Authors In The Media With Cate Holahan 

Recently I did a Q&A With USA Today Bestselling Author of Suspense, Cate Holahan! We briefly discussed her career in screenwriting and her past life as a journalist. It’ll be exciting going more in depth on both! 

Q: Welcome back to Book Notions Cate! I’m so excited that you’re back! What drew you into becoming a journalist and then a screenwriter? 

A: Thanks for having me. I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. At age seven, I wrote and illustrated a short story in hopes of it being published. My mom, who has always believed in me—perhaps more than she should—sent it to scholastic to be published. I was given a very kind rejection letter back, though not my original work. Lesson learned. 

Though I knew that I wanted to write, I didn’t know how to make a career out of it. My grandfather, Jim Holahan, was a longtime journalist and pilot, as well as founder and publisher of Aviation International News. The summer before high school, I interned at his magazine. Working there enabled me to see how he and his fellow reporters used their skills as writers, editors, and interviewers to create engaging articles that explained technological innovations and the airline industry. It was at his magazine that I realized, hey I can write, be of service to people, and eat! 

After working for my grandfather, I got a job at New Jersey’s second largest daily newspaper, The Record. I was a sophomore in high school when I started. At first, I wrote for the community section and penned short obituaries. Every day after school, I wrote about death. I interviewed surviving family members about their lost loved ones in hopes of providing readers with enough identifying information so that anyone who knew the deceased at various points in his or her life could recognize them. I also tried to include details that would make the obituary a keepsake for loved ones, that said something true about their life and made them more than just a name from a town that had passed. 

While on the obit desk, I also worked filling in quotes and other information for reporters on bigger stories. Ultimately, this led to writing my own front-page stories. 

The Record showed me the impact that quality journalism can have on people’s lives. There was a journalist there, Mike Kelly, whose work I truly admired. He reported on the troubles in Ireland and their impact on New Jersey’s Irish American community in a way that made me understand what was going on there for the first time. 

Later, in college, I studied political science and worked as a stringer for local New Jersey newspapers as well as, occasionally, for the Daily Princetonian, my collegiate newspaper. I wrote about everything from campus life to the changing music industry and Napster, to people struggling to rebuild their lives after losing a spouse during 9-11. And I got to learn from some great people like Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Barton Gellman. 

All of this is to say that journalism taught me a lot about writing the first draft of history and the importance of telling stories about people. Later, I’d bring this to my fiction writing, trying to tell stories that I made up that said something honest about the world. 

Writing as a journalist and then as an author convinced me that, at its core, all writing is storytelling for different mediums. And storytelling is the way that we talk to one another about our culture, our issues, and ourselves. When the bookstores closed during Covid and I wasn’t on book tour supporting a new novel, I thought, let’s go to grad school and learn a new method of storytelling. So I applied for and enrolled in NYU Tisch’s Dramatic Writing Department with a focus on screenwriting. There, I sold two movies of the week and learned how to adapt my own novels into screenplays and television pilots. 

Q: In our Q&A you told me that you studied dramatic writing at Tisch for your MFA when I asked if screenwriting helped with writing your novels. What was it like learning how to write screenplays? Did you also take journalism classes on the side when you were at college? I just love knowing about someone’s individual journey as to how they got to where they are. 

A: Princeton doesn’t have journalism as a major, but they offer plenty of classes in journalism through their humanities department. I spent a lot of time in those classes learning under the likes of Kathryn Watterson, author of New York Times notable books like Women in Prison, and Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman. They taught me so much about getting to the truth of a matter. 

While in college, I interned at The Boston Globe, covering an Oxycodone theft ring that definitely contributed to my penchant for including true crime elements in my novels. The story was riveting. I was covering these young, drug store cowboy types who were also struggling with Oxycodone addiction, which fueled their violence. 

After that, I returned to The Record for a while and then left to cover tech business at BusinessWeek. I left there to start an online TV business show on MSN Money and then, after that, moved on to CNBC, working on their special projects and Fast Money team. 

Throughout it all, I wrote fiction on the side. But I never got published until I had my second daughter and decided I wasn’t going to go back to breaking news for a bit and, instead, would give my fiction all my attention. If I didn’t have an agent in a year, I decided I’d return to journalism. Fortunately, Paula Munier, my wonderful agent, saw something in my work and took me under her wing. I published my first novel a year a couple years after Olivia, my youngest, was born. 

Learning to write my first publishable novel was an education. But journalism is a career about constantly educating oneself on something new. So it felt right going back to school during Covid when the bookstores were closed. I was a bit old for the program, but I had some amazing teachers like television writer and author Robin Epstein who really helped me evaluate my writing in a different way as well as understand what skills I could bring from the novel world to writing for a visual medium and which ones didn’t translate. 

Q: For anyone who is curious about becoming a journalist, author or a screenwriter, what is your advice for them? 

A: Write every day. I know everyone says it, but it’s true. Writing is a craft and the more you do it, the better you become. Write blog posts. Write for your local newspaper or magazine. Write letters to the editor. Also, learn to pitch. Writing as a career is about selling your writing, so learn how to write a compelling pitch that will make an editor say, I’d love to have that story and I think this is the right person to write it. They have an interesting voice and are asking the right questions. Also, don’t have much of an ego. Writing is rewriting—and being told to rewrite. You have to get on board with that in order to be published in any format. 

Q: When I asked about what it was like writing and tv producing for BusinessWeek Magazine, New Jersey’s The Record Newspaper, The Boston Globe, MSN Money and CNBC, you wrote The best part of my former career was interviewing people whom I’d never have had access to otherwise. I’ve spoken with Jeff Bezos for MSN Money, Elon Musk for a leadership series on CNBC, Meg Whitman at BusinessWeek, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson etc. Did you ever find yourself being starstruck when interviewing Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Meg Whitman, Mark Zuckerberg & Richard Branson? Did you also interview authors, actors, politicians & even criminals? 

A: I think intimidated is a better word than starstruck. I feared my questions would be viewed as stupid or banal or unworthy of their time. And I worried that the questions that I needed to ask for readers to understand their thinking would be viewed as unnecessarily combative. I worried about being thrown out of rooms before I would have enough information to write the story that my editor was expecting from me. 

Those worries were similar when I interviewed politicians and authors and actors and criminals. I covered it all in my more than a decade long career as a journalist. But I think they were more pronounced the more prestigious the person being interviewed was because that person had the flexibility to go to other media outlets if they didn’t like how they were being interviewed. There was—and is—always a delicate balance between asking the hard-hitting questions necessary to get to the meat of a matter while also being liked enough for the interview to continue. I found establishing a rapport through listening was the most important part. I’d leave the more combative questions for the end, after the person trusted that I’d heard them out and, therefore, would really listen to their response to more difficult topics.