Author R&R with Natasha Díaz

Natasha Díaz is an award-winning author and screenwriter currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. Natasha’s scripts have been developed at FX and Disney. Her essays can be found in The Establishment and Huffington Post. She is an anthology contributor to Wild Tongues Can’t be Tamed, For the Rest of Us, and instant USA Today bestselling Black Girl Power. Natasha coauthored two novels told in stories, The Grimoire of Grave Fates and House Party. Her debut novel, Color Me In, was released in 2019, and her sophomore novel, the YA mystery What Lies Beneath the Flowers, was released this week.

"It" girl Estella Aubergine is everything Pippa and Bidi are not: wealthy, popular, influential...and missing. Finding her and collecting the reward money that Estella’s reclusive mother is offering could turn their lives around. They’d be able to pay off the overdue bills on Pippa’s family’s store, and all the media attention would only help Bidi’s chances of becoming the youngest elected official in San Francisco. 

But to uncover what happened to Estella, they’ll have to enter her wealthy world. Namely, the prestigious Beaumont Academy, where Estella’s classmates and teachers all seem to have dark secrets and enough money to hide them. 

The deeper Pippa and Bidi dig, the more questions come up about Estella’s disappearance. Worse, someone seems to be clocking their every step. And as cracks form in the girls’ friendship, they begin to see that maybe the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

Diaz stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing the book:

 

The idea for What Lies Beneath the Flowers, started off with my editor suggesting I do a retelling of Great Expectations. It was an interesting idea, but the issue was, I had never read Great Expectations, so I set to the task of reading five hundred and forty-four pages. (A fun fact I learned along the way was that Dickens wrote the story in a serial format, each week a new chapter was published, and he was paid by the word, so he was incentivized to write as many as possible.) 

As this was the source material, reading the book was an essential type of research, but it was also unique. I don’t often read a book with intent of dissecting the pieces I like best to remix into my own version. This time, reading a book also meant trying to capture the rhythms of Charles Dickens’ writing. I tried to pay attention to his style as much as the story. I tried to fill in the gaps where the world he created and the one I know didn’t overlap. 

Aside from reading the actual book, the second most important research I did was about flowers and plants. For that, I went through a bunch of flower books and read about flowers that caught my eye and took notes, so I had a little log of options. Otherwise, if I came to a moment where Pippa needed to lean on her knowledge of flowers to help get her through a situation and nothing in my log worked, I would search for a flower or plant that experienced a similar conflict in their lifespan. A lot of times, I was able to find as close to a parallel scenario as possible for a certain floral species and then use that information in the story.

You can learn more about Natasha Díaz via her website and Substack and follow her on Instagram and Goodreads.