A Conversation With Caitlin Rother on the Fine Line Between Truth and Fiction (Killer Writers)
Clay Stafford has a conversation with bestselling author Caitlin Rother on writing true crime and fictional thrillers, research, and more.
Some stories are imagined. Others are uncovered. In this conversation, I speak with bestselling novelist and true-crime author Caitlin Rother about the delicate balance between fact and fiction, the challenge of building suspense when readers think they already know the ending, and the emotional responsibility of bringing real people to life on the page. From pacing and scene construction to ambiguity, character, and investigative truth, Caitlin offers a candid, unique look at the craft behind both psychological suspense and true crime, including their differences and similarities.
“Caitlin, you’ve been very successful as a true crime writer, and you’re now becoming well known as a fiction author. When readers pick up one of your novels or true crime books, they’re looking for a compelling story. Since you’ve written in both genres, at a fundamental level, where do you see the strongest overlap between writing fiction and true crime, and how can skills in one benefit the other?”
“One of the things I try to do in true crime is make it read like a novel. I’ve always written narrative nonfiction, and both fiction and narrative nonfiction use similar storytelling techniques. When you read a true crime book, you feel like you already know what happened, because most publishers don’t give you a contract unless somebody’s been convicted. So you think you know the ending, but I try to give people surprises all the way through. I use suspense and pacing, giving you little rewards and discoveries throughout, similar to what you want to do in a novel to keep them turning the pages.”
“I’d think both fiction and true crime depend on creating that kind of page-turning tension. How do you approach building suspense in nonfiction, and how does that compare to how you build it in fiction?”
“I do it in a calculated way. You want to raise questions at the end of chapters and include tidbits of information that make people want to read more. You tease them a little at the beginning, and then you reveal more as you go through the book. I learned it by reading thrillers and suspense novels when I was starting out. The last half of the book goes faster and faster. You can’t maintain that pace all the way through, because it gets boring, so you ebb and flow. I do the same thing with both fiction and nonfiction. I’m working on the ending of a novel now. All the action is over, and the main character is confused, working through the book's central question. That reveal and resolution at the end are really important. My books are psychological, so those are the questions I’m throwing out there for the reader, and they want those questions answered. I’ve found that with my last couple of true crime books, readers sometimes get frustrated because they want me to say whether a person is guilty or not. I’m not taking a position. I want them to come to their own conclusion. TV wants resolution, but real life is sometimes ambiguous, and questions don’t always get answered properly.”
“Characters play a central role in both forms. In true crime, the people are real; in fiction, they’re imagined. What similarities do you find, and what liberties do you have when developing characters so readers feel emotionally invested in them?”
“I want characters in both real life and fiction to be real. I’ve read books by bestselling authors and felt their characters were cartoonish. Even if it’s fiction, I still want them to feel believable. I want to relate to the characters and root for them. Whether I’m working in real life or fiction, I flesh them out as much as I can; the bad guys are not all bad, and the good guys are not all good. With my latest true crime book, some readers appreciated that I told who one particular victim really was, the good and the bad, because that makes the person real. Others were offended that I put in negative things about a victim, but the victim was central to the question because it goes to the motive of whoever really did kill them. Most true crime books follow the standard formula: Law enforcement says this, prosecutors follow up, the jury votes, and now we have the right person in prison. My latest book doesn’t work that way.”
“Scenes are the building blocks of both forms. When you’re reconstructing real events rather than inventing fictional ones, how do you approach shaping scenes so they feel vivid and immediate?”
“It feels natural, so it’s hard to describe. I taught writing for a long time. The way I teach scene writing is that it’s the building block of both narrative nonfiction and fiction writing. You have to have a story arc, build toward a climax, and ensure every scene moves the action forward. Every scene has to have a purpose. If the purpose is to throw in information, that’s not good enough. Find a way for it to move the story forward. As I’ve been doing revisions on this new novel, I’ll find that a chapter is in the wrong place or a scene doesn’t belong there. Everything has to flow naturally and build; the entire book has to have a climax and a story arc, and each scene has to contribute to that building.”
“Are you a hard taskmaster on yourself?”
