Category: The Ramble (page 36 of 457)

(ed: Rob Hart is a former journalist, and so if you need someone to tell you how to start researching for your novel? He’s your guy. (Also, his newest, Paradox Hotel, fucking rocks. It’s slick, cinematic sci-fi noir.)

Around when I was 18, I decided I wanted to write novels. I was failing out of an art conservatory, and realized graphic design was not in my future. When it was time to change majors, I figured: a creative writing degree is a clear path to waiting tables but if I go for a journalism degree, at least I can make some money!

If you read that and decide you don’t want to take any advice from me, I will understand. But… I was 18. Cut me a little slack, okay?

Anyway, I excelled in my school’s journalism program, then landed a job working for a daily newspaper in New York City, which I did for four years. At which point I saw the industry was on the verge of cratering, so I turned tail and ran for the hills.

But journalism placed some great tools into my fiction-writing toolbox. I’ve got good observational skills. I type real damn fast. I don’t miss deadlines. I understand the need to kill darlings, because often you’re dealing with a word count (or in my case, column inches), and a sweet-ass detail or quote might not fit—and that’s okay.

I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about research. That, I think, is my writing superpower. It helped me on The Warehouse, which was about what would happen if one online retailer completely took over the American economy and housing market (and then, slowly, the government). And it helped me again with The Paradox Hotel, which is about time travel but also evil billionaires and Buddhism and stuff.

For your reading pleasure, here is my research toolbox. As with any and all writing advice: your mileage may vary. Take what works for you and discard the rest. Oh, also, some of this would be tough to do in the United States of COVID, so make sure to have a mask handy.

CREATE BASKET, FILL WITH IDEAS. Every time I get an idea I think has legs, I create a Google Doc. For months, The Paradox Hotel was a Google Doc that said “time travel hotel.” As I come across relevant books or articles, or have stray ideas I think might fit the concept, I toss it in there.

I like Google Docs because they’re collaborative, easy enough to access, and I can keep an icon on my phone’s homescreen, so even if I’m on the subway or standing in line at the coffee shop or waking screaming from a nightmare, I can jot down notes.

But you do you. Carry a notebook. Shout ideas at strangers. Get notes tattooed on your arm. Just find something that fits your style.

ASSEMBLE YOUR AVENG… ER, UH, SOURCES. For me, there are two types of research. Direct and indirect sources.

Direct sources are explicitly about the subject matter you’re writing about. They can come from books, but also documentaries and news articles. So for Warehouse, it was books and articles on Wal-Mart and Amazon (Wal-Mart being better for this purpose; Amazon is a new company and not as much has been written about it, whereas Wal-Mart has been around since the 60s, so there’s a much deeper record of how it reshaped the economy).

For Paradox, it was a lot of time travel and quantum physics and Eastern philosophy.

Indirect research is more about tone: for Warehouse, I read The Trial by Franz Kafka and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. But I also read a lot of mainstream thrillers just to learn more about their mechanics. For Paradox, I watched movies like The Grand Budapest Hotel and Bad Times at the El Royale and Timecop and Primer.

Sometimes you need to live in an adjacent fictional world for a little bit. Besides giving you more of a frame of reference, it’ll help you see tropes and ideas that you can put your own spin on.

Pro-tip: Want to make your life a lot easier? Read your research books in eBook format. You can highlight stuff, and then it spits all your highlights into a file. It is game-changing.

THE NEWS IS YOUR FRIEND EVEN THOUGH IT HATES YOU. If you’re writing speculative fiction, or anything with an eye toward current events, it’s good to read the news. A lot. Which can sometimes be very depressing! But I’m a news junkie and besides informing my books (I tend to enjoy writing about how billionaires are douchebags), it’s also where I get most of my ideas. The entirety of Warehouse sprung out of this one article. 

This is why a Google Doc, or just some other repository, is important to have. My Warehouse document was 80 pages long. Half of that was just links.

