Member-only story
How I Turned My Autofiction Novel Into a Thriller
The first novel I ever wrote was never published, though I labored over it for six years. Like most first novels, it was shamefully autobiographical. It followed a woman immersed in the male-dominated world of tech since college who, at thirty-five, meets an older woman writer who introduces her to the power of the feminine, and, in doing so, changes her life.
The nearly hundred agents who considered it were kind and even encouraging, but rejected the book on the grounds that it didn’t have enough plot. And fair enough. Big plot-driven stories — sci-fi, mystery, and, yes, thrillers — were not my thing. At that time, I was drawn to elucidating the mundane, and character journeys — sitting inside someone’s mind for hundreds of pages — were all I wanted to read.
I challenged myself to write a similar internal character journey, but with a real, propulsive plot. Specifically, a death. I needed to force myself to raise the stakes externally and see where that took me.
But one can only try for so long before admitting defeat. More than anything, I wanted to tell the story of a woman in tech crawling out from a life of male influence and — crucially — I wanted that story to be…
