Notes from the Shelf

Today’s Featured Author: Lina Chern

Today on Notes from the Shelf, I’m excited to feature an interview with Lina Chern, author of the witty and twist-filled mystery ‘Play the Fool’ as well as the sequel ‘Tricks of Fortune’ coming out July 1st. Lina brings humor, heart, and a bit of chaos to her unforgettable characters. In this written Q&A, she shares how extensive journaling shaped her stories, what drew her to mystery writing, and the joys of turning the mundane into a story only you can tell. Enjoy!

Meet Lina

Lina Chern is the author of Play the Fool, winner of the 2024 Mary Higgins Clark Award and nominee for the 2024 Lefty and Anthony Awards. A sequel, Tricks of Fortune, will be available on July 1st, 2025. Lina has also written trivia questions, poetry, word puzzles for a TV game show, paranormal romances, dialogue for your favorite comic book characters, award-winning movie reviews, and poems that have been published and read by up to dozens of people. Find her at www.linachern.com, on Instagram at @linachernwrites, or Bluesky @linachern.bsky.social.

Q&A

1. What inspired you to start writing in general?

I’ve been a voracious reader since I was a kid, and writing seemed like a natural extension of that. To this day, I consider reading and writing to be essentially the same process, with writing adding a few extra steps. My earliest writing consisted of exhaustive journaling, which turned into stories, poems, and eventually novels.

2. What inspires you to continue writing?

I’ve always been obsessed with storytelling. The process that turns any old mundane situation into a story – the creative choices that make the messy randomness of life seem interesting and orderly – is endlessly fascinating to me.

Writers often get asked where they get their ideas, but the truth is, coming up with ideas is not difficult or mysterious if you pay attention to the world around you. Now, capturing an idea and hammering into a special, interesting form in a way that only you can – that’s the difficulty and the joy of writing. Most writers I know (myself included) are addicted to it, at the same time as we complain how hard it is.

3. When did you know you wanted to publish a book?

Publishing a book was always a dream of mine, but one I thought was out of reach until I stumbled into a freelance ghostwriting assignment that required me to write a series of mystery stories. That was when I realized that not only was writing a long-form story doable, but that it was tremendous fun! After that, I decided to try my hand at my own novel.

4. How did you first get published?

By first acquiring a lot of rejections. My earliest publications were poems in small literary magazines. I racked up a slim handful of publications and a very thick folder of rejection slips. After that, I didn’t publish anything for many years, as work and life intervened. When I started working on my debut novel, I set out to break into traditional publishing, a long and tortuous road paved with its own stack of rejections. If you’re sensing a theme here, it’s that rejection is a part of the publication process.

5. What is your writing routine?

What is this “routine” you speak of? I pretty much just grab writing time wherever I can find it – during the day when my kids are in school, in line at the pharmacy pickup window, or anywhere else I can get to my phone and jot down a few thoughts. A lot of writers swear by their routines, but unfortunately, it’s a luxury my life doesn’t always allow me.

For me, it’s more a matter of checking in regularly with my work to keep myself interested in it, even if that check-in consists of opening a document and reading through what I’ve written the day before. Deadlines, when I have them, force me to be a bit more organized, but when left to my own devices, I find it tough to stick to a routine.

6. Can you walk me through how you develop an idea from initial spark to finished manuscript?

I prefer handwriting as the most fertile way to get the ideas flowing and have a ton of journals lying around the house where I jot down notes and develop them. There’s something about the slowness and sensory component of handwriting that helps me process my ideas, and I return to paper at any part of my process where I feel stuck.

Beyond that, I am an outliner, or in writing-speak, a “plotter” as opposed to a “pantser.” In other words, I need to have some idea of where the story is going before I actually start writing the text – at which point the outline gets tossed out the window.

I use Scrivener to write the actual manuscript, as it works well with my somewhat chaotic writing style. I tend to write chapter by chapter, getting one as finished as possible before I move on to the next, and revising as I go. Once I have a solid draft, I’ll revise all the way through, probably at least three or four times. Somewhere in there I usually bring in my editor and get their feedback as well. I’ve found that there are as many processes as there are writers.

