M.S. Berry gives a glimpse inside the creative process behind her new thriller The Tenant.
Congratulations on the release of your new thriler, The Tenant! The Tenant is told in alternating chapters from the two main character’s points of view. What made you decide to set up The tenant in this fashion?
M.S. Berry: The Tenant has two main characters, Amy and Eleanor, and you get to dive into the minds of each of them. I thought it was important (and interesting) to see both these characters’ points of view— Amy struggles with her fears and Eleanor has a strange, nonsensical logic. Each woman has something that is shouting to be heard and so, moving back and forth between the two of them, lets each of them take charge of their own path. I tend not to use outlines as I initially work on my novels and so jumping back and forth between Amy and Eleanor revealed the plot to me organically. Each time one of the characters did something I knew that the other one would have to respond.
What is your approach to working out some of the more layered or complex challenges that thrillers/mysteries/crime novels pose?
M.S. Berry: Besides using great editors, my approach to working out some of the more layered and complex challenges of a thriller was to take out individual chapters and place them separately in piles so that I ended up with two books—Amy’s and Eleanor’s. When each timeline or motive or character interaction made sense and flowed I then wove all the chapters back together again, as if I were braiding the book.
Amy Ellis uses the pseudonym Paula Webb, and The Tenant is the first book of yours using the moniker M. S. Berry instead of Michelle Berry. Why the change up with your name?
M.S. Berry: I’ve made my main character in The Tenant a famous writer. And because writers in the past, especially women, used to hide their gender or create privacy by taking a pseudonym, I thought it might be novelistically suspenseful to give my writer a name she could hide behind. Give her a false sense of security. If Amy thinks she is hiding her fame behind a made-up name then she won’t suspect Eleanor (or anyone else) of knowing who she is and she can disappear into her writing, her life, without worry. Of course, in the long run, this doesn’t work, but it does surprise her that Eleanor has known who she is. In my case, when I decided to focus on writing thrillers I wasn’t trying to hide my gender or give myself privacy, but instead to create a distinction between the form of writing I am choosing to write at any particular time. My literary novels, that don’t contain much thriller-like-qualities, would be published under Michelle Berry (the name I’ve written in for 30 years). But my new thrillers, ones that play with things that may make you feel creepy, have my initials, M. S. Berry. And hopefully by distinguishing these two styles of books my readers might be able to know exactly what they are getting in the bookstore. Is my reader feeling like being caught in suspense today or is she more interested in a dysfunctional family drama? I also feel like I’ve created a new start for myself, as if I’ve begun a new phase in my writing life, I’ve dipped my toe in a whole new industry/genre that I have to learn. And that makes me excited.
Turnstone Press Ltd.
