Writing Without Permission: Ashley Winstead on Genre, Grief, and Imagination

A college reunion ending in bloodshed. Enemies-to-lovers who want to save the planet. A patriarchal cult. Opposites attract amidst Texas politics. A Southern gothic thriller. And most recently, a glimpse into the world of true crime alongside a contemplation on the inescapability of grief.

You probably wouldn’t find the characters of these books sitting together at a bar or even on the same shelf at a bookstore. Yet they’re all written by the same bestselling author. Ashley Winstead: a cat mom, a Texan, an academic, and an artist with words and paint.

Ashley met with me over Zoom to talk about her incredible ability to write across genres, her new novel This Book Will Bury Me, and the pull of made-up places.

EM: I’m so excited your new book, This Book Will Bury Me, is out in the world. I was a huge fan. I wanted to start with asking about your process writing across genres. Your first novel, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, and your latest are both primarily suspense. Is suspense what you originally saw yourself writing, or have you always thought you’d write across genres?

AW: When I started out my writing career—and I think it was because I was in academia for so long, both undergraduate and then getting my postgraduate degree—I had this idea that the only writing was literary fiction, fiction that was aiming to be the canon and to be studied by graduate students one day. So that was a monkey on my back. That was a weight I put on myself. And that realization didn’t hit me until after I’d finished my PhD, I’d turned in my dissertation, I’d defended it, I’d gotten past all those barriers.

To do all of that, I’d developed this effective, efficient work ethic where I could sit myself down from morning till night and just write, write, write, and research, seven days a week. And I thought to myself, what if you took that work ethic and actually wrote a novel that you enjoyed? It sounds so silly, but I had to give myself permission to let go of this idea that if I was going to write, it was going to have to be the next Great American Novel or something like that. I had to convince myself no one was going to see what I was writing. I was only doing it for me, and within those permissions and those parameters, I ended up writing a contemporary YA fantasy. And that’s what got me my agent and that’s how it all started.

But I had this instinct—because I’m such a voracious reader across all the different genres, and I just love everything under the sun—I was probably going to want to write everything under the sun eventually. So, when I was querying, that was one of the important questions I was asking agents: Do you represent multiple genres and how would you feel if I skipped around a lot? And luckily, I landed with an agent who had the breadth of contacts in the industry and ability to read [multiple genres]. She ended up being a perfect fit, and I’ve been with her ever since. So, I think my intention was always to write across genres and it’s funny to me that I’m best known for my suspense and crime fiction. If you had told me that, six, seven years ago, I would have been like, what? I couldn’t have imagined that.

I started writing In My Dreams I Hold a Knife to procrastinate edits on the YA fantasy. I was like, oh, this edit letter my agent’s just given is so long and seems so hard. It sounds easier to write a whole new book. And that’s what I did, and I thought, this is a thriller, the pacing is moving like a thriller, there’s a murder. So really, I’m here by happy accident.

EM: I think a lot of us in MFA, PhD, higher academia, feel this pressure toward literary fiction, which is so wonderful and important, but there are all these other genres. And sometimes it feels like genre doesn’t even matter so much.

I loved that in your new bio at the end of Bury Me, you described your writing as “about power, ambition, complicity, and love in the modern age.” Do you think that sums up how all your work ties together, across genres?

AW: I do, yeah. It’s the beauty of being a writer as opposed to when I did my PhD program. [In my PhD] I was sitting on the other side of the fence, doing the analysis and trying to figure out the meaning, to assign the labels and the genres. It’s freeing to be on this side of the fence because genre and all the ties that bind my work, that’s for other people to figure out. I don’t ever put that pressure on myself in the creation process. So, it really is stepping back and looking across my books and thinking, okay, I can see that these are the things I’m consistently interested in, no matter what genre I’m writing in. So that’s fun to have that moment of insight, but I never put that pressure on myself.

EM: Do you have a favorite genre as a reader?

AW: Oh, it’s totally mood based. I’ll go through these spurts where all I want is dark mystery books with high stakes and a grimness to the world. Then sometimes I’ll want to escape into fantasy worlds, and I’ll go through a six-month glut of reading nothing but romantasy or fantasy. I tend to do that both as a reader and a writer—because I’ll spend around six months on a book project—I tend to hop. I’ll do a thriller, then the next one—because of my contracts—has to be romantic comedy or romantic drama or something like that. It keeps it fresh.

EM: You recently announced a deal for a new book in the upmarket genre. That sounds exciting.

AW: I’m so excited. I hope people like this new genre from me. I feel like I dipped my toe in romantic comedy, and I put out two [romantic comedies], and I would totally write more. But writing in different genres is like trying on different outfits and trying to figure out what’s you and what’s not. And even though I had a lot of fun writing romantic comedy, and I wrote those two books during the pandemic when I needed to manufacture my own sunshine, and they did that. But I think maybe my voice fits a bit better in the romantic drama, upmarket fiction space.

