My Writing Process Blog Tour

Ben Starling asked me to join the Writing Process Blog Tour, share my writing process. I will, but I want to mention Ben first. It’s difficult to read his bio without being impressed. Oxford educated, boxing champion, passionate about marine life and author. Ben, you’re making the rest of us look bad.

You can check Ben out at www.facebook.com/ben.starling.author

What am I working on?

My third novel, Reincarnology. The title is the slang for an alien technology discovered circa 1625. It’s a twelve hour process that produces a twenty-something clone who retains all memories. They’ve kept the secret for nearly four hundred years while they recreated themselves periodically, accumulating wealth, power, influence, developing secret technology. The existence of Reincarnology has been leaked to a journalist. If they can’t stop him they will end the need to keep the secret by killing all of us.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

If someone were to read some of my scenes taken out of context they might think I write horror, but I don’t. Horror has a tendency to be plot driven with only enough character development to let the reader know who the zombies are eating.

My style of horror, if you insist on calling it that, is character driven with something creepy slithering around in the background.

It’s possible to shock or scare a reader with unexpected images of blood and gore, a body falling out of a closet or a sheet covered corpse in the morgue sitting up, but scare is fleeting.

Fear is different. It slips into the reader’s guts, almost unnoticed and begins growing slowly. The reader may be oblivious to the fear until it starts chewing and clawing its way out.

A writer cannot induce fear unless there is effective character development. Readers must meet characters offering an emotional bond. When the bond is accepted the door to fear pops open.

Why do I write what I do?

For that answer I need to introduce you to It. Apparently the off switch on the imagination pump malfunctioned and I received a triple dose before they shut the system down. That overdose of imagination is It.

I grew up an only child and with the absence of siblings to provide entertainment It flourished, becoming my lifelong companion, always ready to play whatever game.

The summer I turned ten my dad and I were going to the movies weekly. I saw many movies that summer, but I only remember the name of one of them, The Horror of Dracula. I didn’t make it through the entire movie. Somewhere in the midst of fangs to the throat, blood sucking, severed heads and stakes to the heart I reached my saturation point.

I asked my dad to take me out of the theater, which he did, but the strangest thing happened when I was back out in the summer sunshine. I looked back at that dark theater and it hit me. Getting the crap scared out of me had been great fun.

When I was about sixteen I turned to the writing craft. I considered making movies, but startup costs were prohibitive, even to my teenage mind. Pen and paper, on the other hand, were dirt cheap. Given my income level at sixteen I chose the less expensive path.

Writers are not born, they’re made through hard work and obsessive focus. My first efforts at writing produced nothing short of dribble. Oh God, it was awful. Yeah, the writing was bad, but It had a gun to my head and it was either my fingers or brains on the keyboard.

Given that kind of incentive I continued working at becoming a writer and when I wasn’t doing that I was feeding my addiction to horror.

Horror movies. There’s a boat load of crap out there.

I was leaving one such poor excuse for a scary movie, grumbling to myself that I could produce a better story. It was at that precise moment that I witnessed a three-way collision between my imagination, my need to write and my love of horror.

That’s the long answer to the original question. The short answer is that I love horror and I have an imagination with no off switch. If I don’t do something with the stuff I’ll get very sick. My imagination with no outlet would be a very scary thing.

How does my writing process work?

I’m into spooky stuff, but it’s possible that my writing process is the spookiest of all.

I start with a basic idea. With my first novel, Devil Glass, it was an ancient artifact with a doorway into another world populated by winged predators. With my second novel, The Bookseller, the basic idea was a reincarnating nonhuman spirit responsible for many of the great atrocities in history.

Basic idea, characters, I turn everything over to It. Periodically I watch the short film clips that have been prepared for me.

I have come to believe that the complete story is already written, stored in some file and is being metered out to me a bit at a time.

This is very entertaining except when it’s not. I’ve killed some good characters, but not all were by design. Sometimes a sacrifice is demanded.

I try to stand my ground. The character is too good to kill. I have too much work invested in the character. I like the character. My protests are always ignored and the story is always better for it.

I don’t always get it right. Sometimes I take a misstep that threatens Its master plan. When it happens I get introduced to a good case of writer’s block. I’ve learned to go back over the last couple pages, find my misstep and fix it. Once the correction has been made the creative flow returns.

That’s a snapshot of my writing process, but I need to say one more thing about It. When I read It is a real pain in the ass, always looking over my shoulder, weighing the plot, pointing out the missed opportunities and, of course there are always those places where It would have said it differently.

Maybe I’ve been possessed by an alien ghost, enslaved, forced to write by a thing that loves the notion of giving readers nightmares.

That’s a creepy thought.


My Writing Process Blog Tour continues with Michael Brookes on July 21. Michael is an author and a video game producer. He will explain his writing process on his blog at:
http://thecultofme.blogspot.co.uk/

Over to you, Michael.

I’m also sending it back to our resident boxing champion, Ben Starling, for something new on July 21.
http://ben-starling.com/blog/

Back to you, Ben

ScaryBob