Catherine Ryan Howard: 'The only thing you can do is write the book you want to write'
Catherine Ryan Howard. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan
It’s probably no surprise to discover that Catherine Ryan Howard thrives on deadlines. The Cork author has been delivering a book a year since her first, Distress Signals, was published in 2016. It means she is juggling promotion for her sixth book, Run Time, with finishing the manuscript of her seventh, which is due for delivery any day now.
“As ever, I’m doing the majority of the work at this point, at the deadline. This is how I work, I have completely given up trying to do anything else. I need it breathing down my neck before I do any work. In a few days, I will be up all night, strung out on caffeine, saying to myself ‘why on earth have I done this again?’. But this is just the method in my madness.”
It’s a method that clearly works for Ryan Howard whose psychological thrillers have become a mainstay of the bestseller charts. Her last book, the lockdown-set 56 Days, was her biggest hit yet and Run Time looks set to follow.
Another hugely entertaining page-turner, it is ostensibly centred on the filming of a low-budget horror movie in the west Cork countryside, but takes many dark and fiendish turns along the way. Ryan Howard laughs heartily at the suggestion she doesn’t like to make things easy for herself.
“The thing is I have to entertain myself. What is so funny about Run Time is that I wanted to write something straight-forward, as I felt 56 Days was so complicated with the timeline. I just want to write something in a linear fashion where there was no jumping around the place. But when I sat down to write that, it got boring for me.”
The inspiration for Run Time came from Ryan Howard’s brother John, who is an actor. “He was in an independent horror movie that came out in 2016 called Beyond the Woods. It was filmed in a secluded house near Millstreet in the winter, mostly at night. He was telling me that one of the things they had to do was go to the local Garda station and tell them ‘if anyone rings you at four in the morning and says they’re hearing screams in the forest and someone is getting murdered, they’re not, it’s just us filming the movie’.
"Of course, I immediately thought, ‘well, what if someone was getting murdered, a movie is a great cover’. When I sat down to write it, things went off in a totally different direction but that was the genesis of it.”
The book features a movie script as part of the plot, which could be seen as an obvious pitch but Ryan Howard is adamant that writing for the screen is a route she has zero interest in pursuing.
“When you are writing a novel, you ultimately decide what goes on the page and no-one can force you to change anything. With screenwriting, you are writing something, it is doing the rounds and you are getting notes, notes and more notes, you have to incorporate them and it goes on forever. I would much rather people just optioned my stuff and go away and do it themselves. I don’t want to get involved.”
Some of Ryan Howard’s books have been optioned for the screen but none have come to fruition as of yet. It is something she prefers not to focus on.
“When something is optioned, people will ask you when is it going to be on TV or Netflix. They option so much stuff and people can’t believe how long it takes. I don’t waste any energy worrying about it, hoping for it or even thinking about it, I’m just writing my novels. If things get optioned, great, it’s extra money for work that is already done. If one day something makes it to screen, that will be a wonderful bonus. But it’s not a priority.”
Ryan Howard has been described as the queen of high-concept crime fiction. It is a title she doesn’t take lightly but nor does she want to get distracted by thinking too much about what her readers expect.
“It is not so much the coming up with ideas that I worry about, it is topping each book. The Nothing Man was my personal favourite, I don’t think I will ever write another book like that. Then 56 Days was the most successful by far. I spent about five minutes worrying how ‘am I going to top that?’. The bottom line is you can’t think like that.
"Run Time is a very fun book, it has had amazing reviews. Then, I go on to Amazon and there is a one out of five review saying ‘I hated this, I didn’t even finish it'. You can’t write something that will be universally liked and you can’t second-guess what people want. The only thing you can do as a writer is write the book that you want to write, the one that you feel in that moment is the best idea you have.”
- Run Time, by Catherine Ryan Howard, published by Corvus, is out now. Ryan Howard will take part in Let’s Twist Again, an online event for Murder One crime-writing festival on Oct 8. www.murderone.ie
