What I Write
If you look through my stories, you’ll see there are certain things I try to provide. Here are seven of them.
“What do you want?”
–That’s such a marvelous question. It can be the seed to a beautiful memory, or the offer that calms a terrorist. It can delight, seduce, or reassure… and of course it can map out which of thousands of genres and styles each of us want to spend our nights curled up reading.
It’s also the defining question for a story itself. A quest, a mystery, or even a slice of life are all brought together by the struggle for some goal the characters want. (When someone writes a slice of life story, or just anything with a slow start, that’s the time to check Kurt Vonnegut’s blessed rule “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”) So saving a kingdom is not the same as unmasking one killer, or trying to make the person in the next cubicle laugh before the workday begins.
And when I start defining one of my character’s goals, I like to cut the ground a bit further out from under him:
- In Shadowed, Paul was searching for the answer to his own mysterious power, and the hole in his memory that had him give up his ordinary life to live in secret.
- In the Spellkeeper Flight books, Mark wanted to save the people he loved from enemy magic—but he’d also lived his life in the shadow of his best friend (she’s so much more capable than he is), his older cousin, and his criminal father. Not someone who’d see himself as a hero, even before the story took a few hard twists.
When my heroes want something, I try not to make it simple.
Struggling on All Sides
The one piece of writing advice that’s stuck with me more than anything is: a strong story leaves the character no choice except what he has to do.
(And that last choice is still the hardest he has to make.)
After all, the basic question of how we all get through our days is “What do I do next?” It unfolds into the step-by-step journey that makes a character unique, AND builds a plot that’s specific and convincing. What are the options, the allies, the limitations that someone’s world is made up of? How do they see its shortcuts, and what blind spots do they miss?
If my hero doesn’t try bargaining with the opposition, or avoiding them, or asking for help… then I want to think I’ve shown solid reasons why they wouldn’t. Which ways are closed off really can be what defines a strong story concept: the increasingly implacable enemy, the inescapable problem, or the isolation that forces a hero to struggle alone. And those blind spots of the answers that another person could have used, and this one took too long to see.
Or just in a single scene, how many arguments, ideas, or maneuvers can there really be, and how does the chess match play out? Including, how many moves does the other side have planned? A battle like the ones the Spellkeepers have (“this city’s not big enough for the four of them”) ought to be worth losing ourselves in the whirl of action, that always leads to the conclusion it needs to.
For Joy
Mark can fly. He only needs a moment to fling himself up past the rooftops, and every time he looks at his city from above, he sees something new. Even if it’s another pattern about where his enemies might be hiding.
Paul’s story is more earthbound, and Shadowed was mostly about looking into the darker corners of his world. But the core idea of that world is that power and hope can make a difference in people’s lives—even when there isn’t a conspiracy to fight. “A nice place to visit, and maybe I would want to live there.”
Paul has a long way to go before he understands that. (Though my followup short story for him “Passengers” is one moment of him getting closer.)
But whatever stage one of my stories is at, I try to look for moments of peace or pleasure. If I can’t immerse myself and the reader in how those moments keep a character going, the road ahead would look pretty dark.
Suspense
It’s in my motto: “Whispered spells for breathless suspense.” My favorite scenes are usually the ones where every twist and every image pull me deeper into the moment, until I’m screaming inside to know what comes next. I want that when I write, every time.
Some scenes are playful or restful, but I still want them to find something to tease the reader with, and make each moment flow into the next. The further I look into what makes suspense work, the more I see that the same twists work for any moment and any style.
And sometimes I have a man with a flying belt being forced down into sewers and grabbing one last desperate look at what ought to be familiar surroundings above ground. By the time Mark erupts back into the open air, we should all be soaring with him—and his night’s still just getting started.
What’s love got to do with it?
Many writers treat “paranormal” as one half of “paranormal romance.” But a writer I know once asked who preferred their love stories hot and who wanted a slow burn, and my answer was that I best remember the ones that take their time. Better yet, the stories that genuinely play their relationships against everything else at stake, and make us wonder which should be more important.
A mystery fan could “cherchez la femme” in my books, and find women and men at the root of some of the most powerful drives each other has. I hope you’ll like who the story ends up putting with who. But that doesn’t mean you’ll know how it’ll get there.
Mark would be the first to admit that knowing Angie has shaped half of his life. Paul and Sarah and Lorraine and Greg… it’s been complicated.
Nothing will be the same
More and more, I like a story to put some weight into the steps it goes through. True, I’ve written searches, chases, and confrontations that only reinforced what the story had already shown was going to be the challenge… but more and more, I like the moments that change that up.
Truths are turned upside down. Loyalties break. New strengths unlock. People die, sometimes.
So often, those are the moments we remember in a story. Again and again, I find writing comes down to building a tale around pieces that could truly tear something loose if they changed, plus the journey that makes them important. Then, being willing to push the detonator.
Is this the scene where things just got real? How many more of those can a story take?
I always want to find out.
To the Truth
Purposes and possibilities, joy and fierceness and heart and heartbreak… But like the philosopher cowboy on City Slickers said, all that really matters is “one thing,” meaning it’s all a journey to find what that thing is.
All my stories come down to some final truth, that I’ve been working toward from the beginning. It might be who can be trusted and why, or it might be what a character can trust in themselves. Everything else is exploring why that has to be the answer.
I like to think that makes the twists along the way more than tools for suspense. That the glimpses into the reasons why someone can’t take an offer, or how they look at someone they’ve never understood, might stick with a reader after the last page is turned.
If those are the stories you want to read, I hope you’ll click here and take a look.
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