The last time Maeve saw her cousin was the night she escaped the cult they were raised in. For the past two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything—and everyone—at a safe distance. When Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she’s ever had. Soon she’s spending more time at Andrea’s remote Catskills estate than in her own cramped apartment. Maeve doesn’t even mind that her cousin’s wealthy work friends clearly disapprove of her single lifestyle. After all, Andrea has made her fortune in the fertility industry—baby fever comes with the territory. The more Maeve immerses herself in Andrea’s world, the more disconnected she feels from her life back in the city; and the cousins’ increasing attachment triggers memories Maeve has fought hard to bury. But confronting the terrors of her childhood may be the only way for Maeve to transcend the nightmare still to come.

In JUST LIKE MOTHER, Heltzel employs an unsettling, cultish environment as a framework for exploring the pressures of motherhood and group think, society’s expectations for women of a certain age, and the extremes of conservative feminism. Atmospheric prose and chilling scenes from a childhood gone wrong will leave readers hungry to discover Maeve’s spine-chilling fate. 

It’s the journey, not the destination

You probably think I’m talking about the journey to publication. This applies in that case too—pub day is rewarding; but it’s the blood, sweat, tears, and tendonitis that you’ll wear like armor when you approach anything challenging in life moving forward.

But what I’m really talking about here is your story. In Just Like Mother there were aspects of the “reveal” that couldn’t be hidden due to the book’s setup. This was a conundrum, because I was aware there may not be the traditional payoff for readers of thrillers. And since Just Like Mother is a horror-thriller hybrid novel, there are certain expectations for BIG TWISTS.

To alter the reveal, I realized I’d have to adjust the entire backstory and setup. I wasn’t opposed to making massive changes, but I was opposed to changing my protagonist’s origin story in service of familiar plot conventions. So instead of focusing on how to make this particular twist more twisty, I focused on how to make the getting there as unexpected, rewarding, and fun as I possibly could.

As someone who tends to know her endings early on and work toward them, I really enjoyed refocusing on making the more mundane aspects of the novel pop: working sinister details into every scene to build atmosphere, veering off in some bonkers directions, playing with mood and tone.

I realized a couple of interesting things when I was playing in the in-between: first, that it’s really fun to let go of the urgency of speeding toward an ending; and second, that I should have been doing this all along anyway. Sure, a great twist in the end is fun (and don’t worry, I did still build in a few surprises!); but it’s the getting there that contains the most payoff.

And my revised strategy seems to have worked! Even when readers can predict the ending, most of them have commented that they really enjoyed getting there—which is the most rewarding feeling!

Write to your emotions

Unfortunately most writers can’t just write when we feel like it or when inspiration strikes. If you are a person like me who experiences a range of emotions throughout any given week, you are in luck! I have found a workaround.

I learned early that my best writing is emotion-driven, and I also learned early to keep a running list of scenes that come to mind, so I can dive in on any scene and will never be lacking inspiration or stuck on what comes next. At any given time, I typically have at least three scenes (and as many as 15) listed in a separate document. The list grows as I get further into the story and know more about my characters and envision them in scenarios that support their narrative arc and are thematically related to the plot. Usually a scene idea will spring randomly to mind while I’m driving or in the shower (times I allow my mind to wander). I keep a million notes on my phone along the lines of, “pumpkin effigy” or “scene in garden no gloves.” When I’m in front of my computer I build out these scenes into a couple of sentences to tie them into the existing text.

Then—here’s the good part—when I really, really don’t feel like writing but know I have to hit a deadline, I pull up my scene list and choose the scene that is most aligned with my emotional state. If I am angry or frustrated, I jump into a scene where my character(s) are experiencing negative emotions. Channeling real emotions into pre-planned scenes results in more visceral, immediate prose—so even on the days when I’m really dragging, I can usually produce something worth keeping.

Pretend no one will ever read it

This is, hands-down, the best thing I learned to do while writing Just Like Mother. Sometimes my brain goes to extremely dark places. Sometimes there’s fear surrounding that tendency. I’m not proud to say I care a little too much about what people think, and I’m always worried about things like disappointing my parents or tarnishing my reputation. (For the record, I know intellectually that my anxieties are mostly unfounded. No one thinks about me that much, and certainly I’m not giving my parents enough credit here. But when your day job is editing kids’ books and you write gruesome horror novels on the side, you consider these things.)

