Most writers put a lot of thought into their work. You don’t sit with a project for over 70,000 words and not think about its construction, what drives the story forward, how the questions you raise are going to be answered, and if those answers are going to be satisfying to the reader. With that being said, Sarah Epstein’s consideration and understanding of how exactly her books are constructed is on an entirely different level. That thoughtful consideration seems to be embodied in the neat background of the room she’s in when we speak via zoom; white bookshelves and polished timber floors, as well as a neatly organised desk.
Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and lockdowns in Melbourne, Epstein still hasn’t seen a physical copy of her second book, Deep Water – which follows the search for missing 13-year-old Henry Weaver from a small Australian town, through the eyes of Henry’s friend, 16-year-old Chloe, and Henry’s older brother, Mason – in a bookstore. As a result of the lockdowns, she was the first author to appear on OzAuthorsOnline – a platform for digital author events in response to the cancellation of live launches, events, panels, and appearances.
Amid the multiple lockdowns and restrictions, Epstein has had a piece of big news with the announcement that the rights for her debut, Small Spaces, were optioned for film. I congratulate her on it. “I’ve actually known about it for quite a while and haven’t been able to say anything,” she admits. “I had a zoom call with both of the producers, as well as the writer and director, Shelly Lauman…they’re really positive. I just have to temper my expectations because I know full well that options do not mean movies get made.” But her pragmatic optimism aside, Epstein can’t keep the delight from her voice at the enormity of it all. Nor should she.
The adjective which immediately springs to mind to describe Epstein is ‘generous’. She’s willing to share her time, her experience, and her thoughts. Even the way her camera shows so much of the room behind her speaks to that openness. I tell her how much I enjoyed Deep Water which is perhaps one of the most well-written books I’ve read this year. The way everything which transpires across the plot seamlessly builds upon itself to culminate in the reveal, and I geek out over the technical construction behind the story. “I love hearing that from a fellow writer, it’s a big compliment,” she says with a huge smile, noting that “so much work goes in” to ensuring the ending of her stories are tightly crafted. She’s definite on the need for ending to be done right: “You need to have a logical conclusion for readers so they don’t think ‘where did that come from?’ Clues need to be peppered through so that when the reader comes to the climax, you don’t want them to have guessed it too early in the piece, or at all, but when everything is revealed, you want them to be saying, ‘of course, because of this and this and this…all the clues were there, but I just hadn’t put it together.’ The worst thing I think you can do for someone who’s invested in a thriller or a mystery and they get to the end, and they’ve guessed it, or they’ve had an inkling… but you need to have it so that when the reader gets to the conclusion it’s logical and it makes sense.”
I follow up with my favourite question to ask authors – planner or pantser – even though I have a strong suspicion as to what the answer will be. She pauses for a second. “Planner absolutely. One million percent.” (I was right.) And as she talks through her process, it’s clear she has a well-considered understanding of the mechanics that drive a story: “I can come up with a really strong opening, and come up with some intriguing questions, but I’ll hit a stall point and I’ll think…ok where am I going. Sometimes I’ll start a project […] I want to hear the protagonist’s voice, so I start drafting the chapters to hear who they are, what their situation is, what their grievances are, their day-to-day life as the story opens, but the second I start weaving in bits and pieces of their past, or something that’s happened in the recent past, I need to stop and figure out where this is going and ultimately what the ending is going to be. I do a broad overall plan about what the core story is, who the main players are and where the story’s going to end up at the climax. I then start to break it down more into chapter by chapter, or at least, the three separate acts, or kind of…my pinch points […] I do know I want to have that building tension, I want to have that all is lost moment, I need to have new information as I build to a climax, then I need those denouement chapters, you know, what happens after the climax.” Her background in visual arts and graphic design (most authors “don’t know I was in visual arts for 25 years before I got started with writing”, although her artist Instagram attests that she is a beautiful artist, and she even has a greeting card range) is part of the process, too: “I’ll actually colour code my charts by characters and scenes and even pacing, and I’ll actually print out a chapter breakdown as a physical paper form and put it on my desk and colour code, so I can look as a visual snapshot where I’ve got characters doing things, what the pacing is like.”
Epstein speaks in paragraphs. It reveals just how much her writing is a cerebral process – it’s really no wonder that she plans out her writing. As we talk, it becomes clear that there’s a lot of hard work that goes in to making her story so engaging. For Epstein, “character drives the story” because “a character makes a decision and the consequences follow on, and that then springboards another decision, or another sticky mess that they get themselves into. And that then the way that springboards has to be logical to their personalities, to their character that I’ve set up in all of the chapters so far.” It’s a great insight into how to approach story. She goes on to elaborate that, “you can have a very basic story, but once you start looking at your characters and their home situation, it makes it easier for you to realise how they’re going to react in any give situation, and what their relationships are like with other people. I like to call my books both plot and character driven because rather than just a cracking good plot or a creepy book, I want people to be invested in the characters.”
