About The Writing Process

 I wrote my first book in the 7th grade, a neighborhood saga called From My Perch, a tell all exposé thinly disguised as fiction, written from the point of view of a crow who spied on all the neighborhood kids. Without realizing it, I was following one of the cardinal writer's "rules": write about what you know. 

     Especially in the early stages of a book, I often feel my way into a story with a pen—I see what it's about as it emerges on the page. I used to write all my drafts longhand, though for the past ten years or so, I've been more of a keyboarder than a pencil-pusher when it comes to roughing out a draft. (Though I still jot down lots of notes by hand. In many notebooks of many sizes.) Using the computer actually seems to activate a different part of my "writing brain"—a part that's as tuned into the sounds of language as the sense itself, and that thinks hyper textually, associatively. 

     Writing is a process of finding connections. It's not only connecting words, but connecting ideas, symbols, events—and connecting them all to people. 

When I started writing Do Angels Sing The Blues? I knew I wanted the book to be about the death of a best friend, something I had experiences when I was 26 years old.  And I knew I wanted the book to be about music. I was listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan one day, singing, "Life Without You" and that's when the connection clicked.  I knew that the music in the book had to be the blues.  

     I find the act of writing to be a process of exploration and discovery. Much of the "think-work" I do as a writer involves asking questions and seeking answers. When I sit down to write the first draft of a story, I consider two things: what is going to happen, a general plot, but even more important, who is going to make it happen, and to whom is it going to happen. 

     I spend a lot of time getting to know my characters, who they are, what they're like, how they think, so that they really do take on a life of their own. Very early on, I start building character biographies, using a "character bone structure" created by Lajos Egri. The characters begin to live inside my head at a certain point. And parts of me wind up in all my characters, both female and male, adult and young people.

       One thing I've noticed in books I've read, as well as  in my own writing over the years, is that a sense of place, of geography, is one of the fictional elements in a story which, if vividly depicted in words, can really pop a fictional world into 3D. L.M. Mongomery's Avonlea, Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Narnia, The Shire, Arakis, even Dr. Seuss's Whoville, through its illustrations, are all mapped in my mind. 

      In creating a world inside a book, I spend time exploring the geography, imagining the particulars of the landscape  my characters will inhabit, down to specific street names and architecture and types of trees in different seasons.  My "Wessex" throughout my fiction has been the Connecticut shoreline along Long Island Sound. My city of Newbridge is a composite of New Haven and Bridgeport, with features of both.