EM: I’m excited to read it.

AW: Thank you. Yeah, learning these things about oneself is like building a plane as you fly it.

EM: I love how you talk about continuing to find your voice as you try on different genres. And I was reading your commentary on using footnotes in Bury Me, how you were inspired by a reading during your PhD. I’m curious, are there are other areas of craft or certain writing techniques you’ve saved in your brain to use in the future?

AW: I feel like my PhD program was this beautiful untapped well, or a well that I know will be endless as I tap it. Because the beauty of programs like that is you’re exposed to so much work and so many ideas. I fell in love with literary theory, and the densest, most confusingly written ideas. I don’t know why. Something I struggle with in my fiction writing is pulling myself back from doing that in my work, from where my brain wants to go post-graduate degree. So, in some ways, my education is something I have to actively unlearn.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a book I read during my PhD program. And I was taking notes as to how John Fowles was using footnotes to provide not just extra information but meta commentary on the text itself and its place in literary history. And I thought, okay, noted. That’s something I want to try. And the idea of braided narratives in a book, like The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood—which is my favorite book. Books within books and that sort of thing, that’s something I want to tackle.

Whenever I start to feel a sense of writer’s block, or what I’m writing isn’t really gelling for me, my immediate go-to solution is to read as widely as I can, watch good movies, turn to poetry. Richard Siken and Terrance Hayes are poets who jump start my brain. Remembering how adventurous other people have been with language and form, I want to say it gives me permission again, and now I’m reflecting on why I need so much permission to do things.

EM: I do the same thing when I get writer’s block. I read, sometimes to the point of procrastination though, so I try not to do that.

AW: That’s what research does to me. I’m like, oh, I can really fall down this rabbit hole.

EM: I read this was your most researched book. Did you enjoy the research component?

AW: I loved it so much. It was like walking into a bookstore with my Ashley Winstead Books LLC credit card—which does not mean I’m not paying for these things, it’s just two different accounts—and for some reason my brain is like, oh, free money. And I look around and pick out a stack of books, under my chin, old library checkout style. Being like, look at all these books I get to read. One of my favorite parts of the process is subsuming all that information.

And [the research for Bury Me] gave me such a deep appreciation for the people who are doing amateur sleuthing, which I think was a necessary correction for me before I started writing. Because I was coming at the idea of true crime and amateur sleuthing with a bit of a bias that it was a little more exploitative. Because I had been witnessing and participating in things that looked exploitive. It was a necessary correction to read all the accounts of meticulous work that got results. Yeah, I love the research part.

EM: I enjoyed seeing the real-life cases you cited, and I was less familiar with the Internet sleuthing as well, but the characters certainly came off likable, not exploitative.

AW: Thank you. In writing fiction, you’re wearing so many hats, and one of those hats is anthropologist. Whatever setting you’ve chosen, or whichever group of people you’re writing about, you want to capture the truth of the way people talk to each other in that setting, the dynamics of it, the hierarchies. And I hope Bury Me feels like a true representation of the dialogue and mannerisms of Internet culture and some of the deep reddit threads and all that.

EM: I’m not as familiar with Idaho [where Bury Me takes place], but parts of it felt familiar as a Texan, the kind of western side of it. And your two romantic comedies take place in Texas. I’ve heard that Larry McMurtry said he had to move away from Texas to write about it. Do you feel that—as a Texan—writing about Texas is easier or harder than writing about other places?

AW: I think that I come at it with a bias of being less interested in where I am than in other places. Because I also like writing about places in a reflective mode, after the fact. It’s funny that quote you just shared because it does resonate with me for that very reason. Sometimes it’s beneficial to sit with your impression of a place, for a while. Even when writing about Texas, I’ve never written about Houston, where I’ve lived for eight years. I was writing about Austin, this place where I’ve only been a tourist. And in Bury Me, it felt almost scandalous and strange—only within my own mind—to write about the parts of Florida where I grew up as a teenager and where my mom still lives. It’s like I finally had the distance to write about that.

I really like writing about made-up places. Because you have the license to do whatever you want.

EM: You’ve written about made-up colleges a few times now. Do you feel that you come up with a whole new fake place from scratch, or do parts of real-world places come through?

AW: They’re always amalgamations. Because what I’m interested in at the end of the day is commenting on these real-life places, but also being able to have my cake and eat it too. Being able to comment on these real-life places, but also, hands up, well, I didn’t accuse Duke of being this or Vanderbilt of being this. It’s this Duquette University, which is a whole separate thing. But absolutely, I will cop to the fact that these places are always amalgamations of and stand-ins for reality.

EM: I think we all have to write what we know to a certain extent, so nothing comes from complete fiction. It’s all a little bit of everything.,

AW: I mean, one day I’ll write my own Basgiath college, dragon training academy. But as of now, I haven’t.

EM: We can all dream.