Making It Up with Lori Roy, author of Lake County

Carter Wilson's Making It Up

Lori Roy is an award-winning novelist. Her debut novel, Bent Road, was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel by an American Author. Until She Comes Home was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. Let Me Die in His Footsteps was named one of the best fifteen mystery novels of 2015 by Oline Cogdill and received the 2016 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, making Roy the first woman to receive an Edgar Award for both Best First Novel and Best Novel—and only the third person ever to have done so. Gone Too Long was named a People magazine Book of the Week, was named one of the Best Books of Summer 2019, and was excerpted by Oprah magazine.

Among other things, Lori and Carter discuss seeing writing as building a career instead of just a hobby, becoming more comfortable with the writing process over time, and how Lori studies screenwriting to improve her structure and dialogue. At the end of their conversation, they make up a suspenseful story using a line from Greg Iles’s Cemetery Road.