When I first began drafting Just Like Mother, I was having a hard time shaking these anxieties. I played it safe for much of the novel’s start, until I knew something had to change. I wasn’t having fun anymore, and I wasn’t unleashing my imagination. But I know enough about writing to know that playing it safe gets you nowhere, and I had to be gutsier for my novel to succeed.

So I told myself a half-truth: No one but you will ever read this book. It was only a half-truth because at that time, I genuinely didn’t know. There was the very real possibility that no one would read the book—that I’d query agents and get no requests. Writing without any audience in mind served to extinguish all my anxieties about what people might think of me and allowed me to go to some very dark places without fear. It also—crucially—made it necessary for me to enjoy the experience of writing the book versus focusing on publication as the end goal. If no one will ever read your book, it has to mean something to you. It must come from a personal space and serve you in some way, either as practice for the next or an investment in yourself as a creative person. If you pretend no one will ever read the book, you’ll never find yourself asking, “Is it worth it?”

Write for yourself, revise for your readers.

Although I wrote early drafts for myself, I put myself aside entirely when revising. My writing group offered fantastic criticism of my early drafts, and my agent was brilliant and ruthless in terms of cuts (for pacing) and brainstorming (for plot). When I was revising the book prior to going on submission I cut whole characters, multiple scenes, tens of thousands of words. I did it over and over and over, until the book hardly resembled the original. Then I did it again when we sold it. Because at that point the book was no longer about me, and my goals had shifted. Now—knowing that it would be read—my goal was to make it as enjoyable a reading experience as possible. To get there I needed to step outside myself and relinquish attachment to everything I’d just written.

But you know what? After writing purely for myself for years, it was refreshing to write in service of actual readers. You’ll never please everyone, but being able to accept feedback and be unselfish about a thing you are producing for other people’s entertainment is crucial.

Ask me about the character of Will sometime. He now only exists in a folder of “cut scenes” (along with at least a hundred other pages of nixed content!).

Hotel Lobbies are the Secret Sauce

This one is not very enjoyable to consider, but let’s be honest: none of us have great swaths of extra time for dabbling. I talked about Just Like Mother to friends for a solid year before I started writing it, not because I necessarily needed that additional time for the ideas to evolve (though that was part of it), but because I couldn’t “find” the time.

Eventually I grew embarrassed. I was telling people in my life about my book, but my book didn’t exist outside my imagination. It was time to do the work. When I evaluated my schedule, I realized there wasn’t any room at all—I had (still have) a demanding day job, and my evenings and weekends were packed with work and social plans…Oh.

There was one obvious element there that I could drop to make time for writing. For a year I stuck to a strict rule of one night out with friends per week. Most other weekday nights and weekend days, I worked after work. I started looking forward to my weekends for rest and uninterrupted work time. I apologized to friends and family and hoped they’d still be around when I re-emerged (thankfully, they are). And if I felt myself getting too burned out, I’d use Friday night to binge TV rather than write.

I know this isn’t feasible for a lot of people, especially people with partners and children. I was “lucky” in the sense that I was single when writing Just Like Mother. It wouldn’t be possible to ignore my partner now to the extent that I ignored my friends and family then, and it would be even less possible with children involved. Also, my process was somewhat extreme. You don’t have write a book in a year—you can take your time. You can sacrifice one thing per week and use those few hours to work on your book. But it will necessitate sacrifice, one way or another.

I will say this, though: I am not a robot. I thrive around other people. Most coffee shops didn’t stay open at night. Bars were the only establishments open late enough for my writing schedule, but they were too rowdy and didn’t allow laptops in most cases. When I found hotel lobbies, my life changed, and my progress improved exponentially. A nice hotel lobby will let you sit for hours with your laptop. Usually it’s bustling enough in the evening to make you feel stimulated,  and involved (it mimics a social life); and often if you choose to listen to conversations or observe body language, you’ll find inspiration.