7. Have you dealt with writer’s block and how do you handle it?

I think I dealt with writer’s block for the entire first half of what can’t even really be called my career. Writer’s block is just another name for anxiety and perfectionism, two things I am intimately familiar with. It took me a long time to understand that writing is composed almost entirely of lead-up and revision and work, rather than one perfect document you sit down and toss off in one fell swoop. Once I understood that the intermediate stages were not only allowed to exist but that they were a necessary part of the process, it got much easier for me to sit down and start working.

8. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

I can’t remember any, which means I was probably too busy thinking I knew everything. Writing advice can be a tricky thing, with the potential to do more harm than good – at least for me. It’s easy to look at another writer’s experience and say “I should be doing that – what’s wrong with me?” You run the risk of comparing yourself out of the necessary exploration of your own process.

Writing is tremendously varied and personal, and the only real way to figure out what’s best for you is to discover it on your own. For me, too much advice from other writers makes me anxious and cramps me up. I don’t mean to say that writing advice doesn’t have its place; it just needs to be taken with a grain of salt and applied carefully and flexibly.

9. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Don’t rely (solely) on other writers’ advice! Leave room to discover what works for you. Don’t chase publication before your writing is solid. Remember to have fun with the work because, to be honest, there are not many other reasons to do it.

10. Which books or authors have most influenced your writing?

My earliest and most profound writing influence was Harlan Ellison, who was this deeply imaginative, boundary-pushing badass speculative fiction writer in the mid-to-late 20th Century. I found his life as intriguing as his writing, and he probably did more to propel me to be a writer than anyone else.

More recently, after I became interested in crime fiction, I was deeply influenced by Elmore Leonard. His writing was like a revelation — so entertaining yet so sophisticated. I want to do what he does – tell people a great story that also makes them think.

11. What book(s) are you currently reading?

I’m reading the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, a classic of Soviet science-fiction. Other books I have recently enjoyed are The Last King of California by Jordan Harper, Keith Rosson’s Fever House duology, Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle and All Fours by Miranda July. I kind of read all over the place, genre-wise.

12. What’s something readers might be surprised to learn about you?

English was not my first language. I was born in the former USSR, and while I have spent most of my life here and consider English to be my primary language, the immigrant perspective always finds a way to creep into my work. Someday I would like to explore it more directly in my writing.

13. What are you currently writing?

I am currently between novels, but I have a book coming out on July 1st (please preorder!): Tricks of Fortune, the second book in my Play the Fool mystery series, a set of lighthearted mysteries about a tarot-reading amateur sleuth. For any locals out there, Tricks of Fortune is based on the incredible true story of the death of Lieutenant Joe Gliniewicz in Fox Lake in 2015. Check it out here: Tricks of Fortune by Lina Chern: 9780593500682 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

14. What books have you published and where can people find them?

You can find both Play the Fool and Tricks of Fortune anywhere books are sold, although I always recommend supporting your local indie bookstore. A great place to start is this link to my publisher’s webpage, which includes links to all retailers, including indies: Lina Chern | Penguin Random House

Connect with Lina

You can find Lina Chern at her website at linachern.com, or look her up on Instagram and Bluesky. For quick links to all her online activities, check out her Linktree.

Wrapping Up

A big thank-you to Lina for taking the time to answer my questions thoroughly! I love when she said “capturing an idea and hammering into a special, interesting form in a way that only you can” is the difficulty and joy of writing. That really hit home for me. It doesn’t matter if the story has already been told because you’ll bring your own unique perspective to it, so it’s still worth your time to write it down and tell the story the way you want.

Be sure to check out her Play the Fool series; I just finished the first book and I’m obsessed; a tarot card reader solving a murder is right up my alley.

If you would like to support indie bookstores as well as this blog, consider buying Play the Fool and preordering Tricks of Fortune through Bookshop.org. If you buy through these links, I may earn a small commission—at no extra cost to you.

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