She follows up with an incisive comment about why it’s so vital to her teenage readership: “The thing about YA and the challenge for writing for teen readers, they are much more likely to put a book down, discard a book, as soon as it’s boring…they’ll put it down as soon as they’re bored.”
Deep Water is anything but boring. I say to Epstein that I was hooked from one of the first pages because there were too many answered questions: Why was Henry’s bike left at the station? What did he mean when he said ‘when I leave, I won’t be like you, I won’t keep on coming back here again and again’ and does that mean he left by choice and if so, why leave the bike? Chloe’s certainty that wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye in concert that the other two questions leaves something not adding up. That was all within the first five pages, by the way – and from there, I was totally hooked. She smiles. “It’s funny how you can just put in those little turns of phrase, or just put in a question that in the protagonist’s mind that’s just enough, it’s just enough for readers to go ‘ooh what’s this all about’ or ‘ooh what does that mean?’ ”
The need to find the answer to the question and the way it drags the reader along is furthered by the sense of increasing stakes as the story progresses as we discover more. When I attended YA Day 2019 (back in the time when I could legally leave my house and go to events in person…a simpler time), Epstein was a panelist, and I vividly recall her saying that she works to ratchet up the tension and increase the stakes across the book. It’s a valuable piece of writing advice, regardless of genre. Given her awareness about the preferences of her readership, Epstein notes, “I’m very conscious of the middle in my books to make sure there’s a lot of interesting things going on but if it’s breakneck speed, the reader will get exhausted and put the book down […] you do need to give your characters breathers, so you’ve got some nice scenes in there that are character interaction…or you’ve got your protagonists pondering everything they’ve learned so far. So the scenes might be a little bit quieter, but there’s got to be some gold nugget in there…some little gem that’s still valuable to the plot.”
Like most authors, writing was not Epstein’s first job. While she loved writing when she was at school, when she graduated the only vaguely writing-related degree was journalism (“I had no interest in being a journalist”). She pursued her other interest, art, through a graphic design degree, and it was only in her 30s “when I had babies” that she began writing again. Deep Water she wrote “over the span of 13 years.” I have to wrap my head around the idea of sitting with a story for so long, but it makes sense that the story is so tight precisely because she took that interval of time to absolutely nail it. In fact, she reveals that “it went through a few iterations,” where her first version of the book “was all just from Chloe’s point of view. [But] what I realised as I was doing yet another revision of it, was just how interested I was in Mason and Ivy Weaver. […] So I actually thought, I need to just write a few chapters from Mason’s point of when is just to get into his head and see where he’s coming from, so I can understand him better, […] and that’s how the structure changed completely.” The dual perspective is one of the things which actually makes the book so good – although the reader gets more information because it’s coming from two sources, it gives us more scope to make assumptions that can end up being wrong. Not only does that feed into the tightness of the plot, pacing, and reveal, but it also leans really beautifully into the trope of unreliable narrator, something authors in particular love to discuss quite a bit, but which for readers, means flawed and real characters. Epstein, of course, has thought about this, too. “We make judgement calls based on interactions with people. But our interactions might be completely different to what they have with somebody else.” She continues. “What I wanted to do is show that it’s fine to root for a strong female protagonist…but it doesn’t mean she’s not flawed. A really good way to do that is when we do see her through Mason’s eyes.” She tells me she wrote a sentence toward the end of the novel that sums up a lot of the themes she explores in Deep Water, even though she doesn’t write with a theme consciously in mind: “Mistakes show we’re human, but it’s what we do next that reveals who we truly are.” I’m not going to elaborate on the line because I wouldn’t want to give away any spoilers, but I see what she means.
Epstein reveals that she’s working on another psychological thriller for her publishing house, but that “my interests are quite varied in terms of writing and projects, so I have a bit of a plan going on behind the scenes of things that will probably break me out of this dark thriller genre.” I’m intrigued, but she’s tight-lipped. For someone who’s been so generous with the information she’s shared across the past hour of conversation, it only serves to heighten my interest. “I’m always consciously looking for ways moving forward, where I can marry the two sides of my creative personality,” she says, as she teases that what is likely to come next will be “a different area, it’ll be really fun to talk about,” and that she’s really fighting to overcome what “we as writers have all the time, this crushing self doubt [which] is just so tedious.”
It’s a surprise that someone as meticulous in her work suffers self. Epstein’s work is polished and thoughtful – the mark of someone who knows their craft thoroughly. Whatever comes next, I’m sure it will bear those exact same hallmarks, so she has no need to doubt herself.
