Chris Mooney writes:
I started work on what eventually became Deviant Ways during my sophomore year in college, when I took my first creative writing courses. I had always known I wanted to be a writer and had what I thought to be a good idea for a book. I was eighteen. I wrote the first chapter and handed it in with the words "to be continued" written at the bottom. When I got my first chapter back, the professor had written at the bottom "no, you will not continue." After class, he told me the writing was "for shit" and that I had to rewrite the assignment. He also told me, more or less, to consider another occupation other than writing. So I did.
Years later, in graduate school, I decided to write the book. I was twenty-two. It took me two years to write it. After that, it took another year to find an agent I liked and respected, a lovely woman named Pam Bernstein. Pam told me I had to rewrite it. So I did. Six months later, we shopped it around to some editors, all who said they loved it but that it needed work. Enter Richard Marek, thriller editor for Robert Ludlum’s early novels and my all time favorite book, The Silence of the Lambs. He read it over the weekend and called me back on a Monday. His advice was to start from page one. So I did. I scrapped the entire story, got rid of all the characters except one, and over the next two years, rewrote and revised the book.
I was twenty-nine when Deviant Ways was published. And it only took me eleven years.
Chris Mooney's most recent book, Remembering Sarah, is currently nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is working on his next novel The Missing.