News articles are also a great way to find information that you don’t need to waste time reading a whole book about. For example, in Paradox, time travel is what the space industry is turning into: it was developed by the government and later, as a way to raise money, was opened up to tourism. So I did a little reading on the commercialization of space travel. And I learned why reaching space is so valuable (it ain’t just to send rich people to ride on rockets that look like wangs—but you can read the book to find out more…).

MAKE NEW FRIENDS! People like to talk about themselves and their jobs. Use this.

Before I settled on Paradox, I was working on a book about a world where the power grids got wiped out by massive solar flares. I found an expert at the forefront of sounding the alarm on this. I sent him an e-mail, told him I was an author working on a book about the subject, and asked him if I could send him some questions. He said yes. I also spoke to Con Ed, the power utility in New York (which is where the book would have been based), to talk about their countermeasures, the science of it, what recovery would look like. And I spoke to the Office of Emergency Management, trying to figure out what the response to a massive, permanent blackout would entail. Those last two, I contacted their press/PR departments.

How do you find these resources? Think about your subject, and who the authority on it might be. My second book is set in a strip club; I had a friend put me in contact with a friend of his who was a stripper. My fifth book was about the heroin crisis on Staten Island; I met with a recovered heroin addict who lived on the island. Paradox features a trans character; I talked to two friends who are trans to get their perspectives.

Reach out respectfully, offer to buy coffee or a meal if you’re setting up an in-person interview (always the best kind), record the conversation (with their permission) but don’t be afraid to jot down notes in case the recording fails, and do your research beforehand so you’re asking good, targeted questions. Their job is to fill in gaps in your research, and provide personal anecdotes you can use to inform your story.

And always ask the most useful questions in journalism: is there anything else you think I could have asked, or information this has brought up that you think is worth knowing? That’s a good way to end things. Sometimes they’ll see an aspect that you didn’t even think of, and that’ll bring you down new paths.

GO TO THERE. For Paradox I knew I needed the hotel to have a “look.” And we all know what hotels look like, but there was a lot of value in being inside a hotel, and looking at it from a storytelling perspective.

I knew the Paradox needed a loot, and after a whole lot of Google Image searching, I settled on the TWA Hotel at JFK (I think a lot of hotel-based stories lean into Art Deco design, whereas the TWA is mid-century modern, which looks both retro and futuristic, which worked well for a time travel book…). 

Lucky for me the TWA hotel was nearby. I wrote a nice e-mail, which I sent to a few of the addresses on the website (the media contact, the manager, the archivist). An event coordinator got back to me and gave me a tour. He told me about the construction, design, and history of the space, and let me take a ton of photos, (you can find some of them on my Twitter and Instagram). It helped immensely—not just in being able to visualize my own hotel, but in creating action and momentum in the plot.

Pro-tip: That Google Doc or research file you’re keeping? Create an acknowledgements list. This way you don’t forget to thank the hotel event coordinator when you finish the book two years later. 

GOOGLE EARLY, GOOGLE OFTEN. Seriously, the Googs is your best friend—sometimes you just have to spend a day shotgun-searching relevant phrases and picking through endless links to find what you need.

But also: Image search is how I found the TWA Hotel. Street view is like a writer’s best friend. Writing about an unfamiliar city or neighborhood? Boom. Go for a little “walk.” I’ve used map and street view a lot when writing books about unfamiliar locations, or locations I hadn’t been to in a long time.

Street view is also helpful if you can’t afford to travel—or don’t want to, what with the world being on fire.

PATRONIZE YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY; YOU ALREADY PAID FOR IT [WITH TAXES]. Your library is chock-full of resources. Reference books. Old newspapers. Some of which haven’t been digitized so you wouldn’t be able to access them otherwise.

And the best part? The very best part?! Librarians are awesome. You can say “hey I am looking for information on this subject” and instead of getting borked by Google search algorithms, or spending hours clicking through non-relevant links, you get a real-life smart person who can help guide you.

It’s like the internet but way less frustrating.

