Karen E. Osborne on Rewriting Getting It Right From Scratch and Turning It Into a Psychological Thriller
What do you do when the characters from your debut novel start talking to you again nine
years later?
For Karen E. Osborne, the answer was unexpected: begin writing a sequel—and then realize the original novel had to be rewritten from scratch.
Karen joins tech-thriller author and Thriller Pitch host Mark Nadon for a craft-focused conversation about reimagining Getting It Right, originally published in 2017, as Getting It Right: A Psychological Thriller.
The project began when Alex and Kara returned to Karen’s imagination and demanded another story. But once she started the sequel, Karen discovered a timeline problem, new story possibilities, and the simple fact that she had become a different writer.
So she rebuilt the novel in about five months, keeping the emotional core of Alex and Kara while adding new scenes, characters, experiences, a different ending—and murder.
Mark and Karen explore what it means for a discovery writer to work from an existing book, how a sequel locks certain facts in place, and why the original novel functioned almost like an outline.
They also discuss writing a father whom readers understand only through other characters’ eyes, creating Kara as a trauma survivor who remains a full and complicated human being, and the beta-reader question that forced Karen to reconsider her ending:
What did you promise the reader at the beginning?
Mark also shares his reaction to the novel, praising its blend of family secrets, privilege, abandonment, suspense, and complex characters.
Go behind the scenes of Getting It Right: A Psychological Thriller and discover how Karen E. Osborne rebuilt her debut novel while preserving the two women at its heart.
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