but you got to do it. What did
you go through?
Speaker 1: Oh? Wow, I went through a lot of editing. So
I'd say, first of all, this book started as an
adult short story in a workshop I was doing after
grad school with what of my professors, And then I
realized about a few months in that a short story
was a too small a container to contain the story
that I wanted to write, so it became a novel
and I wanted to get deeper into the head of
my teenage protagonist. I thought that would make it more interesting.
So I decided young adult was the way to go.
And I'd say there's a thing every November called National
Novel Writers Month nano Rimo, and I think it was
around twenty eighteen when I participated for the first time,
and basically it's writers all over the country. It may
even be international, I'm not sure, but writers all over
the country vow to write a novel or finish a
novel within one month, and it's the month of November.
And there's a way that you calculate the number of
pages you need to do every day in order to
make that happen, and you log your pages on the
computer every day, and there's all kinds of workshops going
on in different towns across the country. And I finished
the first draft of my novel during one November, and
I think the next November I did it again and
finished the revise of the book. But there have been
way more revises since then. You know, I think I started,
you know, I take classes, ongoing classes and writing books
for kids at a place near me, and I also
I am in several different writing groups, so I'm always
having pages of what I'm writing critiqued by other writers
and sometimes a teacher, so that I could I get
feedback about what's confusing, what needs more clarity, do certain
relationships need to be deepened. And also I was continuously
reading why books during the time that I was writing
this and kind of getting more of a hang up
the ya voice, because at first it was hard for
me to go from writing for an adult readership to
writing for teens because I was often told that my
language sounded to adult or I used words that teens
would maybe not use. But so I just kept revising
and revising. You know, I probably started sending the book
out to agents where it was ready, because I didn't
know any better since this was my first novel that
I submitted, and over time I realized that I needed
to fix something, so I kept working on it, and
after I'd been sending it out for about a I
don't know, about a year and a half, I was
getting interest. Agents really liked the idea and they were
asking for my full manuscript, but it wasn't getting picked up.
But some agents were being really nice and giving me feedback,
and so I decided to go through all the feedback
i'd received, and I realized that there was some common
There was some common feedback there. So I revamped the
whole novel again, and I changed it from third person
to first person, and I changed it from past tense
to present tense because I wanted to be more immediate
and more you know, right. I wanted to be right
in the character's mind, and it increased the pacing. I
started the book in a different place that one of
the agents suggested, because I think I had too much
backstory in the beginning. And it was after I did
this revise and started submitting it to both agents again
and small publishers that my publisher the first publisher that
I sent it to after I made this revise took
it a few months later with all press. So the
revision's paid off. But there are a lot of different
iterations of this story.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's the boom boom pow effect.
Speaker 2: That's that's going through there and making sure that you
don't you don't stop, because I mean when you talk about,
you know, using the language of the young adults and things,
even as a radio talent, they sit there and work
with us one on one saying they younger people wouldn't
say that. Younger people wouldn't say that, And you say,
and you've got to figure out what what is the
younger people saying? And so you and because I mean,
even though you might be for a twenty five to
forty five year old female audience, you still have to
talk to those who are going to fit into that
category in the future. So no, you totally are on
spot on when it comes to who is your reader
and how.
Speaker 3: Do they speak?
Speaker 1: Zach? Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Wow, Where can people go to find out more about you?
Speaker 3: Lorie?
Speaker 2: Because man, my god, I love where your passion is
and your outreach for sharing stories.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much much. They can go to my
website www. Lorimillercase dot com. That's l O R I
M I L L E r K A s E
and they could find out more about the book, places
to order the book. There's a book trailer on there
that my filmmaker nephew made for me, which is quite
good actually, and it gives a little information about my
other writing as well.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Well, you've got to come back to this show anytime
in the future, Laurie. The door is always going to
be open for you.
Speaker 1: I would love to thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 3: Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 1: Okay, thank you so much.
Speaker 2: And if you see Hannah say say hey, Aero said hello,
I will thank you er, thank you