Guest Post: How I Came to Write Killer Story

Author Matt Witten returns to Colloquium to discuss his latest thriller, Killer Story.

The book features Petra Kovach, an idealistic journalist who launches a true-crime podcast so that she can investigate a murder. Petra loved Olivia Anderson like a little sister, even though Olivia became an an alt-right YouTuber.

Disparate political viewpoints aside, Petra’s passionate quest for justice propels her program to the top of the podcasting charts, but her just-barely-legal tactics backfire. She loses everything: her job, her love, and her reputation.

Now she is fighting to get her life back . . . and catch Olivia’s killer.

How I Came to Write Killer Story

by
Matt Witten

I began writing Killer Story because I’m a huge fan of crime podcasts like Serial and Accused and crime documentaries like Making a Murderer and Jinx. At the same time, I’m a skeptic of those shows. I’m intrigued by how reporters sometimes omit key details or distort the truth in order to tell a better story. In this ultra-competitive era, getting clicks and followers can be more important than getting the truth.

Another inspiration for Killer Story is all the men and women I know in their twenties who are fiercely dedicated to going into journalism despite the huge obstacles they face. Journalism is such a rapidly changing field, with newspapers dying, internet news sites unable to find workable economic models, and decent paying jobs increasingly hard to get. Those aspiring young journalists have a sense of mission that I admire. Their passion refuses to be denied.

I also found inspiration in my own life. All television writers get fired at least once in their careers, or to use the industry parlance, they “don’t get their contracts renewed” and that has happened to me, as well. There are many reasons television writers don’t get renewed – often it’s as simple as there’s a new head writer who wants to hire people they’ve worked with before. But whatever the reason, losing your job is painful.

And it happens all the time in the newspaper industry. Will Doolittle, a reporter for the Glens Falls Post-Star, told me that when he started out twenty years ago, they had fifty reporters; now they’re down to eight. All over the country, newspapers are laying people off or going under.

So I created a main character in Killer Story, Petra Kovach, who is about to get laid off from yet another journalism job. She obsesses about all the things that just about everyone I know who’s ever lost their job, including myself, stresses about: Did I choose the right path in life? Is what happened somehow my fault? Will I ever get a job in the industry again?

But Petra gets back up off the mat and keeps on fighting.

As I’ve indicated, Petra is based partly on me; I identify with her feelings and forgive all her flaws. She’s a young woman who’s trying to make it in a very difficult business. Petra is also inspired by a brilliant young woman I know who, like Petra, is a first-generation immigrant with big dreams from an economically disadvantaged family. She’s working her way through law school now.

The murder victim in Killer Story is Olivia Anderson, a Harvard freshman and alt-right YouTuber. Olivia is inspired by the alt-right media figure, Tomi Lahren. In the book, we meet her before she becomes a controversial young celebrity. While I’m not at all a fan of the political views that Olivia adopts, I found it intriguing to speculate about all the pressures that might have transformed a sweet, caring young girl into somebody who is, on the surface at least, a pretty unlikeable person.

WritingKiller Story gave me a renewed, healthy skepticism of the news media, along with a new appreciation for journalists like Petra who overcome all kinds of obstacles to bring us the truth about the world. I hope you are as captivated by Petra as I am, and that you don’t guess the killer until the very end!

Meet Matt

Matt grew up in Baltimore and says he began writing poetry when he was in first grade “about how great the Baltimore Orioles baseball team was, and how terrible the New York Yankees were.” In tenth grade, his drama teacher, on whom he had a crush, suggested he write a play. So of course he did, and it was performed for a local women’s club.

At the age of seventeen, Matt fell ill and swore to remember, should he recover, that “writing is central to who I am and I should never give it up. . . . I held tight to my dream.”

Matt holds degrees from Amherst and Brandeis Universities. For a time, he taught playwriting to inmates at the Greene Correctional Facility while he continued writing his own plays. One of them, The Deal, was about an FBI investigation into small-town political corruption in a small town. His favorite, Sacred Journey, was inspired by a homeless Native American man he encountered in Brooklyn and widely performed.

Matt’s four Jacob Burns mystery novels mirrored his own life at the time. Like him, the main character was a writer married to an English professor at Adirondack Community College, with two boys aged five and three.

Although he never planned to write for television, he penned episodes of Homicide and Law & Order as a freelancer. Soon he and his family moved to Los Angeles where he has spent more than twenty years writing for series including House, Pretty Little Liars, Law & Order, CSI: Miami, JAG, Judging Amy, Women’s Murder Club, The Glades, Medium, and Supernatural. He also wrote the script for a movie called Drones, and is working on a pilot for NBC called 51%, as well as a Hallmark Mystery movie. His television scripts have been nominated for an Emmy and two Edgars. He finds it especially fulfilling to watch, with family and friends, a television episode he has written, and contemplate “that millions of other people are also watching my words being performed.”

He hasn’t given up teaching, serving as a part-time TV writing instructor with the UCLA Writers’ Program.

The writers who have most inspired him most are Dr. Seuss because of the freedom with which he wrote and his imagination, and Elmore Leonard for his economy of language and realistic dialogue. Matt has never lost his love of reading thrillers, especially the psychological thrillers that he consumes “like candy,” penned by Gillian Flynn; Harlan Coben; Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen; Laura Lippman; Jessica Knoll; A.J. Finn; Paula Hawkins; Shari Lapena; Karin Slaughter; Mary Kubica; Lisa Lutz; Ruth Ware; Linwood Barclay; Fiona Barton; Lisa Jewell; JP Delany; Hollie Overton; and others. So he finally decided to write his own thriller and The Necklace is the result. The story is set in Lake Luzerne, New York, where he and his family spend their summers. Matt has found the process of writing on his own “fun. Collaborating on a TV show is fun too, but sometimes it feels good to just sit in your office – or the coffee shop – and write something that’s all yours, that comes totally from the heart, like The Necklace and Killer Story,” both published by Oceanview Publishing. The Necklacehas been optioned for film by Appian Way and Cartel Pictures, with Leonardo DiCaprio attached as the producer. Matt has already adapted the novel as a screenplay.

Matt’s dream is “to write a novel a year until I’m 80, and then take it from here.”

Connect with Matt at his website, or on Goodreads, X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram or BokkBub.