Category: Writing Process

This article on my writing process was posted as part of a blog tour for What Grows From the Dead. It was originally posted here.

Writing past your headlights

It’s late, and your trip’s been long and difficult. You’re off the main road, trying to follow directions, but they aren’t detailed enough. You’ve never been here, you’re not familiar with the territory, and nothing looks familiar in the dark – just shadows, hints, only coming into focus for an instant as your lights cross them. There’s paint on the road to show the lanes, but some of it is worn away, and the intersections and turns aren’t marked.You’re going too fast for your lights, and if something’s in the road, you’re in for a few moments of either terror or panic as you try not to run headlong into it. 

That’s my writing process. I’m what writers call a “pantser,” somebody who writes by the seat of their pants. That’s in contrast to a “plotter,” somebody who has reams of backstory, character profiles, recipes, history, and a massive, detailed plot outline, somebody who knows what’s happening in each chapter, what beats they need to hit, as they progress towards the plot’s conclusion, along the route they’ve already worked out and carefully crafted step by step.

Those two styles are wonderful in that they both can lead to terrific work. J.R.R. Tolkien was clearly a plotter, almost more excited about creating the details his world’s history and language and legend than he was in the story on which the book rests. Donald Westlake, author of countless mysteries, legendarily hated outlines and just wanted as he wrote to find “what’s next?”

How it works for me is I just start writing, page one, and usually I just write until the first draft of book is finished. I usually have no more than a couple sentences of concept, not a plot, just a setup. I often don’t know who my characters are, or even how many they will be, until I begin to discover them on the page. A pattern I often follow is to write for a bit and then throw myself a curve at the end of a chapter – a twist in the plot, an unexpected appearance, a secret revealed. I certainly don’t try to make every chapter end on a cliffhanger, but those seem to me to be natural moments of heightened interest, nice punctuation marks in the narrative. Often I don’t know what they are or even when they’re coming until I write them. If I’m doing my job right, they also serve as little nudges to keep reading – the reader saying “what’s next?” right along with me.

In What Grows from the Dead, one of those moments that turned out to be central to the story was a “what’s in the box?” moment, one that readers of the book will surely remember. I had no idea starting the chapter what was in the box. I hadn’t even known there was going to be a box until I threw it in as another twist a couple chapters earlier. I certainly didn’t know that the contents of the box would be critical to how the story played out. I did know it had to be something important and maybe a little unexpected given that I’d kind of hyped it up some, but beyond that, I didn’t know until I wrote the last sentences of the chapter what was in there.

I’m sure that sounds chaotic, and it is, but I have a good bit of background in thinking this way. I’ve been doing improv comedy for the past 18 years with a group at a local comedy club, and my love for that feeds perfectly into my writing style. With improv, you start a scene without knowing what it’s about, without knowing where you are, who you’re with, or even who you are. All of that gets solidified as you go, ideally early on in the scene so you can build the relationships and the drama that make the scene get moving and have a more appealing (and if you do it well, amazing and funny) plotline. You’re doing all the elements of storytelling there in the moment, while people are watching you, without a chance to edit or go back or rethink, and it’s just magical when it works. The basic tenet of improv is “yes, and” – meaning I accept what you’ve just added to our world, and here is something else I’m giving back, something that hopefully expands and defines the world, our characters, our relationships, our desires. 

When improv succeeds, it’s absolutely enchanting. In part, that’s because the expectations the audience has are so low – they know you’re making up a scene and a story and a world on the spot, and if you pull it off, even halfway, they’re with you, impressed or even amazed. If you fail, you can just go on to the next scene, and you’ve only wasted a few minutes of people’s time. With books, however, it’s totally different. You’re asking people to spend hours in your world, and there’s a strong expectation going in that the book will be good, that it will be polished, tight, meaningful, lyrical. You don’t get the grace that an improv audience will give you, and you shouldn’t get it. Even if you write a book using the principles from improv, the book still needs to be just as good as what you’d get from somebody with fifteen notebooks full of outlines, backstory, and character sketches.

That’s where editing and rewriting come in for me. I can improv a first draft, see what happens, get to know my characters, come up with a plot and world, emotional beats and a satisfying ending. Once I’ve done that, I get right back in my car and drive that route again, this time in daylight, where I can see appreciate the colors and the leaves and see everything coming. That’s when the world truly takes full shape.