My best, most productive post-work writing nights were spent in the lobbies of The Marlton, The Hoxton, and The High Line in New York City with a glass of wine and a snack. Having somewhere to go also forced me to clean up, put on a decent outfit, and generally be more of a human. And it’s fun, because for me these hotels were out of reach financially for an overnight stay, but this way I got to experience their glamor. (Once, though, I treated myself to a stay at The Ludlow on New Year’s Eve with my dog. I wrote in the lobby in the early evening and went up to my room when it got too crowded. I ordered a single glass of champagne for midnight and snuggled my dog in luxurious surroundings, and it remains one of my favorite memories of NYE.) I strongly recommend patronizing a hotel lobby if you live near one. But really any public space with interesting people and snacks will do. Honestly, a mall food court would work just as well.

ANNE HELTZEL is a New York-based novelist and book editor. In addition to writing horror, she has penned several milder titles for children and young adults. Just Like Mother is her adult debut.

Anne Heltzel: Website | Twitter

Just Like Mother: Bookshop | Indiebound

This is not going to be a helpful post, a healthy post, a post of solutions and fixes, a post that makes sense of anything, that catalyzes what we’re all going through, that attempts to be optimistic or do anything at all to understand the pervasive miasma of trauma we are all standing in and breathing. It is a post of sadness and rage, words that I’m not even sure will make much sense, but right now I don’t have anywhere to put them so I’m putting them here.

At the time of this writing, 19 elementary school children are dead in Uvalde, Texas, alongside two teachers at that school. They were shot by an 18-year-old gunman who by all reports went out on his birthday in order to purchase the weapons he used to commit the mass murder of innocents.

If this happened in a vacuum, if this were a single instance, it would have been a colossal failure, a failure that he was able to have those weapons, a failure of a society that produces those weapons, a failure of a system that was unable to protect those children. If this were a singular horror, it would still necessitate scrutiny and action to follow in the wake of sadness and rage. But it isn’t a singular action. It was not one-and-done. There will likely be another mass shooting today or tomorrow. There have already been hundreds this year. There have already been several this week, from the supermarket shooting against Black Americans in Buffalo to the shooting at a Taiwanese-American church in California. And now this. This, another cup of blood poured into an ocean of it. Blood with the hellish stink of gunpowder burned into it. Shell casings gleaming at the bottom of this sea of pain.

And I don’t know what to say, and I don’t know what to do. The greatest frustration with this and so many of our problems isn’t that we are up against an insurmountable problem. We aren’t facing an issue without solution. We have the answers. We have answers that we collectively agree upon. We know there are some very simple, common sense regulations we can levy against both the gun industry and against the buyers of guns. We know what guns are the problem. We know that there are things we can look out for, like how so many of the shooters are also domestic abusers. It is easy and obvious to say, if you have to learn to drive a car, you should learn to use a gun. If you need a license to operate a vehicle, to sell houses, to run a business, to run electricity through a building — then it stands to reason you should have a license to wield a concealable device that can kill dozens of people in the blink of an eye. We can all probably even agree that concealable is a fucked-up metric for guns, and we would wisely ask, why is that even allowed? The (often mythical) “good guys with guns” shouldn’t want to hide that they have them, so the only people who want to conceal a weapon would be someone who intends to do harm. It follows easy logic that if you have to be 21-years-old to drink an alcoholic beverage –you should at least be that old to use a gun. Most of us can understand and agree that a gun is a tool whose sole purpose is to commit violence. That’s what it does. That’s all it’s for. Even if you view it as necessary for defense, that defense means using it to put holes in other people. It’s not a hammer. It doesn’t cook food, despite what that odious shitstain Ted Cruz would tell you in some pro-gun propaganda bullshit video. It’s there to shoot animals or people. It’s there to inject a little metal missile into meat at around 1100+ feet per second. To turn it to pulp. To butcher it. To make it bleed out and end it, same as it was yesterday, when guns were chosen for the explicit purpose of killing kids — killing them so brutally, so profoundly, that the only way to know who they were was by fetching DNA from their parents in the hopes of making a match.

