First Lie Wins
First Lie Wins
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Ashley Elston on First Lie Wins
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A dinner party with a stranger who shouldn’t be thereThe novel began as an image before it became a plot. Ten years as a wedding photographer had trained her to notice social arrangements, who was watching whom, who didn’t quite belong, and that instinct is where the first scene came from.
Because of my background in photography, I’m a very visual person. I could see a group of people sitting around a table and began imagining what they were discussing. Then I thought, what if someone was there that shouldn’t be? I continued to ‘what if’ as the story progressed until the plot had developed.
The timing of the book’s start shaped everything about its tone. She began writing in March 2020, the first weeks of lockdown, having just finished two YA rom-coms, with no plan for where a single exploratory scene would go or who its main character fundamentally was.
I decided I would just write the scene and go from there. I didn’t know who Evie was yet, if she was good or bad. Was she an undercover cop? Was she a con artist? I just thought, well, we’re all locked at home, and nobody can do anything. What does it matter? I’ll just play with it. And it became my little escape from just a really not great time in the world. I would lose myself in that book.
That accidental permission, the sense that nothing was at stake because the world had already stopped, freed her to discover a character she might have second-guessed into non-existence under normal writing conditions.
First Lie Wins is her seventh book but the first written for adults, and she hadn’t planned the genre switch so much as followed the story that arrived. Once it landed, the change of audience felt less like a risk than a reset.
The adult stuff is new for me, and it’s reinvigorated my love of writing because after 10 years this now feels new. Yeah, it feels exciting.
How she wrote it
Butcher paper, seven endings, and a villain who changed three timesShe describes her process as discovery writing: the architecture of the story emerges from writing, not outlining. Her drafts build in passes, each one adding detail and consequence to a skeleton that only exists in rough form after the first run-through.
It’s layering, and every layer sort of makes it better, more real, and when you’re done, you have a real finished thing, like a person.
The ending of this book resisted every version she tried. Mr. Smith’s identity, the antagonist whose real name is never revealed to the reader, changed three times before she committed to the version that shipped.
I rewrote and rewrote. Once I had the bones, I’d come back and tweak, twist things up. That’s where the magic really comes for me. I changed the ending seven times before it was all said and done.
That struggle was unlike anything she had faced on her previous six books. Speaking about working through the ending in a video interview, she put the experience plainly.
Delete, delete, delete, write it again, write it again, write it again. This was the first time I really struggled to in my mind to get it right. [paraphrased from audio]
Editorial notes pushed her to a structural change she was nervous to propose to her publisher. The villain’s identity shifted not because she planned it but because the notes revealed that the existing version wasn’t holding together. Before committing, she called her agent, Sarah.
I called Sarah and I was like, ‘Sarah, hey, I think I’m changing who the bad guy is. Is Pam going to kill me?’ [paraphrased from audio]
The change went through. Her explanation for why it had to was direct: the notes showed her the existing structure wasn’t working, and a big problem required a big fix.
To track the dual-timeline structure during edits, where present-day scenes and flashbacks had to interlock without losing the reader, she built a physical map on roughly eight feet of butcher paper, with a sticky note per chapter and present scenes in one color, past scenes in another.
If there’s a ton of sticky notes around chapter six, well then chapter six is really not working. Chapter twelve looks pretty clean. So I’m good there. [paraphrased from audio]
On what the book is wrestling with
A name you never lived underEvie, the novel’s protagonist, spends the entire story protecting her real name from a man whose own name the reader never learns. That formal symmetry wasn’t accidental: the arrangement let Elston keep identity as a live question rather than a mystery to be solved.
I love playing with identity. I love that you don’t know his. I love that identity is such a strong thing for her that she’s gone all these years trying to protect that original identity. And this idea of—does it really matter if you didn’t live a life under that name? What does it matter? It’s just a name, right? It’s not going to bring anything back. [paraphrased from audio]
Keeping readers sympathetic to a character who is clearly committing crimes required a moral calibration she worked on through revision. The Robin Hood frame she settled on was not a shortcut but a deliberate argument about where Evie draws her own line.
To keep the reader on board and to keep the reader like, ‘I’m still with you even though she’s a criminal,’ it’s sort of a little bit like a Robin Hood kind of thing. Like I’m fine with her if the people that she’s stealing from are worse than her. [paraphrased from audio]
Evie’s moral position in the book is a calibrated one: she has a line, it just isn’t located where most readers would draw their own. Elston describes arriving at that calibration as the moment the character became navigable.
Once I figured out who I wanted Evie to be—you know, she’s got her own moral line in the sand. It might not be where mine is, but it’s where she is. She’s not bad, but she’s not good either. And once I got to know her, I’d start thinking, ‘Well, she’s smarter than that. She could have done this, but she’s better than that.’
What she wants us to sit with
Sometimes it’s good to be badWhen asked what she hoped the Hulu adaptation would preserve from the book, she named a feeling rather than a plot point. The question was about translation from page to screen; her answer was about the emotional contract she’d built with readers.
Like she’s bad, but you love her. That’s what I want. Like ‘I shouldn’t love her, but I love her.’ I love that it’s set in the south, and I love that it’s in places that you wouldn’t typically put a con artist story, so to speak and shining that light on places that don’t always look so pretty. So, just that feel of sometimes it’s good to be bad.
Louisiana is not backdrop in this book. Placing a sophisticated con at the center of the American South was a deliberate counter-argument to how the region is usually portrayed, both in crime fiction and in culture more broadly.
I think sometimes the South really gets the shorter end of the stick when people think about how we are here. And it was really important to me to show that there could be sophisticated crimes, sophisticated things, being done in a part of the country most people don’t consider sophisticated.
The book’s success arrived after a decade in YA, including books that came and went quietly. That context shaped how she received this one, and what she wants readers to understand about what it cost to keep writing through the years before anyone was paying close attention.
I’ve always said ‘I’m glad this was my seventh book and not my first book,’ and I’m glad I was 50, not 25 because I’ve had books that came out with little fanfare. When you have a book that does well, as this one has done, it’s even sweeter because, you’ve seen the other side of that, so you have such an appreciation for when it is good.