Travis Cottreau asked Scott Hawkins:

Thanks so much for "The Library at Mount Char". Your bio reminded me so much of a friend of mine living in the US (I'm in New Zealand), that I took a photo off the back cover and sent it to him. He agreed. I would love to know your writing method. Do you just set aside time and write, or do you have techniques to trick yourself into sitting down? Also, how long had you been working on the novel before publication?

Scott Hawkins Hi Travis,

This particular book took about fifteen months from start to finish, though there were maybe three months in there when I really didn't do much.

In general, I try for two hours a day during the week, and maybe 3-4 hours a day on weekends. At the time I wrote Mount Char, I was getting up really early--like 3:00-4:00 a.m. most days. The bulk of the book was written between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m. That sort of helped, I think--the rationale was that "if you're going to get up this bloody early, you better @^T$ing work."

These days I'm sleeping later and working in the evenings--6:00 to 8:00 p.m.. There is sort of a ritual. I brew a cup of really strong coffee, close out all my browser windows, and have at it. I usually get around 1200 words in those two hours, though of course some days it's 2000 and some days it's 500.

When I first got serious about writing every day, I'll admit it was kind of a grind. After a while it got to be just part of my day. Now I genuinely look forward to it--I code during the day, so all the gore and one-liners in the evening are a nice break.

I'll be honest, though--it's a lot easier to sit down at the keyboard every day knowing that there's a reasonable chance the book will sell. Writing Mount Char was kind of a mid-life crisis sort of thing. I'd written four books before that. None of them sold, so my hopes weren't real high. There was some "you're not getting any younger" in there. But the fact that I suspected no one but me would ever read it probably helped, in a weird way--I'm not sure I'd have gone quite so nuts if I seriously thought anyone would ever read it.

I tend to throw out the vast majority of what I write--like, 2/3 or more. I'll often do three or four versions of scenes until I find one I like. Maybe switch points-of-view, maybe tell it as a flashback, maybe do one version comedy and one straight. I really think the key to getting a saleable book is to be brutally honest with yourself about what's working and what isn't. Yes, it sucks to throw away two weeks of work (or whatever) but rejection slips suck more.

Plot tends to be pretty fluid as well--I don't have any kind of outline when I start. I just make up random scenes that sound interesting without worrying too much about making sense. For instance: "Here's a guy jogging--how can we make that interesting? I know! He gets attacked by feral dogs! How shall we save him? I know! LIONS!" That kind of thing.

When I have a couple hundred pages I flip through them and riff off of whatever seems to be working. Usually the book morphs significantly in flight--Mount Char was originally conceived as an office drama / thriller sort of thing. (Really)

In case you're wondering about the "office drama" idea;

Following a disastrous job interview, Steve runs into his prospective boss Carolyn at a bar. They're both slightly nuts, and they get cataclysmically drunk. It turns out she has a fetish for breaking into houses. seductive wink While in the house the owner comes home--he's a cop, but he's also a really bad guy. He's going to kill them. Steve shoots the cop--it's more or less in self-defense, but try convincing a jury of that.

So the upshot is that when these two strangers wake up the next day, they're basically tied together by a death-row level felony. Steve--the worst interviewee ever--still needs a job. Carolyn hires him anyway, mostly to keep an eye on him. He's a disaster at work...but he's kind of handy with a gun. And ambitious Carolyn has a glass ceiling problem...

Anyway, I couldn't make it work. I think the problem was that I spent all day working in cubicles. The last thing I wanted to do was think about them in my off hours, so I threw in some lions in the spirit of "let's see where this goes."

Anyway, thanks for reading! And tell your U.S. buddy I said hi.

Best,

Scott

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