We all understand. And most of us probably even agree on it. Same as we know how to slow or even halt climate change. Same as we know what helps stave the spread of COVID-19. We know how to save lives, how to accept our kids for who they are, how to share love to stop hate. We know the answers. We even want the solutions. But here we are. Year after year. The same problems. The same problems, growing worse. Cracks in the foundation spreading, poised to collapse. And nothing is done. And nothing is done. And nothing is done. Children dragged onto an altar, killed in service to monstrous capitalist Christofascist interests who will lie with their shit-slick tongues and tell you they are pro-life, pro-life, pro-life, that they care about kids in schools, that masks are abuse and we cannot have them, that the cure is worse than the disease, that we don’t want kids to learn anything harmful, oh no, not ever, but wait, what’s that, they don’t care if their policies lead to kids getting shot again and again, to kids considering suicide because they are denied joy and love because of who they love or how they identify or what the color of their skin looks like, and when kids die, when women die, when anybody dies, they say oh, thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers, maybe if we armed more people, maybe if we paid more blood and money to get more bullets, maybe if we gave teachers guns, maybe we give kids guns, maybe we give fetuses guns, more guns, more bullets, more blood, as long as we are getting paid, as long as we are getting re-elected, as long as we are biting into the meat of power with our teeth and holding on so tight you’ll never, ever shake us.

Republicans want obeisance to some mad, deranged version of the Constitution, as long as that version keeps them fat and happy and in control. They’ve lost the thread, lost their humanity. They’ve lost democracy, the very thing their precious Constitution hoped to entrench. And the other party, the Democrats, are generally on the side of justice, but can barely be seen to do so because they mumble and shrug and shuffle their feet instead of getting loud, getting mad, throwing (metaphorical) punches in the media and on the chamber floor. They’ve so bought into this collegial lie, this notion that the GOP won’t cut off their fingers just for trying to shake hands, that it’s killing us. The GOP are greedy aggressors; the Democrats are mealy-mouthed glad-handers. On one side: the monsters. On the other side: the cowards. Here we are, banning books, when we need to be banning guns. But who’s fighting for us? Who’s not only speaking out, but genuinely fighting? Who will help us?

I don’t know what to do or what to say and it feels all the more angering. I only know that we are all on this bus, driving fast down the highway with a driver who is increasingly cruel and unstable. All we have to do is unseat the driver. And I don’t know how we do that, but there’s more of us than there are of them. There are a lot of passengers, but only one driver. And we better figure it out real goddamn soon, because our tires are wet with blood and it won’t be long before they drive us off a fucking cliff. It’s already too late for those 19 kids in Uvalde.

But maybe we can save the next 19 if we’re willing to get up out of our seats.

I’m a new writer who’s not a new writer. 

What I mean is, I’ve been writing a looong time and only now do I have a debut novel. Experience (or age) doesn’t make me unique in any sense, but it adds a certain perspective to this whole ride. My expectations are…lower? Don’t get me wrong, I’m very interested in my books existing. Being read! Selling! Made into comics, tv, and movies! But I don’t expect those things, at least, not anymore. I did, in the early days, despite telling myself I was a realist.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha.

I could write pages of the things I believed before writing NINE TENTHS that I’ve since set aside, for the better. I’ll share five of them with you, because five is Chuck’s limit and he won’t let me out of the cellar if I disobey.

I’m A Morning Writer, Or You Control Your Environment

This lesson was the simplest. In the early years I worked in the late afternoon or early evening because life, or so I thought. In reality, I slept late. I could have been writing, but I chose sleep. Fine, if that works for you. It didn’t work for me. A lot of my late-day production was a slog.

Enter children and school.

What ye olde folks don’t tell you is when your kids go to school, so do you. The hours, the activities, the homework–the whole burden returns. My precious morning sleep disappeared. I wasn’t busy for an entire extra two hours, but I certainly had to function earlier in the day. I realized since I was awake, I might as well write. And at that hour (now) the words flowed easier than in the evening. My brain wasn’t mush from a full day of “other work”. I was energized and eager to attack the novel in progress. The scheduling switch didn’t occur to me organically—it took my children starting school for me to pivot to morning writing. I wish I’d learned (earlier) to play with scheduling, and jumpstart my creativity.

This is not me saying you should write in the morning. This is me saying you should learn when you’re most productive, and write then, as much as life allows. Sometimes you’ll have to make trade-offs. (Dream about donuts or wake up and finish that novel because no one else will.)

