Cassandra Myers
They Shut Me Up
DOSSIER: Being such a fan of shows like Boardwalk Empire and Seinfeld, your TV & film tastes have quite a wide range. Is there a genre you don’t particularly care for? Moody vampires, angry aliens, baseball documentaries? If so, why?
MYERS: I really try not to limit myself with genres, because there’s so much great art out there in almost every form imaginable, which I find really inspiring. I will watch everything from Last Year at Marienbad to Project Runway to Step Brothers and beyond.
That said, I have very little patience for TV shows featuring protagonists who are constantly having affairs and being sad in expensive, minimalist kitchens, or ones starring white-teethed actors in their thirties playing high school students who talk like they’re in a David Mamet play. And I really dislike shows and movies that pander to their audiences with main characters who are just so charming and good-looking and superior to everyone around them that they’re basically just wandering around being awesome all the time (and this occurs in both small-town dramas and action movies, in case you’re wondering).
I basically don’t care about genre – it’s more about the writing. If you write interesting, real characters and show me something I didn’t know or notice about humanity, I’m all yours. If you’re basically a toothpaste commercial or the movie equivalent of a flattering Buzzfeed quiz result, I’m out.
DOSSIER: Since you’ve written so much (and for so many different outlets) please share with the Dossier audience how easy (or difficult) it was for you to get your debut novel, THEY SHUT ME UP, picked up for agent representation and publication with Winding Road Stories.
MYERS: I actually don’t have agent representation yet, but yes, getting They Shut Me Up published was definitely difficult. Probably no more or less difficult than any author’s road to publication, to be fair, but there was a lot of rejection along the way and for years I didn’t even submit it. I’d written other novels and moved on to other styles.
But I have a wonderful friend who told me about the Twitter pitch event called PitMad, where you can pitch your manuscript to agents, editors, and publishers, and I thought, Why not? I was planning on only pitching my newer manuscript but asked my dad if I should pitch They Shut Me Up while I was at it, and he said, “Why not?” (Are you sensing a pattern?)
So I did. And that was how my editor and publisher found me. He asked to see the full manuscript in December and by the end of January I had a signed contract to publish my first novel. That part of the process was actually very fast — everything else was painfully slow. But we got there! It turns out that “Why not?” is a very powerful question to ask.
DOSSIER: When and where do you write, and what kind of environment do you prefer? (E.g., along the Gourmet Ghetto or the Northside neighborhood in Berkeley?)
MYERS: I wish I was one of those cool authors who wrote in cafés or while long-haul trucking or even just outside, but I’m definitely not. I need absolute silence and I also can’t sit still for very long, so I write at home on my computer. (Incidentally it always boggles my mind when writers say they write longhand or on a typewriter — for better or for worse I am way too impatient for either of those methods, although they are definitely more visually interesting.)
I sit at my computer, bite my lip, write three sentences, sigh, make ten notes, and then get back to writing. I need the silence to concentrate and also because I mutter to myself and read sentences out loud if they’re not working. I also noticed recently that while I’m writing I’ll make the same facial expressions my characters are making in the story, and that clearly needs to be done in private.
If I can write 1000 words in a session, even if they’re terrible, I’m happy. I’d like to write first thing in the morning when my brain is freshest but that usually doesn’t happen, so I write whenever I can.
DOSSIER: You had a short story recognized in the Kalanithi Writing Award contest, and you’ve written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Daily News, The Bakersfield Californian, The Santa Cruz Sentinel, and others. It’s the university science stuff you wrote about, however, that really has the Dossier interested. What was that all about? (Please say time travel, please say time travel!)
MYERS: No time travel, unfortunately, although I have written a little about quantum mechanics, which is as interesting as time travel (and kind of related). I’m actually still a university science writer for San José State University (by day). I was a comparative literature major who interned as a political journalist in college, so science writing was definitely not something I was anticipating becoming my career, but it has.
I don’t have a science background at all, but I can write, and I’ve actually found it to my advantage that I’m not as familiar as other science writers with scientific topics. That means that when I interview professors and students and scientists they have to explain it to me so I can explain it to readers, and having a semi-blank slate actually makes that process a little easier.
Over the years I’ve written for Stanford’s Department of Medicine and for San José State about COVID trials, a dying patient’s miraculous recovery, quantum technologies, an octopus nursery in the deep sea, and more. I was kind of a lit snob in college and I’ve found science to be far more interesting than I would’ve guessed. It’s also made my writing richer by widening my perspectives and exposing me to ideas and concepts I never would’ve come across otherwise. I’m grateful for how it turned out.
DOSSIER: Your debut novel, THEY SHUT ME UP is described as “The Godfather meets Agatha Christie with a dash of Seinfeld.” When you sat down to write it, what was the one angle that you kept going back to most—the gangster element, the mystery detective angle, or the yada yada?
MYERS: I’d say all three angles were equally important, although maybe that’s a cheat of an answer. The mystery was baked into the idea from the very beginning — this book started with its ending, and I always knew it was going to be both a whodunit and a whydunit. I spent a lot of time constructing the book so the mystery would play out a certain way, and that was a huge part of my inspiration for the idea in the first place. My favorite mysteries are the ones where the theme of the book and the solution to the mystery are deeply intertwined; I hope They Shut Me Up accomplishes that.
It was also always a gangster story because I find that world so interesting. I love any organization with its own politics, rules, infighting, vocabulary, etc. and the whole idea of “organized crime” is just fascinating to me. It’s also a world that historically women are not participating in at high levels, and so I wanted to peek behind that door, or at least imagine what it would be like to peek behind it.
And then the “yada yada yada:” I’m a huge fan of comedy, and I love how Seinfeld in particular is all about the little petty things that we probably shouldn’t care about but we do. No one on Seinfeld is glamorous; no one is even cool. They’re completely human and fragile and ridiculous and I’m certain that even though we all see movies about cool, glamorous mobsters, the real ones are just as human as the rest of us. So I wanted that in my book, too.
Also, I always try to be funny in real life, so I couldn’t resist trying to be funny in my book.
Website: Cassandra Myers | Amazon Page
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