Zibby Mag

Book jacket biographies don’t tell us nearly enough about the authors we love. That’s why Zibby Mag launched the Author Snapshot, giving readers an inside look at the lives and work of our favorite writers.

This week we are featuring T.J. Newman, author of the New York Times bestseller Falling. T.J’s second novel, Drowning, released just this week—grab your copy here! And if you’re local to Los Angeles, join us at Zibby’s Bookshop on Friday, June 9 at 6 PM for an event with T.J.!

Your newest novel, Drowning, is about a plane that crashes and sinks to the bottom of the Pacific with passengers trapped inside. How do you come up with the ideas for your novels? What kind of research is involved in your writing process, or does your background as a flight attendant primarily inform your books?

The ideas for both Falling and Drowning came to me at work while working red-eyes. (They were my favorite flights to work—the passengers would go to sleep, and I would go to work on my stories, handwriting pages in the galley.) For Drowning, I was standing in the forward galley on a flight from Hawaii to LA looking out the small porthole window in the door. It was the middle of the night, everyone was asleep, and I was looking out at…nothing. An endless expanse of pitch-black void. For hours and miles in every direction, there’s nothing out there but water. And in that moment, it hit home how truly isolated we were. That’s when the wheels started turning. What if something went wrong and we had to ditch? Who would find us? How would they find us? How would we save ourselves? And the story started to develop from there.

Flight attendants are trained extensively in ditching procedures (a “ditching” is the aviation term for an emergency landing on water), so I drew from that experience. But in initial training they don’t exactly go over what to do if the plane sinks with people trapped inside. I spoke with pilots, engineers, emergency preparedness officials, Navy personnel—essentially anyone who could help me understand what it might look like after the story steps outside of the extent of my knowledge. I also got SCUBA certified. Being underwater, breathing underwater: it’s like walking on the moon. It’s an entirely foreign experience that I knew I wouldn’t be able to write authentically if I didn’t have that practical first-hand experience.

Let’s back up a little bit. Your first book, Falling, was one of 15 debut novels that landed on the hardcover fiction New York Times bestseller list in 2021. Only five of those–yours included–were not celebrity book club selections. How did it feel to experience such success with your debut? Have you felt pressure or anxiety leading up to the publication of your second book? What does a successful book launch mean to you?

Of course I was nervous, but as Billie Jean King says: “Pressure is privilege.” Any time I’d feel myself start to lock up under the pressure and fear, I would remind myself of all the people who were so supportive of me and Falling. All the people who bought the book and then spent hours of their busy lives with the characters I wrote. That gift is a privilege and an honor I do not take lightly or for granted. I worked as hard as I could to write as good a book as I could—for them. For anyone who took a chance on me. I owe it to them. My own fears are inconsequential against that.

I was proud but at the same time I was humbled. I was so proud of that book and how hard I worked on it. Seeing what it accomplished validated all the years of late nights and early mornings and sweat and tears. It validated my belief that the story was one people would love if I could just tell it right.

But seeing your name at the top of the New York Times bestseller list is also incredibly humbling. Knowing you’re now among so many other incredible books and authors who have been on that list—and also all the ones who deserved to be there, but weren’t. Writing a book is hard. Publishing a book is hard. Being in the company of brilliant authors who have done it and done it well…it’s very humbling.

In addition to being a flight attendant, you also were previously a bookseller! How has your experience working in an independent bookstore shaped your writing, your publishing process, your connections with readers, your book tour events, etc.?

I know I wouldn’t be where I am now without that experience. I got a job as a bookseller at Changing Hands in Tempe, Arizona, after I moved back home from New York. I had been pursuing my dream of being on Broadway, which went about as well as you can imagine. (Non. Stop. Rejection.) Working at the bookstore, being surrounded by stories and people who were passionate about reading, writing, and talking about stories gave me permission to be creative again. To start dreaming again. My time as a bookseller is where my lifelong dream of being a published writer turned into a concrete goal.

Both reading and writing are solitary events so there’s something magical about being with people to talk about something you all experienced on your own. Books tours are just that, and the one I did for Falling was one of my favorite parts of the entire publication process. I cannot wait for the tour for Drowning…especially my event at Zibby’s on 6/9!

Your books are unputdownable and keep readers at the edge of their seats, but you bump the stakes even higher by centering each of your stories around a family. Why is it important to you to add in this additional layer to an already heart-pounding story? Which piece of the novel comes to you first: the scenario with the plane or the characters themselves?

I love action thrillers. I cannot get enough of big, epic spectacles with high stakes and larger than life drama. But concept alone isn’t going to sustain a reader’s attention for 300 pages. The true center of the story must be the people, the characters, caught in the middle of all that spectacle.

Congratulations on the incredible deal for the screen rights for Falling! It must be a total dream to have such attention and desire for both the book and now the screen rights! Will you be involved in the adaptation at all? Do you have any “wishlist” actors you’d want to see star in it?

Both my books actually have film deals—Falling with Universal and Working Title and Drowning with Warner Brothers—which I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around. It’s insane! Two heated bidding wars in which studio heads and multiple Oscar-winning filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Damian Chazelle, and Nicole Kidman were vying to make my books into movies. That’s insane! I mean, I dreamed big. But I didn’t dream that big.

I’m adapting Falling, which has been a fascinating learning experience. Writing a script is all about compression. How do you take a scene that needs ten pages to be told in the book and compress it into a single page in the script…without losing anything. It’s a highwire act. And learning to do that well has been a real challenge and also very helpful for my novel writing.

What are you working on next? Can we anticipate another heart-pounding, flight-related story?

I’m going to play the third book as close to the vest as I played my first two, but I’ll reiterate what I said whenever I was asked what my second book would be:

You don’t work in an industry as dramatic and interesting as aviation for ten years and only walk away with one or two good ideas…