I Wasn’t The Second Coming Of FAMOUS WRITER

You’d think I’d know better. EVERYONE falls for this. And I certainly said the correct things, out loud. But inside my head, I marched to a different drum. They’re going to think you’re amazing. I could hear them. Look at this guy, he nailed a bestseller on the first try. Established authors would contemplate their own work, the horror dawning as they realized I was so much better at everything literary.

Please see extended laughter above.

Turned out, I had no idea what I was doing. I relied on plenty of cheap writing tricks. My plots lacked direction and urgency. My characters had no agency. I cobbled together approaches and themes from various authors I happened to be reading–pastiche. Again, this experience isn’t atypical. I mention it so maybe a handful of you manage to silence your early author hubris. I mean, confidence is valuable, but then there’s delusion.

I learned I had skill gaps. I still do. And that’s fine. I can be the writer I am. So can you.

What You Think Is Clever Dialog Is Not A Story

Up until very recently I wrote dialog with a blind eye. Early feedback complimented my dialog, and in a world where I had any number of other writing struggles, I was more than happy to believe I had dialog sewn up. At least I know how people talk and translate that to the page. In my head, the characters bantered endlessly, entertaining with every word they uttered and I transcribed. Cut the dialog, I thought to myself. But, it’s so good.

Again, see cruel laughter above.

At the risk of sounding like a jerk, my dialog wasn’t bad. Dialog writing was one of the easiest parts of the process, for me. The problem was failing to turn a critical eye to the words my characters spouted. Did the words matter? Did they serve more than one purpose, advance plot, or reveal character? And if the dialog did nothing else but seem incredibly fun to read, was it notable? Meaning maybe limit myself to one or two moments of clever for the sake of clever in the whole book, rather than one or two moments per page, Macfee, you dumbass.

It’s great to have a strength. But even strength needs editing. If nothing else, mine did.

A Unique Premise Isn’t The Most Important Element

When I first had the idea for NINE TENTHS, the premise of an ordinary man who repossessed augmented (superhero) devices, I knew I had a winner. At the time (I’m not going to list a year, but it will become clear it wasn’t recent) superhero media was rare. I wasn’t aware of anyone who’d taken the angle of an ordinary person in a world where superheroes were the norm. The combination of repo man and superhero felt fresh. THIS IDEA IS SO GREAT, NOTHING CAN STOP ME.

Enter the MCU. And scads more brutal laughter.

I still think my story is unique, or unique enough. But after I accepted the whole superhero market saturation thing (or mostly accepted) I realized what I should have realized all along—it’s the characters, stupid. If I cared about the characters, other people would care. If I kept the characters interesting, if I was true to the story I was telling, basically if I followed all the writing fundamentals, I’d still have a good, maybe great, story, regardless how many superhero movies and tv shows existed. “The idea” is but a small first step. Lots of people have ideas. Very few people deliver on them (or even try).

Creating A Story Is Fun (Forget, Relearn, Repeat)

The whole point of writing is that you, the author, enjoy the process. Why else are you writing? It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme—there’s not enough storage space in the world to contain the typed laughter. You’re writing because it’s fun. Making stuff up, seeing the nonsense you invented become a real live book, to have people get what you wrote, enjoy it, imagine up their own version in their heads—this is cool stuff. Most amazing of all–sometimes, every once in a while, you might even read your own writing and think–I did pretty damn good. That’s the point.

But writing is also real work. Producing a novel requires discipline. We’re not talking manual labor, but it’s structured. Regarding writing as a task requiring effort is a great lesson to learn, and learn early, but living that lesson does run the risk of obscuring the reason you started down the path in the first place. My writing benefitted from outlines, spreadsheets, supporting research, and inspirational documents. But this type of somewhat grindy work pushed the fun parts from my mind. And after long enough the “all work and no play” approach was reflected in my writing. I had to remind myself the process was fun. Who writes thousands of words with no promise they’ll earn a dime? Who sinks countless hours into creating a whole world that may never see the light of day? People trapped in hell, and those who think they’re having fun, that’s who.

I had to relearn this lesson along the way. Put on new writing music. Write a whole new section that might not survive edits. Write in second person. Forget all the writing rules for a day or two and let the crazy fly. Then I reactivated editor-brain and folded in the pieces that made my writing better. Even if zero of those tangents succeeded, I’d recharged myself.

