Author Profile: Sinister sport

New York Times bestselling author and Iowa native Heather Gudenkauf found inspiration for her latest thriller in an unlikely place.

“I really got the idea for “Everyone is Watching” from watching reality TV,” Gudenkauf shared in a recent interview.

“I’m a fan of competition series, like ‘Survivor,’ ‘The Amazing Race,’ and those types of shows. And I thought it would be really fun to do a locked-room mystery based on a reality show.”

“Everyone is Watching,” Gudenkauf’s latest page-turner, follows five characters from different backgrounds as they come together to compete in a secretive reality competition, vying for the ultimate prize: $10 million.

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The characters each came to the competition with something that they would have preferred to keep private. And those secrets begin to emerge as the game is played.

“We learn that the characters really are trying to hide these parts of their lives but somebody behind the scenes is trying to expose them.”

“So it’s a story of revenge in many ways, and it makes the reader — I hope — think, can we ever truly escape our past? Can we ever truly leave our past behind?”

“And countering that — is revenge worth it? What does that do to you as an individual, what does it do to your life. And remaining in the past, what does that do to your future?”

The contestants

Like any good reality show, the contestants needed to have a variety of personalities in order to get readers invested in the story.

“I had to create these characters from all walks of life from all across the country and bring them together.”

So Gudenkauf wrote characters that were unique, “somewhat” relatable, but “also a little bit out there so the readers can equate them to what they see on TV — the different contestants in the shows.”

The main contestants are a former senator, a television executive, a lawyer, a psychiatrist, and a mom from Iowa.

“I wanted to pick a few characters to focus on and I settled on the mom from Iowa (for obvious reasons), the psychiatrist, and also the production assistant for the show, Fern, a young woman who really gets caught up in the inner workings of the show in ways she didn’t expect.”

Structuring the game

The book is structured as a classic locked-room mystery, where the characters are together in the same location for the duration of the book.

Gudenkauf takes a decidedly modern twist on this structure, as she also blends in key elements of reality show production and culture.

For example, Gudenkauf created “the vault,” where contestants can talk about the competition so far and share their honest perspective.

She also gives a nod to common reality show viewing habits, namely how feedback and discussion often occurs in real time on social media.

“The viewership is such a huge part of reality TV,” Gudenkauf explained. “I wanted to get the audience involved as well.”

So Gudenkauf created different minor characters/viewers from across the country who are watching the show and coming to their own conclusions about the characters.

“We feel like we know the people we see on television intimately. We form opinions. And what do people typically do when they’re chatting about what they see on TV? They may go to social media and get behind their keyboard and insert their thoughts. So that’s included in the story.”

“There’s a lot of different pieces and perspectives throughout the book and my hope is that it really adds to this frenetic fast-paced experience that we often get as we’re watching a reality competition show on television.”

The final production

This meticulous balancing of different perspectives made “Everyone is Watching” a challenging book to write.

“It was really tricky to bring all these pieces together. I tend to write fast-paced books but it isn’t always as easy as it appears on the pages because of the many layers.”

“Every One is Watching” took Gudenkauf almost 18 months to write. She completely rewrote the book at least three times, she explained, going into the story, tearing it apart, and putting it back together. She also created new characters and deleted characters that didn’t lend themselves to the story.

Another big change for Gudenkauf? This is the first book she’s set almost entirely outside of Iowa.

“I love writing about Iowa, my home state. But for the purpose of this story, I really needed to take the characters away from their comfort zones.”

“And I wanted the characters to come from all across the United States so these characters who are seemingly strangers to one another come from all over and meet in a remote winery estate in northern California.”

Now that she’s written a book set outside of Iowa, she may do it again.

“The book I’m working on now also steps out of Iowa and, again, it needed to be done so for the benefit of the story.”

“But I will always have Iowa roots in my books. That is very clear in the one I’m working on next.”