How Alyssa Cole Sits Down & Writes
'When No One Is Watching' is a psychological thriller that will stay with you long after you close the book.
Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing.
To hold onto her community’s past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block—her neighbor Theo.
But Sydney and Theo’s deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised.
When does coincidence become conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other—or themselves—long enough to find out before they too disappear?
When No One is Watching is perfect for fans of psychological thriller flicks like Get Out and Rear Window.
We caught up with Alyssa Cole to talk all things When No One Is Watching, as well as her best advice for writers tackling their first drafts and why the middle of the manuscript is always the scariest.
Q: Where/When do you like the write the most?
I write the most at my desk, and I’m usually most productive in mid-afternoon, early evening. My favorite place to write is in my bed, though!
Q: Are you more of a plotter or a pantser?
I’m a pantser who tries to plot. I always develop the basic beats of a book around the same time (that is how the story comes to me) but even when I plot extensively before writing, it often changes completely, and I’ve found that it can bind me in when I think I have to do things a certain way because I spent time deciding that while plotting. I guess I’m a plantser and trying to use very loose plotting for now to see if it saves time breaking free from a solid plot outline.
Q: Stephen King has a great line in On Writing that says “the scariest moment is always right before you start. After that, things can only get better.” That scary pre-start moment often inspires procrastination in writers. Suddenly, you have to clean your entire house, do the laundry and play Candy Crush for an hour before you can actually start writing. Is there anything you need to do before you can actually sit down and work?
Haha, Stephen King is wrong, the scariest part is in the middle of the book when you realize you have no idea what you’re doing and have to decide whether to go back or plow ahead. That said, I don’t have any kinds of rituals I need to do before I sit down and work. Sometimes I decide I need coffee, other times I need to look up an obscure term, but it changes day to day.
Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d give an author just starting out on their first draft?
It’s going to suck. Keep working on it and then one day it won’t suck. This will never get better but it’s also what makes writing satisfying—the “oh this actually doesn’t suck” moment after countless hours of thinking it does.
Q: Did your writing process change in any way when you were preparing to write a thriller following your romance novels?
No. I know that’s the boring answer but I write many subgenres of romance, and also romance requires the same amount of research and preparation as (and often more than) other genres.
Q: When No One is Watching tackles the injustice built into the foundation of America through an exploration of the specific injustice of the gentrification in Brooklyn. What drew you to explore this through the lens of a thriller?
I definitely had several ideas about how to explore it as a romance, but when the possibility of doing it as a thriller arose, it just seemed perfect and all of my previous ideas kind of snapped into place more solidly. Also, I love writing suspense and darker things, and trying new things as a writer, so it was fun to branch out into a new genre.
Q: So much of the creeping horror in When No One is Watching comes from Sydney watching deeply familiar aspects of her everyday life change or disappear while simultaneously being gaslit by the people around her. What was your entry point in world-building this neighborhood in quick, unwanted flux?
I guess my entry points were my reality as a Black woman growing up and living in NYC and also years of observing changes in real life and seeing how corporations and politicians control this change that is supposedly great for a community.
Q: There's a line in When No One is Watching where Sydney reflects on the surprising joy that comes from both learning and sharing lesser-known historical facts, even when they're unpleasant. Is this something you experienced while working on this novel?
I’d say it probably came more from writing my historical romances, which is why it was in the back of my mind as I wrote Sydney.
Q: What has been your favorite book this year?
Hm, probably a tie between Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn, which is YA fantasy that ties together Arthurian legend and Southern Black history and lore, and Courtney Milan’s The Duke Who Didn’t, which takes some complex topics like colonization, racism, and belonging and ties them together in a romance that is just warm and fulfilling on every level.
Pick up your copy of When No One Is Watching at Barnes & Noble, bookshop.org, or IndieBound. Enjoy!
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