Depressing note–I forgot this lesson more than once. You will too. Forget. Relearn. Repeat.

If I learned anything at all writing NINE TENTHS, it was to be better, at everything. The book taught me about my own life as much as writing. I need to be a better version of myself if I want to have any success as a writer. And by success, I mean regular joy in the daily writing process, regardless of how many books I ever sell.

Was that a sixth thing I learned? Of course not.

*checks lock on cellar door*

***

Jeff Macfee is a writer. His work has appeared in Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Shotgun Honey, and the anthology Killing Malmon. Nine Tenths is his debut novel.

Jeff Macfee: Website | Twitter

Nine Tenths: Amazon | B&N | Google | Kobo

Why yes, it is time for one of those shotgun-blast slapdash news-updates. I have more, um, cogent bloggery in mind, but I am currently under

*does a quick count*

the yoke of FOUR DIFFERENT PROJECTS right now, and am a little bit

*eye twitches*

overburdened.

(To explain, the four projects are: first draft of the Evil Apple book, second draft of my TBA new writing book, page proofs of Wayward, and outlines for a secret li’l comics project. Three of these things hit this month, while I am, as noted, trying to write a first draft of the new book. AHHHHHH.)

But! There be news, just the same, should you care to bear it —

First up, The Book of Accidents has been nominated for a Locus Award in Best Horror, holy crap. (That’s now in addition to being nominated for a Stoker, as well, hot damn.) You can find the list here — I’ll note that in horror I share the space with some amazing finalists: Premee Mohamed, Grady Hendrix, Stephen Graham Jones, Stephen King, Rivers Solomon, Daryl Gregory, Caitlin Starling, and Champion Joe Lansdale. It’s fucking cool. I’m very lucky. TBOA has gone back for another printing in paperback already, by the way, and continues to sell really well and that’s thanks to you, and to all the great booksellers and librarians who are out there shoving my MIND VIRUS I mean COOL HORROR NOVEL into people’s eyes. Thank you for that. If you’ve read the book and care to leave a nice review somewhere, I’d be thankful.

Second, the SFWA is running their silent auction with Worldbuilders, and you can find that auction right here. But you’ll also find a couple WENDIG-SPECIFIC auction items, including this lot of signed/personalized books, as well as seats for a virtual kaffeeklatsch (which is German for, “a caffeinated chat in which you are trapped in a virtual room with me and you cannot leave until your time is up”). The auction runs for the next four days, so get in and bid to support the good work done by the SFWA. Good work like, for instance, the #DisneyMustPay initiative, which LA Times just did a piece on — read it here.

Third, we’re looking for new ideas for cool WENDIGIAN VOIDMERCH. You can find what we’ve got already cooked up thanks to designer Jordan Shiveley right here — Black Swan shirts, Art Harder, Welcome to Ramble Rocks, and so forth. But! If you have cool Wendig- or terribleminds-themed things you want emblazoned upon clothing or bags or YOUR VERY SOUL, umm, you know, drop a note in the comments below. A new Certified Penmonkey shirt maybe? An Ashe & Grim Solemnities logo shirt? Scream it so the cheap seats can hear.

The Elden Ring Update

So, Elden Ring ended up one of my favorite games. Had a lot of fun with it. Again, my goal was basically this: run all the way past the scariest shit, and then scoop up all the good items I could while also leveling up along the way, and then when I was of significant level, I’d go back to the scary shit to basically just kick the big bosses’ assholes inside out. It was a fun way to play — focused largely on exploration and late-game conquest. It worked. It ended up not being a very hard game at the end of that, really. Except, well, at the end.

The end game of Elden Ring is, in my mind, bullshit. I know, I know: GIT GUD. Well, I thought I did “git gud.” I was able to basically waltz my way through nearly all of the late-game bosses — Melania stumped me, couldn’t beat her to save my life, no matter what strategy I used. But then I came to the Elden Beast and no matter what I do, no matter how pumped up I am, the Beast fucking slaughters me in a hit or two. I can kick Radagon’s ass easy. But then the EB shows up and just rains hell on my face while my Mimic Tears kinda… just waits around. It sucks. I hate it. So I gave up on that. The end.

