Hannah Deitch: On Accepting More Positive Feedback

LA-based author Hannah Deitch is a former SAT tutor with an M.A. in English from UC Irvine, where she studied Marxist theory and contemporary pop culture. She previously worked as an arts magazine editor and holds an M.A. in journalism from USC. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Follow her on Instagram.

In this interview, Hannah discusses the difficult decision to leave her agent and find someone who had the same belief as she did in her new literary thriller, Killer Potential, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Hannah Deitch
Literary agent: Stephanie Delman, Trellis Literary Management (U.S.); Emma Finn, C&W (U.K.)
Book title: Killer Potential
Publisher: William Morrow (Harper Collins)
Release date: March 18, 2025
Genre/category: Literary Fiction; Mystery/Thriller
Elevator pitch: After stumbling into the brutal crime scene of her SAT student’s parents in their Los Angeles mega-mansion, a down-on-her-luck tutor is forced to become a fugitive alongside the mysterious woman she finds tied up in this rich family’s closet. Killer Potential is a 21^st century take on Thelma and Louise or Bonnie and Clyde: These outlaws are queer burnout formed gifted students once destined for greatness, now wanted for murder.

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I was living in San Francisco at the time I came up with the idea. I had just moved there during the pandemic and was working my first ever non-gig work job as an editor at a mobile gaming studio: I took a leave of absence from my PhD program to take the job. It wasn’t a lot of money, in retrospect, but it was more money than I’d ever made before, as a tutor or a server or a TA in my English department. I thought my gig-work days were behind me, but I found myself working 10-hour days, often on weekends, and I could still barely afford the tiny closet of a studio I’d been so excited to rent. I started applying for tutoring jobs, figuring I could squeeze in students whenever I had a spare hour or two on evenings or weekends. It was a pretty bleak prospect, especially since I barely had any time outside my full-time job as it was. In the middle of applying for these jobs I suddenly found myself opening a Word doc and jotting down “SAT tutor discovers murdered rich family and kidnapped woman in closet”—you know, super normal, healthy-brain stuff. I started writing the book almost immediately.

Around three and a half years in total. I wrote the first draft in about three months, from roughly December 2021 to February 2022. I was working full-time so I usually wrote on the weekends or whenever I had a minute during the week. I finished the draft right before I moved back to LA, and I put it away for a few months: I was still working that same job, and on top of that I’d returned to my PhD program and was teaching two nights a week, living in hotel rooms while I looked for housing—absolute insanity, would not recommend, but the good thing was it kept me extremely busy during that period where I had the first draft on ice and was trying desperately not to look at it all the time, so I could get some more clear-eyed distance from it.

That summer I gave it to my agent, who did not like it at all. She didn’t think the previous novel I’d sent her worked either. I felt pretty devastated and stuck: That was now two novels that I being told to shelve, plus the one I’d signed with which we hadn’t been able to sell. So, I was O for 3. Not great. Ultimately, I decided it was time to leave her—which was terrifying, as any author who’s gone through the querying process knows. It took me years to get signed. But I thought this new book had some promise and I wanted to see if there was another agent who felt the same way I did. I started querying again in late summer 2022. My birthday is right after Thanksgiving, and that day—no joke, my literal birthday—I got an email from my number one choice asking to meet on Zoom. I low-key thought it might be a prank. I signed with her and we did a whirlwind revision after Christmas on my week off, sent the novel out in February 2023, and then there was a bunch of surreal meetings and an auction and a series of very cool things that I still don’t think I’ve 100 percent accepted as reality. As far as whether the idea changed, from the beginning I knew the fundamentals—who these characters were, the answer to the whodunit, the why of it all, the ending—and those big ideas never changed, though the story beats and structure underwent some major changes, especially the middle section.

Everything was a surprise. I didn’t have any connections in publishing: Every step of the querying process, for example, I stumbled through using Google. Publishing is pretty opaque from the outside looking in, in my experience at least. I very much relied on my agent, who patiently shepherded me through the insanity of going on submission and contracts and foreign rights and everything that’s come since.

Not in the drafting phase, but I learned a lot about my writing tendencies during revision. I’ve written a few novels before this one, and revised with critique partners and friends, but this was the first time I’d actually worked with an editor. That entire process was a huge learning experience. I guess I edit pretty hard. Unless I was explicitly told something was working fine, I would assume it’s bad and blow it up—which is obviously not the move: These people bought your book, they like it. It took me a while to accept I didn’t need to completely overhaul every sentence. Rejection’s an important part of the process, it gives you tough skin and teaches you how to take criticism, but I think internalizing a lot of failure had produced some bad, weird habits. It definitely took a minute for me to understand how to listen to and accept more positive feedback.

Every reader is different and is going to come to this book with their own histories and their own experiences and insights and tastes—I don’t presume to know what takeaways they’ll arrive at. All I can really say is what was on my mind pretty much 24/7 when I was writing it, which were the urgencies of paying bills and making rent. That’s what’s on the minds of the characters in this book, too, and it will be for most readers as well, because that’s the reality of the world we live in. Most of us are deeply concerned about if we’ll be able to afford housing and pay off our debts and survive on our tiny paychecks, and yet strangely it seems like there are never enough novels where those economic demands take center stage, or even make it to the page at all. In my experience as a reader, that lack can feel really alienating—if there are other readers that feel that way, there’s hopefully something in this novel for them.

My number one advice is to read eccentrically, but with purpose. Of course it’s important to be well-versed in contemporary fiction, whatever your genre might be, but give yourself permission to read outside of that, too. Read nonfiction. Read criticism and theory and essays. Read internationally. Read the classics. Revisit your favorites. I’m not super prescriptive about my own reading list, but generally there’s at least four or five going at once, and they’re almost always wildly different (right now: a history of the Salem Witch trials, several books on tarot—I’m doing witch stuff—some Lucia Berlin, some John Berger, some Hanif Abdurraqib, and an oral history of early 2000s emo music). You got to keep it weird.