This is an especially good resource if you’re writing anything historical, especially if it’s about a certain town or city. Local libraries (should) have local newspapers going back decades, and again, a lot of this shiz will not have been digitized; i.e., you ain’t gonna find it on Google.

KNOW WHEN TO STOP. This is very important. For me. I like the research phase. I like learning new stuff. But I will often fall down rabbit holes. Like this book on warehouse management which I read half of for Warehouse and was a complete waste of time.

Eventually you have to know when you have enough information. And, sure, you’ll find new things to check along the way. But, how do you know when enough is enough?

I dunno. You have to figure that out. For me, it’s when I’m getting completely exhausted by the work and the story is starting to claw its way out of my chest. Then I know it’s time to take all that research and write like a motherfucker.

***

Rob Hart is the author of The Paradox Hotel. His last novel, The Warehouse, sold in more than 20 languages and was optioned for film by Ron Howard. He also wrote the Ash McKenna crime series, the short story collection Take-Out, and Scott Free with James Patterson.

Rob Hart: Website | Twitter | Instagram

The Paradox Hotel: iBooks | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Amazon 

Most of us move through life hoping everything will go well and turn out exactly as we’ve imagined it. Most of us are therefore disappointed. This is even more true for characters in books, because without failure and pain and chaos, there is no story. A book in which everything goes right is exactly one sentence long. That means it’s up to the writer to uniquely torture their characters. In my most recent book, THE VIOLENCE, three generations of women use a pandemic of random violence to escape the cycle of abuse they’ve been stuck in. These three women have to fight everything from a new pandemic to their loved ones to the police to the cashier at a drug store to professional wrestlers. This book was an exercise for me in torturing your characters for the most satisfying and cathartic ending possible. Here’s how to do that.

Make torture part of the premise. When you’re developing the idea for your book, you don’t want to start with a perfect person in a perfect world. You want a character with specific flaws and fears who is uniquely challenged by their world. Pain should be baked right into that backstory. Even if you want to start with a generally happy character and take everything away from them, they should still have flaws and fears you can prey on while melting them down and forging them in a crucible of pain.

Throw thumbtacks in the cake mix. When I wrote my first few books, I wanted the characters to be relatable to literally everyone, which never works. We don’t want mild, smiling cardboard cutouts; we want characters so real and rich and messed up that it’s like we already know them. That means they have to be flawed—and not, “he’s so handsome no one believes he’s a spy”. Real flaws. Deep wounds. Troubled backstory that comes up at the most inconvenient of times. The key is to make them flawed but somehow likeable, meaning that if he’s a gruff jerk, we immediately learn it’s because he lost his entire family in a werewolf attack—and then we see him save a kitten when no one is looking. Maybe giving a character flaws and fears isn’t technically torturing them… but it’s more like throwing thumbtacks into the cake mix. Make it real enough and they’ll torture themselves.

Kick off with failure. I wrote an article for Crimereads called ‘Make the Face Match the Ass’ (https://crimereads.com/delilah-s-dawson-transformataion-in-thrillers/)which focuses on creating symmetry between the beginning and ending of a book. Since your protagonist generally triumphs at the end of the book, it’s nice to give them a symmetrical failure at the beginning. That means that if your character beats the bad guy in a hula hooping competition at the end, we see him suffer a tragic hula hoop-related accident at the beginning of the book. This failure can be as simple as being too shy to talk to a crush or as huge and terrible as Louis allowing his toddler to get run over in Pet Sematary. The bigger the fall, the better the rise.

The obstacle is the way. From the very beginning, make sure that there are all sorts of built-in problems for your character—don’t make it easy for them. You want to keep your reader on the edge of their seat, not knowing what will happen next. If possible, end every chapter on a cliffhanger or a question. If a chapter ends with a character happily falling asleep, it’s easy to put the book down and scroll through Instagram. If the character is falling asleep and hears a noise downstairs when they live alone, the reader may be compelled to keep reading.