AND THAT’S ALL.

More when I have it. Or when I’ve climbed out of this WORK HOLE.

*waves*

There are a lot of rules for writing. One that I hear fairly often is write what you know. That’s fine if you’re writing adult contemporary about a penniless author. It’s less useful if your characters spend their days riding horses, practicing witchcraft, or getting into knife fights. I’m talking about fantasy, the genre where we get to make things up with very little reality required. It’s a genre built entirely around the idea of escapism. You can set your stories in spectacular worlds. Your character can tame dragons or fight monsters. You can do whatever they want.

Even works of fantasy, however, still benefit from some grounding in the real world. Otherwise readers may have trouble relating to the story and its characters. One way to achieve it, while still delivering a fantastical experience, is to create verisimilitude. This is a fancy word (which I can’t pronounce) for the feeling that something seems especially true or real. In simpler terms, it means writing about something in a way that persuades the reader you know your stuff.

In my first book, a portal fantasy to a secondary world, I made up a lot of things. Flora, fauna, countries, geography, you name it. I created a pristine world for modern characters to explore. Yet one of my earliest readers shared that some of the most compelling and vivid scenes from that book were when my characters were traveling through the woods. There’s a very simple and logical explanation for that: I spend a lot of time in the woods myself. I’m a bowhunter. Between September and January, I pretty much live in camo. So I know how to write about the woods in a way that rings true.

Most writers have real-world experience or knowledge that can inform their writing. Maybe you grew up on a farm and know about agriculture. Maybe you helped your dad fix up old cars. Hell, maybe you trained in martial arts and know how to subdue an opponent. Great writers lean in to their strengths, whether it’s Tolkien with linguistics or Rothfuss with music. Their deep and personal knowledge lends a convincing realism to those aspects of their stories.

There are so many aspects of fantasy worldbuilding that benefit from a well-informed author, from the obvious (horses, warfare, political structures, and world history) to the not-so-obvious (economics, sociology, religious fundamentalism, and even culinary science). In fact, there are probably too many relevant subjects for any one writer to be an expert in all of them. There are too many topics and not enough time. How do you balance research for writing with writing itself? When research is necessary, how to you even get started?

In this age of disinformation and misinformation, the best source of information is usually a real-world expert. Someone who has spent time studying or doing the thing beyond an amateur level. Unfortunately, sometimes experts are not easy to find. If you start asking people on the street if they know much about Medieval pole weapons or some pointers on practicing witchcraft, you’ll be greeted with odd looks. But these experts do exist. I know because I’ve spent the past few years recruiting them to come to my Science in Sci-fi, Fact in Fantasy blog series.

When I speak to experts, I ask them to do two things. First, I want to know the common blunders or misconceptions related to their area of expertise – in other words, the most glaring errors that pervade books, television, and other media. The world is rife with misconceptions about things, and fantasy-adjacent topics get more than their fair share. Thanks to the Dunning Kruger effect – a cognitive bias in which people who know very little about a subject tend to overestimate their understanding of it – humans tend to be ignorant of their own incompetence. This leads to gross errors in mainstream media which are subsequently repeated in other mainstream media, simply because none of the creators were truly an expert. Avoiding these common mistakes is step one in the journey to perceived know-how.

The second thing I ask of my many expert contributors is whether there are nuanced bits of knowledge that I can sprinkle into my work to give the appearance of competence. In other words, I want them to teach me just enough to be dangerous. To convince the casual reader that hey, this author really knows what he’s writing about. This, truly, is the secret weapon of the informed author: a knowledge base about an in-depth topic that’s been curated by a real expert.

For example, I learned from a historian that one of the common causes of infant mortality in Victorian England was “teeth” – because it occurred at the teething stage of infancy – and many such deaths were likely accidental overdoses of laudanum, which was often applied to babies’ gums to sooth teething pains. I learned from a martial artist that a person with a gun needs twenty-one feet of separation from someone with a knife in order to shoot them before being stabbed. Thanks to some helpful horse experts, I also know that experienced riders guide their mounts’ movement by controlling the shoulders of the horse, not by turning its head.