“I always feel like I’m never doing enough: not selling enough books, not working hard enough. My body rebels. I get frustrated with myself because I want to keep doing more and producing more. I’m happy when I’m working. I’m happy when I’m writing and happy when I go back and read something I’ve fixed.”
“Let’s talk about pacing. What lessons from true crime have influenced the way you pace your fiction, or vice versa?”
“As novelistic as I would like nonfiction to be, you still have things that happened in real life that you can’t change. Usually, there’s an opening scene where you grab somebody, often with a discovery or a dead body. Then you give the background of the characters while dribbling in the investigation. The middle part is really about the investigation, and then you have the trial. In Down to the Bone, there was one investigation in which the detective was going completely down the wrong road. Part of you wants to expose that, but you also don’t want to spend too much of the book on a detective heading in the wrong direction. Then the skeletal remains of the McStay family are found in the desert after he’d been doing a missing persons investigation for three years. There was also a second investigation, which most books don’t have. Rather than devoting a huge stretch of the book to the investigation, you have to keep adding new things all the time and think about what the reader already knows.”
“Something you do in that book is make the police and detectives talk, but obviously you can’t put words in their mouths. How do you approach dialogue in both fiction and true crime so that it feels natural and believable?”
“Down to the Bone is much more investigative. I’m trying to expose things as I tell the story. I’m building my own case without being overt about it, without explicitly stating my position. There’s a reason I’m showing each particular piece of dialogue. It’s not just to tell you a story; it’s to expose something and have the reader understand the disparities in the investigations and in the prosecution’s case. I try to do the same in fiction. It’s show-don’t-tell: Reveal things you hope the reader picks up on.”
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“Structure is something writers in both fields have to master. How do story arcs and narrative frameworks guide your true crime narratives and your fictional plots?”
“My first novel taught me an important lesson: I spent way too much time rewriting the first chapter and the first hundred pages. Total waste of time. My biggest piece of advice: Write it all the way through. However, I can’t start writing until I know what the story will be. With true crime, I’ve got to do a lot of research before I sit down to do an outline. To sell a true crime book, you have to have a proposal, and the meat of the proposal is your outline. If you don’t do all that research first, you can’t tell the story, and you can’t know what the story arc is. With Down to the Bone, I couldn’t get the McStay family or the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department to talk to me, so I had to find a way to tell the story through court research, news articles, and trial transcripts. Four months before my deadline, I got a huge treasure trove of discovery materials and witness interviews. I also got investigative reports from the detectives, so I now knew what they were thinking, but I had to rewrite most of the book at the last minute. My outline didn’t matter anymore because everything changed. You have to be flexible enough to drop everything and tell the story the way it really happened.”
“But you also want me to feel something, right? How do you create emotional stakes that resonate, whether the story is factual or invented?”
“With a true crime, it depends on the case and what message I want to leave with readers. With Down to the Bone, because it was an investigative book, I wanted you to feel outrage; so many mistakes were made.”
“I did. You twisted my heart.”
“That’s the feeling I wanted you to have: outrage and frustration. My other books are more connected to the characters and the victims. It depends on the case, and I don’t handle every book the same way. With the thrillers I’ve been writing, I want these characters to come alive. I want readers to relate to them, root for them, and get inside their heads. That’s always great if you can do it in true crime, too, but it depends on what access you have to people, because you can’t get into people’s heads unless they talk to you.”
“Do you find that your revision process differs between fiction and true crime, or is the core principle similar?”
“With Down to the Bone, considering I had to rewrite the entire book, it was very different. I had written a 90,000-word book, mostly based on documents and some interviews. Once I got all that additional material and added 60,000 words, my revision was basically surgically chopping out 43,000 words while keeping it accurate, flowing, and compelling. With fiction, I’m making sure the pacing is good, that there are no places where it bogs down, and no information dumps where the reader’s going to glaze over. Early revisions in both fiction and nonfiction are macro; I’m looking for big things, holes, and repetition. It’s like a giant puzzle; you want to make sure everything is in the right place.”
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New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother has written or co-authored 17 books, the latest of which are Hooked and Staged from Rother’s new “Katrina & Goode” thriller series. Her other recent titles are Down to the Bone, Body Parts, and Death on Ocean Boulevard. https://caitlinrother.com
