DIY MFA Radio · Gabriela Pereira

444: Lies, Secrets, and Tension in a Closed-Setting - Interview

·43 min·4 clips

How an Asian writer's first screenplay led to an Oscar nomination with Clint Eastwood.

This episode features an interview with Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and novelist Iris Yamashita, conducted by DIY MFA Radio hosts Gabriela Pereira and Lori Walker. Yamashita discusses her journey from engineering to Hollywood and her debut mystery novel, *City Under One Roof*. The conversation focuses on the craft of writing a thriller within a highly constrained setting. Yamashita explains her novel is about a detective stranded in a remote Alaskan town where all residents live in one building, a setting inspired by the real city of Whittier. She details her career shift, noting she entered screenwriting after winning a contest judged by a CAA agent, leading to her work on Clint Eastwood's *Letters from Iwo Jima*. She describes the subsequent difficulty of being typecast as an "Asian historical" writer in a mid-2000s Hollywood where over 95% of film writers were white. The novel originated as a television pilot sample, which producers liked but didn't sell due to market saturation of similar concepts. Yamashita reveals she structures her writing like a screenplay, using a three-act framework and aiming for cliffhanger chapter endings to maintain momentum. She developed three distinct third-person point-of-view characters: a detective, a teenager, and a woman with a disordered thought pattern inspired by schizophrenia. A surprising inspiration was *Alice in Wonderland*, with the detective as Alice, the teen as the White Rabbit, and the third character as the Mad Hatter. The closed setting creates tension by trapping the claustrophobic detective and forcing interactions among characters who are all hiding secrets. She employs a "vomit draft" method for first drafts, focusing on speed and avoiding perfectionism, then revises through multiple focused drafts. Yamashita uses a reminders app to break writing into small, daily, check-off-able goals to create a sense of instant gratification during a long process. The town's isolation and network of underground tunnels amplify the atmospheric dread and claustrophobia central to the plot. The tone is conversational, educational, and craft-focused, with the host and guest analyzing specific writing techniques and personal experiences. This episode is ideal for aspiring mystery and thriller writers, screenwriters, and anyone interested in narrative structure and character development. Listeners seeking a broad cultural discussion or a purely promotional author interview might find it too narrowly focused on craft.

As heard by us

A patient craft talk about secrets, structure, and the revisions that keep a mystery working.

The conversation treats mystery as a form built from partial truths, lies, and secrets, with Iris Yamashita showing how those pieces can keep tension moving without losing the thread.

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Why you'd press play

When your draft needs a steadier path through secrets and a smaller next step.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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