These are all little details, but working them into the story adds verisimilitude. Realism in storytelling wins more trust from the reader. More trust means more leeway to write about things that are cool but have no basis whatsoever in reality, like magical swords or flying horses. So sure, write what you know. For the other things you write, find an expert. Learn enough to be dangerous.

Putting The Fact in Fantasy: Purchase Here

I came to novel writing after decades working as an intelligence analyst. This means I had tons of experience as a researcher because that’s basically what intelligence analysis is: a research project where, at the end, you brief the President  of the United States on your findings.

No pressure.

As an intelligence analyst, you’re given a topic and it’s your job to learn everything about it in order to understand what the key issues are and the factors driving those issues. You also must figure out what information you need to truly understand the issue, which may not be the information that comes easily to hand. You also must figure out the best way to organize that information, which might amount to thousands of factoids, so that you can not only make sense of it but instantly lay your hands on the citation for any single piece. And lastly, you learn to be quick because you can be called on at any time to brief Congress or the National Security Council.

As it turns out, these are all skills that come in extremely handy when you’re writing a novel, particularly a historical one.

The Fervor (Putnam), which came out on April 26, is my third novel of historical horror. The first was The Hunger, a reimagining of the story of the Donner Party, and the second was The Deep, which brought this treatment to the sinking of the Titanic. When I was on tour promoting The Hunger, I’d have at least one person come up to me at every event to ask how research a historical work, which led me to reflect on my research process for novels. I’ve distilled it into some tips that I hope you find useful.

The number one problem, I heard from writers, is research paralysis. Getting sucked down the rabbit hole and being unable to stop researching and start writing. I’m here to tell you research paralysis is real. The truth of the matter is not that you need more information but that you’re hesitant to start writing. It’s easier to continue doing what you can see—read one more book or spend another afternoon surfing the internet—than to start on more amorphous things like characterization.

It’s a sign of insecurity, and the answer for that insecurity is to build rigor into your research process.

The number one tip is to define the scope of your research. If you don’t know what your book is about, everything seems important. So: define your book as much as possible before you start researching. Can you limit it to a single historical event—say, one battle instead of all of WWII? You’re writing a novel, not non-fiction: don’t forget that your book is about the characters, a specific plot or story, dialogue, voice, theme. Once you know what it is you’re truly writing about, it becomes easier to rule out huge swaths of background.

Your research should serve the story, not the other way around.

A lot of research these days is online, which raises the question of evaluating your sources. Can you trust what you read on the internet? Yes, but only with some vetting. Even experienced researchers can have difficulty determining the reliability of sources. Stanford professor Sam Wineburg found that it’s best to think like a fact-checker when evaluating online sources. Think laterally, in other words, checking a fact against a number of different websites/sources, rather than deciding whether to trust a fact based on how reputable the source website looks.

For The Hunger, I had to rely on the work of homegrown genealogists or from diaries, so the question was how to decide whether a piece of information was reputable. In intelligence, we develop confidence scores: it’s a way of putting all information on a level playing field. You can work up your own system, but generally it’s done in three tiers:

• Probably – very confident; you’re 75-90 percent sure that the information is correct
• Possibly—confident, 50 – 75 percent
• Unlikely—less than 50 percent

Lastly, consider taking your notes in the most efficient way possible. For me, that means spreadsheets and no (or very little) paper. This might be a tip for writers of a certain age; the younger generation is already comfortable with spreadsheets. Paper and journals get romanticized, but spreadsheets are efficient. You can arrange information in a way that visually makes sense. If you need to move a piece of information, you can do it easily and don’t need to recopy a lot of work. You can hyperlink citations or other material. You can make as many timelines as needed, and they’re great for keeping track of characters’ vitals. And they’re searchable! What’s not to love.

Now, put your fear of research aside and go work on your novel.

Alma Katsu is the award-winning author of seven novels. Her latest is The Fervor, a reimagining of the Japanese internment that Booklist called “a stunning triumph” (starred) and Library Journal called “a must read for all, not just genre fans” (starred). Red Widow, her first espionage novel, is a nominee for the Thriller Writers Award for best novel, was a NYT Editors Choice, and is in pre-production for a TV series.

Alma Katsu: Website

The Fervor: Indiebound | Bookshop | B&N | Publisher Site