This article on my writing process was posted as part of a blog tour for What Grows From the Dead. It was originally posted here.

Writing to genre – challenges and shortcuts

I’m here to talk about my mystery book, but I have been publishing books for about five years now, and I’ve branched out from fantasy, where I started, to sci fi, and more recently, to mysteries and thrillers. I love to read in all these genres, but writing them really reveals what different ingredients are needed for each.

With my fantasy novels, most of which are actually also mysteries, I feel like I have the most freedom. I can create new worlds, new cultures, new populations. I can mess with reality using magic and weird forces. I can create people who are very different from people in the real world, and give them all kinds of interesting skills and quirks. I do a lot of research to try to understand how people lived with less technology and in a feudal society, and I try to represent that to the extent that it fits into the story. Medicine and laundry are two areas where I’ve done a deep dive, along with different styles of fighting, because fighting is central to lots of stories.

Sci-fi has a bit more constraint. You need to respect the rules of physics and reality, or at least most of them, and, more than with fantasy, you need to justify where you’re breaking these rules and how. Sci-fi readers can be more unhappy when your worlds don’t make sense or violate basic laws. With the sci-fi books, and with the scientific elements of my thriller, I’ve enlisted physicist and biologist friends to check my work and make sure what I’m saying is at least in the neighborhood of plausibility. There’s also a kind of common lingo with sci-fi that fans know and accept, some of it real, some of it sci-fi – nanites, wormholes, that kind of thing.

With my novels set in the real world, there is, paradoxically, a sense of relief but also a sense of even more responsibility to get things right. The relief comes from not having to invent or explain everything about the world. Readers understand cars and cell phones and cultural references and how people in the modern world live their lives, so you don’t have to explain the society your characters live in at the same time as you’re trying to tell a story. That can make the storytelling much more focused, because you don’t have to digress to explain who the Knights of the Imperial Boot are, or how mineral magic works, or how space warp travel works and is possible. These mysteries and thrillers can be leaner, more efficient, and hopefully more relatable right at the start.

The responsibility part of writing in the modern world is that people can almost instantly tell if you’re getting something wrong. You can’t just make up how something like a hospital or a police station works, because your readers, or at least some of them, will find your errors and be unhappy about them. I should know – as a geologist, I am often annoyed when shows get things like lava and quicksand and Earth history wrong.

That responsibility is a duty, but it’s also an opportunity. When starting to write Got Trouble, I made my main character, Glynnis, knowledgeable about guns, something that I wasn’t at all. That meant I had to learn and research to get that stuff right. I read up whatever I could find, and I watched a ton of videos, which helped not only with factual stuff like loading and unloading and effective range and all that, but also with a culture of gun owners that I hadn’t had much contact with. I also have a friend (and reader) who gave me some great feedback both on how the guns would work but also how somebody comfortable around them would think of them and act. I also had some friends who work in emergency departments help me with how the intake of a patient with gunshot wounds would work. When I wrote a story set on an old sailing ship, I consulted with sailors to make sure I was getting the sail names, the equipment, and the basic operation correct. 

With What Grows From the Dead, I made the main character somebody who had worked as a professor, a life I know very well. But the stuff that happens to him and the things he chooses to do were not familiar at all. I needed to research how police procedure works with search warrants, arrests, defense counsel, and a county jail. I also spent a whole evening learning how to run a meth lab, something that will raise concerns if anybody’s watching my search history. With all the poisons, swords, and other questions I’ve done with the fantasy stuff (e.g. how long would it take somebody to die if stabbed in the gut?), I’m sure I must look like a seriously troubled Google user.

There is a lot that’s common to books no matter whatever genre you’re in. You need relatable characters who act believably, who make choices that fit their situation and their personality. You need the words they say to make sense, to mesh with their values and background, and to be what actual humans say. You need excitement, secrets, humor, longing, adventure, sorrow. Those are the fundamental elements to any human story, going back to tales around campfires long ago. If I do my job, then my readers will find something to relate to as they sit there in the firelight, imagining other lives and keeping warm.