A flight attendant drafted her novel on cocktail napkins - it took off
.J. Newman remembers when Falling, her debut suspense novel, started to take shape. Newman, a veteran flight attendant, was on a Virgin America red-eye from Los Angeles to New York, looking out at a cabin filled with dozing strangers. Even if you haven’t been on a plane recently, you can imagine the view: slack mouths and lolling heads, fleece blankets draped every which way, a handful of insomniacs bathed in pools of light.
“Suddenly I have this thought, that all of our lives are in the hands of the pilots flying the plane,” Newman, who is 37, recalled in a video interview from her home in Phoenix. “With that much power and responsibility, how vulnerable does that make the pilots?”
Even though aviation is the family business — her mother and sister also worked as flight attendants — there was one worst-case scenario Newman had never considered.
A few days later, she presented it to a pilot on a different flight: “I said, ‘What would you do if your family wa kidnapped and you were told that if you didn’t crash the plane, they’d be killed?.’ I knewby the lookon his face thatI’d struck a nerve. He was terrified. He didn’t have an answer. And I knew Ihad a story.”
Thatstory— of a hijacking and an abduction happening simultaneously, with a compromised pilot as the common denominator and quick-thinking flight attendant taking charge — is the crux of Falling, out from Avid Reader Press now.
Newman wrote the book during downtime on long flights,usinghote penstojot scenes on cocktail napkins and catering bills beforetyping them up on layovers. Imagine reading this line over the shoulder ofthe person who just showed you how to use an oxygen mask: “The bloodied mass hung in weightless suspension before being sucked out of the massive hole in the side of the aircraft.”
Newman said her characters are entirely fictional but acknowledged the authorial convenience of coming into contact with 150 fresh faces per journey. After all, she said, “flight attendants get paid to people-watch”.
She did not tell many people that she was working on a book, believing she had depleted her “personal quota of public creative risk” when she moved to New York City in 2007 to pursue acting.
“I did the starving artist route and had multiple survival jobs, and it was a lot of rejection and doors slammed in my face,” said Newman, who graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University with a degree in musical theatre in 2006. While living in Sunnyside, Queens, she made ends meet by babysitting, working in restaurants and passing out flyers in Times Square.
Two years later, she was back in Phoenix, living in her parents’ house —a humbling end to a dream that took shape whenshe starred in a junior high school production of Annie.
Newman found solace in a job at Changing Hands, a bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, that she said helped her get back to her roots as a reader and writer.
“I’m always going to be a creative person,” she said. “I realised those impulses are never going away. If I’m writing and no one reads it except me, that’s a lot less scary than putting myself out there in New York in front of an entire table of casting directors who won’t even look up at me.”
“She was Torri to us then,” said Cindy Dach, the bookseller’s chief executive. “She had a passion for books and community and was a star on the floor. Some booksellers love books, but they’re introverts. Torri is the best of both worlds because she can connect with people easily.” (T.J. stands for Torri Jan.)
In early 2011, Newman left to work for Virgin America. She held onto her Changing Hands staff badge and contin to help out duringthe holiday rush and at events at theTemp and Phoenix locations, but she could no longer ignorethe tug of wanderlust.
“I grew up travelling on my mom’s passes,” New said. “Travel is just about my most favourite thing in the world to do, which is why I wanted a job that paid me to do it.”
There were challenges to her new role — entitled passengers, the beverage cart — but Newman believes her time in the air helped lay the groundwork for a writing career.
“You become really good at reading people. Has this person had too much to drink? Is this person showing a proclivity for noncompliance?” she said. “We are in a metal tube travelling hundreds of miles an hour, miles up in the sky. We’re always aware of the margin of error.”
Those high stakes are on display in Falling, which alternates between a cockpit under attack and the captivity of the pilot’s family on the ground. When Newman completed a draft, she consulted The Essential Guide To Getting Your Book Published, by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, at times ripping out sections to take on trips with her so she wouldn’t have to carry the whole book.
“I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have any connections,” she said. “I researched each step along the way.”
Forty-one agents declined to represent her. (“Turns out, an unpublished flight attendant without a platform is a tough sell,” shewrites in the acknowledgments section.) The 42nd agent, Shane Salerno, worked with her on revisions — Newman shareddrafts with pilot friends to make surethe logistics were correct — before sending the manuscript to Jofie Ferrari-Adler, vice-president and publisher of
id, who acquired Falling for seven figures in a two-book deal.
“I read it inless than a day, and I just was knocked out,” Ferrari-Adler said. “I had my heart in my throat the entire time. I was putting myself in the shoes of every single character in the book.” © 2021