{"id":63388,"date":"2026-03-04T09:24:26","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T14:24:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=63388"},"modified":"2026-03-04T09:24:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T14:24:26","slug":"ruth-knafo-setton-five-things-i-learned-writing-zigzag-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2026\/03\/04\/ruth-knafo-setton-five-things-i-learned-writing-zigzag-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0Ruth Knafo Setton: Five Things I Learned Writing Zigzag Girl"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To catch a killer who knows her secrets, magician Lucy Moon must perform the most dangerous trick of her life\u2014discovering who she really is.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A murdered woman inside a magic box. A black rose in her mouth. And a secret that won’t stay buried.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lucy Moon performs nightly at a crumbling Atlantic City theater, a gifted young magician hiding a past she’s never told anyone. When she discovers her best friend’s body during the infamous Zigzag Girl illusion \u2014 staged to mirror an unsolved killing from decades ago \u2014 Lucy is drawn into a web of deception that reaches from the town’s criminal underworld to the mist-shrouded Pine Barrens.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a killer who knows her secrets closing in, Lucy turns to the only people she can trust: a fierce band of female magicians and mystics with powers that blur the line between stage craft and something older. But as the suspects multiply and the murders echo forward from the 1940s, Lucy faces the most dangerous performance of her life \u2014 unmasking the truth about who she really is, while keeping her distance from the enigmatic man at the center of the investigation. A man who may be a killer. Or the only one who can save her.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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1: I got locked in a real straitjacket for this book\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Picture this: a basement in Philadelphia, thirty male magicians watching, and me\u2014the only woman\u2014strapped into a regulation Posey straitjacket, the kind used to restrain the patients in a mental hospital. Canvas so thick it feels like punishment, collar choking my throat, arms pinned crucifixion-style, and the ultimate insult: a crotch strap. No gimmicks, no tricks. The real thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been sawed in half, and then sawed in thirds, but the first time I truly felt terror was when I was strapped, buckled, and locked inside this straitjacket. I\u2019d absorbed a few vague clues from watching magic, but as I stood under bright lights facing the audience, I couldn\u2019t remember a single one. Getting to this secret magicians-only Escape Workshop was a wild journey; getting out would be another, one for which I had no experience, tools, props, or map. All I knew was that one way or another, I had to break free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one had told me a straitjacket was so hot, its rough canvas an insult to the flesh, and the neck so goddamn tight. I itched everywhere. I wanted to go home. I wanted to cry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTell me what to do,\u201d I whispered to the magician who\u2019d organized this workshop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He shook his head. \u201cIt\u2019s a three-dimensional puzzle, and you are part of the puzzle.\u201d He added softly, \u201cThe only interesting part is the story. Find the story and act it out.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I squeezed my eyes shut. The story<\/em>. Why was I here? Why did magic fascinate me to the point of obsession? Why had I spent the past three years studying magic? Teller\u2014the silent half of Penn & Teller\u2014said, \u201cI love wallowing in magic.\u201d Yeah, so do I. But why? And what was my story? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once upon a time a little girl dreamed of becoming a writer because every time she opened a book she entered an enchanted garden where anything was possible\u2026. and years later, when she studied magic she found herself back in that enchanted garden, and lo and behold, everything was<\/em> possible. As a magician assured her, \u201cIf you can imagine it, we can make it happen.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

2: Atlantic City Is the Perfect Place to Hide a Body (and a Soul)\u2026 <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing Zigzag Girl<\/em> taught me that Atlantic City provides the perfect backdrop for a story about magic, mystery, and murder. But I grew up going down the Jersey shore, and I watched Atlantic City transform herself year after year. Atlantic City has a past. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, many pasts, and none of them are past. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somehow they all live in the shadows of the present. The signs are painted over, but traces of the originals remain. The shadows under the boardwalk always made me believe another world existed beneath the rafters, a parallel world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Zigzag Girl<\/em>, I traveled back to WWII, when Atlantic City was taken over by the US Army and turned in Camp Boardwalk. It was an amazing period of danger and desperation, of heroism and glory\u2014and almost no one knows about it! My characters in the present are haunted by secrets from that era that were never resolved. In Atlantic City, past and present bump into each other on the legendary boardwalk that stretches between glittering casinos and the indifferent Atlantic Ocean\u2014a liminal space where anything might happen. It\u2019s a town that exists in the space between dreams and disappointment. She\u2019s been battered by bankruptcies and hurricanes, yet every dawn the Atlantic still crashes against her pilings, and the wheel still spins at Steel Pier. She\u2019s a dame who\u2019s been knocked down in the ring too many times to count. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as Jinx, my 90+ year old journalist says, \u201cA dame picks herself up, puts on Carmine Red lipstick, and gets back in the ring.