When you’re not sure what to do next, think about the worst possible thing that could happen—and make it happen. Unless you’re a very strict outliner, chances are you’ve left some wiggle room for discovery in your first draft. Sometimes, you come up with the perfect idea while driving to work and feel like you’ve been tongue-kissed by the muse. Sometimes you come to a roadblock and your character is basically staring up at you like God in heaven, asking what comes next. That’s the perfect moment to throw a boulder at them. Let tragedy strike. Have them be attacked. Have their ex show up. Hit them with food poisoning. At the very least, throw a terrible, thundering downpour on them. Then they can’t stare up at you anymore.

Find your Jayne Cobb. It can be tempting to create a cast of characters who are all beautiful and perfect and lovely and get along famously, but again, that’s not a story—that’s a Publix commercial. When you add secondary characters, love interests, and acquaintances, build in that friction. Old grievances, moral differences, annoying habits, opposing wants and needs. Give your characters a reason to argue, to fight, to seethe. Sometimes the most interesting parts of the story come from what naturally happens between characters in quiet moments. It never hurts to throw a raging asshole into the mix and see what is extruded on the other side.

Even one small pebble can feel like the end of the world. Sure, a car accident or alien attack brings strife, but don’t forget how quickly the little things add up. If you don’t believe me, just put a pebble in your shoe and leave it there all day. Raccoons stealing food, a sneeze when silence is necessary, a child who won’t stop crying—it all adds up. If your character is on a journey through the forest and time is of the essence, a horse throwing a shoe is the biggest problem in the world. Don’t neglect the small things that become big things.

But don’t forget the big things. So we’ve got little things and people and fears and flaws that can create friction, but there’s so much more! Most characters are at odds with big things, too—the very foundations of the world. Culture, economics, laws, mores, religion. If a character loses their shoes in the swamp, they might not be allowed in the gas station if the guy up front is really serious about No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service. I’ll never forget Louis (yes, another Louis) from Ghostbusters trying every door and window of the upscale restaurant that wouldn’t let him in and then falling prey to the Terror Dog because of a few locked doors and some snooty waiters. When in doubt, put your character in an altercation with some authority and see where they end up.

At the All Is Lost moment, dial the torture up to 11. Right before The Big Fight or whatever you have as a climax, there’s always an All Is Lost moment. That’s when it feels like your character can never possibly win and, well, all is lost. It’s the dark night of the soul, the moment the protagonist wants to give up. Your job is to push this moment as far as you can—mentally, emotionally, physically. You need your backstory, flaws, fears, wounds, discomfort, betrayal, and hopelessness to all come together in one hot, lumpy stew for your protagonist to swallow down and fight past. We really have to believe they can’t win or can’t go on.

All this pain will be valuable to you someday. When you hit the climax of the story, that’s when you take your long list of tortures and show how your protagonist uses what they’ve learned to fight back. Take that pebble out of their shoe and load it into a slingshot. The purpose of all that torture was to mold your protagonist into someone capable of defeating not only the bad guy—but also that poor sap they were at the beginning, the weak wiener with all the worries. The harder you’ve pushed them, the higher they can rise when it’s go time. That’s what makes us stand up and cheer—having watched this character go through hell, keep on crawling, and finally triump, just like we all wish we could do (without having to suffer all the torture, of course).

But if you really want to see how I torture my characters, please pick up a copy of THE VIOLENCE. It’s available in all the usual places as a hardcover, e-book, or audiobook. Chuck liked it, so it must be good, right? [ed: I totally fucking loved this book and from page one you get the sense it’s something special, also here is where I note Delilah, myself, and Kevin Hearne will be going on a short li’l book tour next month: NYC, Rhode Island, Boston-area.]

Also, someone is bludgeoned to death with a bottle of Thousand Island dressing, and that has to count for something.

***

Delilah S. Dawson is the author of the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: Phasma and Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge: Black Spire, The Violence, Mine, Camp Scare, the Minecraft: Mob Squad series, the Hit series, the Blud series, the Tales of Pell (with Kevin Hearne), and the Shadow series (written as Lila Bowen), as well as the creator-owned comics Ladycastle, Sparrowhawk, and Star Pig, plus comics in the worlds of Firefly, Star Wars, the X-Files, Adventure Time, Rick & Morty, Marvel Action: Spider-Man, Disney Descendants, Labyrinth, and more.  Find her online at delilahsdawson.com.

