A Writer's Tale (37 page)

I suppose I could have turned down the offer…

But I figured,
why not go for it?

So I returned to
Quake
and analyzed the problem with my plot. The problem was easy to identify: there was too much
of it.
And why did I need so much? Only in order to stretch everything out so the climax could take place in the dark. My solution?

Scrap the darkness. Let it all take place in daylight.
Suddenly, my problems with the novel evaporated. On September 30, 1993, I received a letter from Tom Dunne in which he praised what he’d read so far of
Quake
and offered several useful suggestions about revisions and ways to go with it in the future. The next day, I resumed writing the novel on the sixth anniversary of the Whittier quake that inspired it.

Remember what I wrote about “tempting fate”? On January 17, 1994, about two months before I finished writing
Quake,
the Los Angeles area was struck by a 6.6 magnitude earthquake. We were shocked out of sleep at 4:31 a.m., the house roaring and shuddering around us. “This is it,” I thought. “This is the Big One.” There was massive destruction. Buildings toppled. Freeways went down. The power was knocked out. Quite a few people were killed, and hundreds were injured. In our own case, a lamp fell on Ann’s head and I cut my foot on broken glass. Kelly, the lucky one, somehow slept through most of the quake. We were briefly trapped inside our house, but finally made it to the safety of our parked car. There, we waited in the darkness.

When dawn came, we were startled and delighted to find that our house was still standing mostly intact. We entered to survey the damage and clean up. Bookshelves and television sets, window blinds and framed pictures had fallen to the floor. Most of our cupboards had thrown their contents onto the floors. Our bed was broken. The inside of our fireplace had collapsed and our chimney had broken away from the house. The walls were cracked.

And about 500 manuscript pages of
Quake,
stacked on top of a wobbly television tray in a back room of the house, remained neatly stacked on top of the tray as if nothing had happened.

I do realize of course, that I didn’t
cause
the earthquake by writing
Quake.
But I may resist the temptation to write a novel about the end of the world.

I finished
Quake
on March 24, 1994.

The manuscript came in at 679 pages.

It’s certainly not the biggest book in history, but large and complex enough to present special problems.

When writing a small, less complicated novel, I don’t have much trouble keeping track of things. If I want to remind myself of certain details (such as what a character is wearing), it’s a fairly simple matter to leaf through the earlier pages.

Not so easy, however, when there are multiple plot lines, a crowd of important characters, and hundreds of pages.

So I want to tell you about a few methods I’ve developed to help me keep things straight.

If you’re a writer, you might find some of this useful.

First tip. Outline if you need to. Even though I am generally opposed to the use of outlines, they become almost a necessity if you’re trying to write a complex novel with several intersecting story-lines. You have to coordinate the events, or you’ll end up with a
real
disaster. Just don’t feel compelled, when writing the actual book, to follow every detail of the outline. Follow it like a map, but feel free to take detours.

Second tip. Make “character notes.” Whether writing a small novel or a monstrosity, it’s a very good idea to keep a page of notes about each character. I don’t work out sketches of my characters in advance; I let them develop as I create them in the course of writing. But
while
I’m creating them, I take a few moments to jot down their hair color and style, their age (if it matters), what they’re wearing, and other details such as unusual traits or mannerisms. But here’s a trick don’t just make a note of each detail
write down the number of the manuscript page
on which it appears. That way, you’ll have an easy time finding it again. Later on, you may want to double-check what you wrote there, or even change it. Having the page number handy can save you a lot of time and frustration.

Third tip. Draw rough diagrams and maps of any settings that might be revisted later in the book. It’s very easy to forget the layout of a house or a neighborhood or a section of wilderness (where was that lake again?). Maps and diagrams can make your life easier. I suggest you do the drawings as you go along, based on what you’ve just written.

Fourth tip. Create a “log book” for your novel. This is something completely different from your working outline.” You should create the log book as you go along. It is your record of what you’ve written labeled by chapter and page numbers. Here is a sample of my “log book” for
Quake.

PLOT

Chapt. 1 Stan pov. Earthquake hits. 8:20 a.m. Friday. June. Afterward, he murders his mother.

2 Clint pov. Quake hits. Runs from office. Car accident. He joins up with Mary Davis. They’ll drive together.

3 Barb & others at time of quake. Driver’s ed. Teacher heads downtown speeding dangerously.

4 p. 50. Stanley goes over and finds Sheila. They talk, but she is still covered & out of sight.

The purpose of the log book is to give you a quick reminder of what happened and where, and to provide an easy way for you to relocate passages that you may have written months earlier. It can be a major help.

Quake was
published by Headline in January, 1995. It was chosen to be the main selection of World Book Club, which ordered 24,000 copies.

In the U.S., it was published by Thomas Dunne, St. Martin’s Press, in June, 1995. It was given no publicity by the publisher. A couple of copies ended up in some stores.

Other stores received no copies at all.

Like
Savage
and
The Stake, Quake
was a novel that “coulda been a contenda.” I feel that those three books in particular, treated properly by a publisher, would have sold extremely well in the U.S. I think they could have been bestsellers here, just as they were bestsellers in Great Britain.

Instead, they were flops in this country.

They never had a chance of selling in the U.S. because most readers never had a chance to find out that they existed. Even if I had done something to bring attention to the books, they had been printed in such limited quantities that interested readers would’ve had a terrible time finding a place to buy them.

Authors are always taking it on the chin.

