A writer more interesting than her writing

Vera Wong goes down to her San Francisco tea shop one morning to find the door broken open and a body on the floor holding a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? 

Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer. So begins Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto.

As the book evolves the reader meets four characters any one of whom could have been the murderer, assuming a certain suspension of disbelief, but all of whom have good reasons not to have been responsible. I am afraid that by the process of elimination, I identified the murderer—although not the means or motivation—two thirds of the way through the book.

In fact I found Sutanto more interesting than feisty Vera Wong. Sutanto grew up shuttling back and forth between Indonesia, Singapore, and Oxford and considers all three places her home. She has a Masters from Oxford University, but it took her nine years after graduating from her creative writing course to get her first publishing deal. She now writes YA rom-coms, YA suspenseful thrillers, adult contemporary fiction, and adult suspense novels.

She told a Writer’s Digest interviewer in 2024 that she usually creates the plot first because “I outline my books before I start writing. But I never know what the character is going to be like until I actually start writing. Then their voice kind of comes out onto the page. When I first started writing, my first ever book was totally pantsed. I didn’t know how to outline and so I think the first three books I wrote, I pantsed them. I remember my husband being like, ‘I was just reading an interview with this author, and he says that he outlines his books before he writes them.’ And I was immediately like, ‘How dare you. I’m an artiste. Every author has their own process. Don’t tell me to outline.’ And then I realized, this isn’t working because I was getting stuck all the time. Even after I finished the draft, it would be a hot mess. I would have to rewrite a lot of it. So, when I first started outlining, I only outlined about half of the book, and things would surprise me. There was a lot more flexibility.”

By her eighteenth book her outlines had become meticulous. “I like to say I’m a Chinese mother: My outlines listen to me because my characters are scared of me. They know not to surprise me. My outlines, they have no chill, you know? They’re chapter by chapter. They tend to be 12 pages long, and they’re quite detailed.”

By October 2024 Sutanto had published 11 books in four years. How had she managed? “Because it took me so long to get my first ever publishing deal—during those 10 years I was writing and then I would get really sad when the books ended up getting rejected by everybody—I learned the healthiest thing for me to do was, once I finished a book, once it was ready to query or go on submission, the best thing for me to do was to immediately move on to a new project. To fall in love with a new project so I could let go of the last book. So, I got into that habit where as soon as I finish a draft and I edit it, I send it off to my agent.

“Now I actually do take a break, but I emotionally detach myself from it. Then I’m actively thinking of my next project. I’m actively asking myself, What do I want to work on next? So that’s number one, the mental health part of the answer.

“And then the logistics part. I’ve trained myself to write super-fast because it’s the only way I can outrun this really mean little voice in my head. I call it my ‘editor,’ and as I write, this inner editor is saying things like, ‘Oh wow, that sentence is awful. That’s so awkward. Does that even make sense? The character is so boring. This plot makes no sense.’” To silence the voice, she writes in 15-minute sprints and stops after 2,000 words. “I don’t do anything with that manuscript for the rest of the day. It gives me a break, and I’ve written 2,000 words.” Do it every day and you soon have a book.

You can find the interview at https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/the-wd-interview-jesse-q-sutanto

Sutanto has also posted instructions on how to outline, write, and preserve your mental health while doing it at https://jesseqsutantoauthor.com/for-writers  Good stuff.