We have officially added a third date!

CHECK IT OUT.

Wednesday, March 16 at 7:00pm

Strand Book Store

828 Broadway, New York, NY

Link for tickets.

Thursday, March 17 at 7:00pm

The United Theatre

5 Canal Street, Westerly, RI

*Presented by Savoy Bookshop & Café

Link for tickets.

Friday, March 18 at 7:00pm (or 6:30pm?)

Barnes & Noble

1 Worcester Rd, Framingham, MA

Store info here.

It’s me, Kevin Hearne, Delilah S. Dawson, and again we are tentatively doing an in-person tour next month, like, literally a month from today, holy crap. We will sign books. We will sign babies. We will ask that you be masked and vaxxed. We will talk and engage in various shenanigans. It will be great. As long as none of you cook up some new OMEGATRON variant in the next four weeks. BE COOL, EVERYBODY. Just. Be. Cool.

See you in NY, RI, and MA! Er, hopefully!

(*We’re doing this in support of The Violence, the paperback release of The Book of Accidents, and the new editions of The Iron Druid!)

So, you may have noticed as of late the site has been… uhh, let’s go with erratic. The basic story is this, and I’m typing this now under the assumption it may return to wonky goblin-fed shitmess in the next few hours —

So, a few months ago, the site went down a couple times. Just down. Gone. Erased. Brought from back up, fine. Updated everything, that stopped happening. Then it was replaced by a Chinese search engine. Replaced from backup, fixed again. Then, a couple week ago — ads started showing up on the site. Google ads.

First, found the ad code in widgets.

Deleted the code.

Ads went away.

Then, two days later, ads came back up, this time found that plugins had been installed without my permission — !! — and those plugins were creating widgets and using the code. Deleted plugins, shored up security.

Ads went away.

Two days later — ads were back. Took forever to find where they were — it was code in my theme. So I disabled that theme, went to the default theme annnd —

Ads went away.

Six hours later, they came back. And this time they were cascading through the backend of the site, and it became largely unusable. So, we shut down the site and applied new security protocols and here we are, once again, no ads.

No idea how long it lasts! So, I’m sending out this message in a bottle to update you. Still chasing down goblins in case. More as I know it! Apologies for chaos!

Very quick, let me light a news-scented candle and waft the gentle perfume in your direction:

First up: The Book of Accidents is on the long list for the Stoker Awards. Thanks, all! Here’s hoping it ends up there. That’s really cool and I’m in really great company. Sidenote, I re-upped my HWA membership after many, many, maaaany moons.

Then, I got to talk about creepypasta on Gavin Purcell’s very cool podcast, Way Too Interested. The creepypasta expert was the wonderful Lucia Peters. It’s a fun podcast where you basically are interested in a weird topic, and Gavin invites on an expert in said topic, then you all… talk about it. Check it out here. Or don’t. I’m not your dad. Yet.

And over at LitReactor, Gabino Iglesias talks about the books he’s looking forward to that are coming out in 2022 — some real classy picks on there from the likes of Alma Katsu, Paul Tremblay, Ursula Vernon as T. Kingfisher, Clay McLeod Chapman, Eric LaRocca, Cassandra Khaw, and more. “And more,” by the way, is a not-subtle hint that maybe just maaaaaybe Wayward, the sequel to Wanderers, is on that list, which you can find here. And here I note too that Gabino has a fistful-of-teeth book coming out soon, a shiv-in-the-kidney read that will blow your ass away — The Devil Takes You Home, out the same day as Wayward, August 2nd, 2022.

Finally, speaking of Wayward, you can preorder it at B&N today using the code PREORDER25, for 25% off. That is, if you’re so inclined. Link here.

HOKAY BYE