But one of the worst blows of all is to write a book, sell it to a reputable publisher, wait for its publication date, then make the rounds of the bookstores and find that very few are carrying it or ever will.

After discovering that some of the major U.S. chain bookstores had ordered no copies whatsoever of
Quake, I
decided that I would no longer play the game.

I make enough money from the U.K. and the rest of the world that I don’t
need
money from America.

I don’t need it badly enough to put myself through the agonies involved in watching my novels get “thrown away” by one publisher after another.

Quake
was my last novel to be published in the United States, and I intend for it to remain the last.

At least until a publisher makes me an offer I can’t refuse.

So far, that hasn’t happened.

ISLAND

I didn’t get started on
Island
until May 25, 1994, about two months after finishing
Quake.

What led me to write
Island?

I suppose that I’ve always had an urge to write about people who have been marooned on a tropical island. It’s a naturally great setup. The people are isolated. They are reduced to the basics of survival. And they are on their own with no easy way out.

On top of that, who knows what dangers may be lurking elsewhere on the island?

The problem, of course, is that almost everyone is familiar with
Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, Gulliver’s Travels, Lord of the Flies,
“The Most Dangerous Game,” and
Gilligan’s Island.
Plus a ton of lesser-known books, short stories, movies and television shows about people who get stranded on islands and in other desolate areas.

Writing a “marooned” story is a bit like writing a vampire story. At first glance, it might seem that just about everything has already been done.

But there are always fresh approaches.

I wanted to give it a shot.

Instead of being marooned when a storm destroys their ship, my group is already ashore, picnicking on an island when their yacht blows up. Within a few hours after that, one of the castaways is found hanged.

I employed a special technique in the writing of
Island.

The whole story is told by a young castaway who is keeping a journal. We see the entire adventure through his eyes.

What makes this different from the usual first-person narrative (such as I used in
Savage)
is that the writer of the journal is telling the story as it happens. And the writing of the journal becomes part of the story.

Most first-person novels seem to have been written years after the events of the story occurred. We usually don’t know what has prompted the narrator to tell his or her story.

The telling seems unrelated to the actual events of the story. And it is generally obvious from the start that the narrator survived to tell the tale.

Not so with
Island.

We know why Rupert is keeping the journal. We know when he is making entries in it.

We know where the journal is at all times during the course of the novel. But we never know what may happen next or whether Rupert will even by alive to finish the story.

Because he is writing the journal as he goes along,
anything
can happen.

The technique opened up a lot of new ways to play with the story, new ways to surprise myself and my readers.

Rupert’s journal was actually a variation and expansion of the tape recorder technique that I used in the “Simon Says” sections of
Endless Night.
I simply changed the tape recorder to a written journal…  then took the possibilities as far as I could.

With
Island,
I developed no plot outline. It is a fairly straight-forward story, all of it told from Rupert’s point of view. I put together a group of characters who seemed colorful, placed them on the island, blew up their boat, then just let the plot unfold in the ways that seemed most natural.

This is not to suggest that I allowed chaos to rule the story.

Every story has its own integral logic.

One of the major tricks, in writing, is to discover the natural logic that is inherent in a story’s basic situation, then release it. Develop it. Explore it. Exploit it.

Let’s take
Island
as an example.

The situation is this this: a small group of people, vacationing in the Bahamas, are having a picnic on an apparently deserted island when their yacht blows up.

What happens next?

Do they sing “Deck the Halls”? Do they toss around a Frisbee for a while? Do they split up to go bird watching?

Of course not.

Not unless they’re nuts.

What would people with common sense do?

Easy. They would take their dingy out to the site of the explosion and try to recover any items that might prove useful for their survival. Such as food, utensils, weapons, clothing…

This almost has to be done first, before the salvageable items are washed away, eaten by fish, or otherwise lost to the sea.

What next?

After salvaging everything useful from the wreckage, any reasonable person would probably embark on a limited exploration of the island looking for a source of fresh water, signs of civilization, and generally taking note of any nearby resources or hazards.

And so on.

To a large extent, the story is writing itself, telling the writer what should happen next. Or at least giving him a limited selection of reasonable alternatives, As new elements are added to the story (such as a member of the castaway group being murdered in the middle of the night), the situation changes. And the new situation gives the writer certain ways he
has
to go if he wants to tell the story correctly.

If one of your castaways gets killed, what naturally follows?

Shock. An investigation into the cause of the death. Disposal of the body. Maybe a funeral. Discussions about who might’ve done the deed and how to keep the rest of the group safe. A gathering of weapons for self-defense. Cautions against going anywhere alone. A buddy system for leaving the camp to get firewood, relieve oneself, etc. Guards to be posted overnight. And so on.

These are matters that almost
have
to be dealt with, because they would naturally come up if ordinary people are marooned and one of their number is murdered.

Every good author, given those circumstances, would feel compelled to write about the shock of discovering the death, the preliminary investigation, the disposal of the body, etc.

In certain fundamental ways, their stories would be the same. Because the story itself
demands
to go in certain directions.

In other fundamental ways, however, the stories would be very different from each other.

For one thing, every author wouldn’t be able to
detect
the integral elements of a given story. Plus, there would be legitimate differences of opinion about what
is
or
isn’t
an integral element. But even if every author should agree about such matters, they would certainly not handle them in the same manner. Each writer would emphasize different aspects, depending on the needs of his characters and his own preferences and compulsions.