SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Hey, wait a minute. I thought we were going to interview Evelyn Clarke, author of a new mystery. Who are you two?
V E SCHWAB: We are the faces. We are the names behind Evelyn Clarke, aren't we, Cat?
CAT CLARKE: We are Evelyn Clarke. We, too, are Evelyn.
SCHWAB: Everyone is Evelyn.
SIMON: V. E. Schwab and Cat Clarke join us from somewhere on book tour. They've combined under a pen name, Evelyn Clarke, to bring us the story of seven midlist writers who are brought to the private Scottish island of a mega-bestselling thriller writer named Arthur Fletch. But here's a twist - Arthur Fletch is dead. His last manuscript needs an ending. Oh, that should be easy. "The Ending Writes Itself" is the book by so-called Evelyn Clarke and V. E. Schwab and Cat Clarke. Thanks so much for being with us.
CLARKE: Thank you so much.
SCHWAB: Oh, thanks for having us.
SIMON: Who looked at whom, if I used that correctly, to say, let's write a novel together?
CLARKE: Victoria?
SCHWAB: It's entirely my fault. Cat and I have been friends for 15 years. I've spent many days in her kitchen venting about publishing, and I said to Cat, I have an idea for a weird thriller. If I write it, will you write the screenplay?
CLARKE: Right. But here's what you need to know, is that we had both made solemn oaths. I had left publishing in 2018. I used to write young adult novels, swearing never to write another book again. And Victoria had sworn that she would never, ever co-write a novel and that she would never write anything without magic in it. I think I maybe had an inkling of what was coming. What was coming, V?
SCHWAB: (Laughter) I went home and I started to work on it, and I came back the next day, and I said, wait, this is actually way more work. You have to write the book with me, too.
CLARKE: And I said, no, absolutely not.
SCHWAB: And I said, it'll be fun.
CLARKE: (Laughter) And here we are.
SCHWAB: Here we are.
SIMON: Well, thanks for giving me a chance to work in some questions, too.
CLARKE: (Laughter).
SIMON: So tell us about these midlist writers that are called to Arthur Fletch's island. All different genres, right?
CLARKE: Yes. Arthur Fletch, as a writer, is known for his epic twists, just mind-blowing twists. And now that he's dead, his publisher is desperate to find someone who can pull off that sort of twist in this final novel. So instead of just going to mystery thriller writers, they've picked great writers from different genres. So there's a young adult writer, a romance writer, a sci-fi writer, horror. Help me out, V.
SCHWAB: A debut and crime duo.
CLARKE: Yes. So covering all the bases because these writers will think outside of the box. And that way, the publisher hope that they'll get a mind-blowing ending.
SIMON: Help us understand the life of a midlist writer. I mean, Kate...
SCHWAB: Yeah.
SIMON: ...Newhouse (ph), one of your writers, lives on day-old pastries. Doesn't make anyone want to pursue the literary life, does it?
SCHWAB: Yeah. Midlist authors, they used to be kind of the backbone of publishing. It really referred to anyone who wasn't a massive bestseller or someone who hadn't been able to make it at all, and like so much of the middle system, it's collapsed over time. And so midlist authors are ones who are making ends meet. Maybe they weren't selling a million copies, but they were selling enough to get by.
SIMON: And they're offered a prize aren't - quite a prize, aren't they?
CLARKE: Yeah, this is the kind of money that dreams are made of. They will get money for finishing the book, whoever wins the prize. And also they will get a new three-book deal with Arthur's publisher, so they can relaunch their own career, and they will get all the marketing support that they could only have ever dreamed of.
SIMON: And how much fun was it to come up with someone readers never meet, but is central to this, and that's Arthur Fletch, the great writer?
SCHWAB: Oh, it's delightful. The author who's not there, right? The ghost in the book. I think that every book should have a ghost person, should have a person who's haunting everyone who is there.
SIMON: Any Stephen King in there?
SCHWAB: There is definitely some Stephen King. I mean, I think if you put all of the household names of the world into a blender and you blended them up, you would get Arthur Fletch. He is meant to just be immediately recognizable to even people who aren't readers.
