Megan Miranda is the author of “Fracture” and “Hysteria.” The following is a complete transcript of her interview with Cracking the Cover.
Where do your ideas come from?
From everywhere! It’s been different for each thing I’ve written so far. For Fracture, it was from questions that I had about how the brain works. For Hysteria, it was partly from a character, partly from a “what if” thought that I got carried away with. But other ideas come from every day: a conversation with a friend, a story I overheard in a restaurant, or ideas that seem to grow—out of nothing—from a writing prompt I give myself.
Where specifically did your idea for “Hysteria” come from?
It grew from a few places. First, I already had the idea for Mallory—a girl who couldn’t be charged for killing her boyfriend. I was looking into stories about memories and hauntings, and I got carried away thinking about all the things that can haunt, and in all the ways those things can haunt.
Mallory’s past unfolds throughout the book. Did you know her full story first or did that evolve as your wrote?
It evolved as I wrote it. I didn’t write the past first, or separately. The past story developed as I drafted the present—things in the present would trigger ideas about the past, and the two story lines played off each other. Afterward, I separated it out to make sure it was a complete arc on its own.