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Atlantic City is the kind of town where people come to reinvent themselves, to escape their past, to believe in the possibility of transformation. Naturally, it’s also where they come to kill and be killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3: Jersey Magic runs<\/em><\/strong> on Aqua Net and attitude\u2026 <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So\u2026 a town like Atlantic City needs a different kind of magic, the kind that is both seedy and grand, and that perches between Woowoo and Fuggedaboutit, between the spiritual and the streetwise. My protagonist Lucy Moon creates illusions using Aqua Net hairspray\u2014the purple can, because she\u2019s got standards. She performs card tricks with press-on nails that could double as weapons, makes cannolis from the Italian bakery on Arctic Avenue disappear (into her mouth, usually). Her magic smells like espresso and sounds like Springsteen. It\u2019s the kind of magic that says, \u201cYeah, I just made that quarter vanish. You got a problem with that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there\u2019s Elvis Jones, the mysterious bird whisperer who does amazing magic with his seagull (trained, not tamed), magic so powerful it spills from the stage to the street (or boardwalk), and makes Lucy almost\u2014not quite, but almost\u2014forget that he is a prime suspect in her friend\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lucy\u2019s \u201cJersey magic\u201d is her armor, her origin story, her way of controlling chaos. Creating illusions for Lucy, her friend Stormie Weather, and Elvis Jones set me free from boxes I hadn\u2019t even realized I\u2019d locked myself into. But that\u2019s what magic does\u2014it shows us that our imaginations set us free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4: Love is the most dangerous magic of all\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Murder exposes the lies society tells itself; love exposes the lies we tell ourselves. I\u2019ve always been fascinated by the dance of frustrated desire between two strong, flawed characters. When Lucy finds herself falling for Elvis Jones, the prime suspect in the murder investigation, sparks fly and danger erupts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dance of desire across mysteries, secrets, risk\u2014my therapist has notes, but I love reading it, and I love writing it. Passion, desire, love\u2014they lead us to do things we never thought we\u2019d do. It\u2019s the one thing we can\u2019t predict or force; the spark is there or it\u2019s not. And it\u2019s there in Zigzag Girl<\/em>, where the danger a woman faces when she trusts a man is heightened by the suspicion that he might be the murderer. Those sparks\u2014they are life, but they can also lead to death. Some tricks you can\u2019t rehearse. Some escapes you survive only once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 That tightrope, that moment when a man and a woman face each other across a gulf of mistrust, suspicion, fear, and desire\u2026 Will she take a chance and leap across that gulf? And what will she find if she does? The vulnerability required to love in a world already full of danger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That moment.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I live for that moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5: To Write Dark, First Find the Light\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To write dark, first find the light\u2014that glint shining in the distance, a streetlight beckoning from a corner, the glimmer of a woman\u2019s smile, a child\u2019s eyes raised in hope. Writing dark doesn\u2019t mean erasing tenderness, love, and humor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think of black humor, gallows humor. Every Jewish holiday in three sentences: They tried to kill us, we survived, let\u2019s eat. Same rule for murder mysteries: someone tried to kill us, we survived, pass the cannoli. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The shadows are real, but the punch line insists on ordinary life continuing anyway. Because life does go on. People fall in love, work, carry on with the business of being a human in the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also go back to the great existentialists, Camus and Sartre. Yes, the world is absurd. That\u2019s a given. But if that\u2019s the case, then why write? Because we must. It\u2019s Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill, getting to the top, and for an instant reveling in his success, and then watching it fall back down to the bottom. And there he is pushing it back up the hill again. Is he a fool? Are we all fools? Or do we all carry the faint hope that this time will be different? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I imagine the version where Sisyphus gets to the top, stands in the sun for one perfect second, then walks back down whistling. Because life\u2014like Atlantic City\u2014keeps dealing another hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bonus Thing: <\/em><\/strong>The Story That Finally Set Me Free\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The magician in charge refused to tell me how to escape the straitjacket, but he showed me. He jerked one shoulder; I jerked my shoulder. He slid and wriggled; I slid and wriggled. I squirmed inside the jacket and tried to push my way out but my head was completely submerged. I choked on stale air, and I felt sudden terror: I could suffocate to death inside the canvas prison and no one would know\u2014they\u2019d think I was \u201ctelling a story,\u201d the way he had suggested. In raw desperation I tugged the jacket, squirmed and stretched, and magically, miraculously, tore that mother off. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I gulped air. It had taken me ten minutes. With a war whoop, I tossed the jacket to the floor. The magicians cheered and whistled, and I beamed, proud as a kid riding a two-wheeler for the first time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t till later that I realized: that<\/em> is my story. The girl who dreamed of an enchanted garden, who wrote at age 9 in her first diary: \u201cI want to be a writer,<\/em>\u201d who grew up and wrote and traveled, and worked, and lived\u2026 and became the woman who never gave up, who keeps freeing herself from visible and invisible chains, and who\u2019s still writing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zigzag Girl is proof: no lock, no chain, no jacket can hold us if we remember the story and refuse to stop struggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thank you for reading. Now go put on Carmine Red lipstick and deal yourself back into the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Born in Morocco and raised on tales of wonder, Ruth Knafo Setton is the author of the novels,\u00a0The Road to Fez,\u00a0and\u00a0Zigzag Girl\u2014which is a finalist for the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Standalone Book of the Year.\u00a0Zigzag Girl\u00a0also won Grand Prize in the ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Competition and First Place in the Daphne du Maurier Awards. Her TV pilot for\u00a0Zigzag Girl\u00a0won First Prize at the LA Crime and Horror Film Festival, and her screenplays have been recognized by Austin Film Festival, Sundance, and CineStory. A multi-genre author, her award-winning fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction appear in many journals and anthologies.\u00a0An NEA fellow, she has taught Creative Writing at Lehigh University and with Semester at Sea.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth Setton<\/strong>: Website<\/a> | Instagram<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zigzag Girl<\/strong>: S&S<\/a> | Bookshop.org<\/a> | Amazon<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To catch a killer who knows her secrets, magician Lucy Moon must perform the most dangerous trick of her life\u2014discovering who she really is. A murdered woman inside a magic box. A black rose in her mouth. And a secret that won’t stay buried. Lucy Moon performs nightly at a crumbling Atlantic City theater, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-63388","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-guo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63390,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63388\/revisions\/63390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}