Chris Bohjalian is bestselling author of 24 books. His work has been translated into 35 languages and been adapted into three movies and an Emmy Award–winning TV series, The Flight Attendant', with two other novel series adaptations in development. And he’s a playwright to boot. He spoke with PW about the balancing act of writing both drama and fiction and why his novel The Sandcastle Girls, about the Armenian genocide, remains the closest to his heart out of any of his works.

What was the route to publishing your debut novel, A Killing in the Real World, in 1988?

Like most writers, I began as a reader. But by fourth grade I was writing short stories about sibling rivalry and disembodied hands that emerge from wishing wells. My penmanship was amazing, and—as we know—the coolest kids always had the best cursive.

I continued to write short stories, amassing rejection slips from places such as the New Yorker and Harper’s and Ellery Queen. When I got to number 250 I thought to myself: “Huh. Plan A? Not working. Time to try Plan B.” At the time I was working at J. Walter Thompson, so it was easy to round up six months of Cosmopolitan magazines and really study the fiction they were publishing. (And their fiction was very good at the time.) I wrote what I thought was the perfect Cosmo story and, sure enough, the magazine published it.

Once in print, literary agents started approaching me, much to my shock, all asking if I had a novel they could read. I didn’t. So I spent the next year writing from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. before going to work, completing a draft of what would become A Killing in the Real World. It’s not false modesty when I laugh about how awful that first novel is. It’s apprentice fiction that should have stayed in my desk drawer. The only decent writing in the whole thing is the blurb on the back cover. Who blurbed it? Well, one of the only writers I knew at the time was a guy at the ad agency who had published a couple of mystery novels. That author was…James Patterson.

As both a novelist and a playwright, when do you decide to switch between the two disciplines?

I like plays that are, essentially, one long scene in real time. When I have an idea that feels both intense and compressed, I tend to imagine a play. Also I love watching set designers create magic and actors improve what I’ve written because they know how to bring a sentence to life.

Although “novelist” is far less of a solitary job than some people think, it is nowhere near as collaborative as “playwright.” Sometimes a person just needs the human connection you get from working directly with actors and directors and set designers and costume designers and stage managers—and then, when the play opens, savoring the community that is a packed theater experiencing together what stories can mean to the soul.

A number of your books have been made into TV series or movies. How do you find that process?

So far I have only had one book become a TV series, The Flight Attendant, although others are in development, while I have had three novels become movies. And I love the process, because I love TV and movies so very much.

My involvement so far has been eating bagels and blueberries those few days I am on set. I was an executive producer on two projects that never got the green light and I am an EP on one in development now, but I am very comfortable letting showrunners and screenwriters and directors work their magic.

You have won many awards for your books. Is there a particular book especially close to your heart?

I am a grandson of two survivors of the Armenian genocide, so all the recognition given to The Sandcastle Girls, my love story set in Aleppo in the midst of the genocide in 1915, is immensely gratifying. I wrote the novel to educate people to that part of history—a part of history that, when my novel was published in 2012, very few Americans and Europeans knew about—so its success has meant a great deal to me.

I want my books to make a difference: it’s why so many are about issues such as domestic violence, substance abuse, human trafficking, and homelessness and unhoused children. Well, I wrote The Sandcastle Girls to give voice to the dead, to the 1.5 million who died in the Armenian genocide, some of whose unmarked mass graves I have visited in eastern Turkey.