SIMON: How did you come up with Arthur's castle?
CLARKE: Well, it had to be set on an island. And it had to be Scotland. We both live in Scotland.
SIMON: Yeah, 'cause there's no way out. Yeah.
CLARKE: Yeah, it had to be Scotland. So I found an island for sale that was quite a reasonable price with an incredible old house on it, and we thought that this is what this American author would do. He would buy a house and then kind of amend it to his whims.
SCHWAB: The other reason it had to be Scottish, though, was because the weather in Scotland changes on a dime. And so we could have them arrive on a beautiful, sunny, still day, and in that 72-hour deadline, you could have the worst storm of the century.
CLARKE: Yeah.
SIMON: May I ask, does writing under this collaborative pseudonym give you a kind of creative freedom you otherwise wouldn't have under your own names?
SCHWAB: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it began as a kind of shelter for us to take. Cat and I have spent many, many years kind of commiserating through our own publishing journeys, and to be able to give those commiserations a voice, it's inherently less lonely working with another person, but also incredibly liberating because it's Evelyn spilling the beans, not us.
CLARKE: Yeah. It gives us kind of a level of distance. So, you know, if people hate the book, that's not us.
SCHWAB: (Laughter).
CLARKE: So we - it doesn't feel quite so personal. And also it's - we wanted her to have one voice. We didn't want it to seem kind of choppy and disconnected 'cause we have quite different writing styles.
SIMON: So how did you manage the one voice?
SCHWAB: So a lot of co-authors will actually divide and conquer the work. You take points of view one, three and five. I'll take points of view two, four, six. And in order to avoid that, because I do think you can usually tell who's writing what, we kind of built the book like a house. We made a blueprint, and then we went in room by room, and we put down the structure, the floor, the walls. And one of us would decorate, and then the other one would come in and be like, I don't like those curtains and then adjust it, and we would adjust over the top of each other until we were both happy with the scene. And so I think that creates something where you can't tell where the seams are.
CLARKE: It's definitely more time-consuming.
SIMON: I remember some advice a great editor once gave me about endings.
SCHWAB: What is it?
SIMON: She said sometimes when you don't know what the ending is, it's because you already have it.
SCHWAB: Ooh.
CLARKE: Oh, well, Victoria's obsessed with endings.
SCHWAB: I was going to say, I'm obsessed with endings. I write all of my books backwards from the ending. So I know the ending of a story before I ever begin the story. To me, it's kind of the reason [inaudible].
SIMON: But then it's the beginning. If you're beginning with it, even if you call it the ending.
SCHWAB: It's my beginning. It's nobody else's beginning, but it's mine.
SIMON: I just thought I'd bounce that off you. OK.
SCHWAB: No, I love that, though, because there are multiple endings in this book.
SIMON: Yeah.
SCHWAB: There's an ending that you kind of anticipate and you're kind of meant to anticipate as a reader. I always like to hearken a good thriller to a magic act. A good magician will let you see three tricks, and he'll let you see how the first two work so that you're convinced it isn't real. And then you'll never figure out how the third one works. And so we kind of wanted to set it up that way, with if there are three endings in this book, you should be able to guess two of them.
SIMON: Does Evelyn Clarke feel like she wants to write more books?
CLARKE: I think I think she feels that she might.
SCHWAB: I think she feels she might not be done.
CLARKE: Yeah, there might be another book in her.
SCHWAB: We're not allowed to say more because we haven't finished writing it yet. You're going to get us in trouble.
CLARKE: (Laughter).
SIMON: Oh, but it does sound as if you have the ending, and now you're working your way to the beginning.
SCHWAB: That would be a very fair assumption.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: V. E. Schwab and Cat Clarke, or as they prefer, Evelyn Clarke. Their new book "The Ending Writes Itself." Thank you so much for being with us.
SCHWAB: Thank you.
CLARKE: Thank you so much.
SCHWAB: What a joy.
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