Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

More on the giveaway of The View that Disappeared, a mystery set in the Seattle metropolitan area, and a little about how I wrote the book.

We seven days in, and so far, 365 people have entered this giveaway. That's far ahead for this point in any previous giveaway I've sponsored. Also, I'm giving away 20 copies of an advance reading copy. These are normally, or what used to be normally, sent out to books stores, reviews, bloggers, and others, during the pre-publication promotion cycle and are not for sale. That makes them something of a collector's item. I have a collection of the ARCs of books by writers whose work I follow.

Here's the link to the giveaway:

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

About writing The View that Disappeared . . .

Contrary to what some how-to-write writers have to say on the subject, writing a novel can begin with anything: with a theme, with an image, with a snippet of dialogue, with a premise, with a real or imagined event, with a regional accent. Writing a novel begins with whatever gets the writer's fingers dancing on the keys.

The View that Disappeared began with the collision—or collusion—of a few lines of imagined dialogue and a few of the stories that have been handed down in my family. Those lines of dialogue morphed into the Jack Luckner's voice, his character, his attitudes, and his predicament.

As for the family stories, they were my grandmother's tales of her time as a cook in an "old folks' home" in Portland, Oregon. Needless to say, these stories were not happy little ditties about honored seniors living out their sunset years, or days, in a state of jolly and spritely tranquility, rocking comfortably on a sun-drenched porch.

Then as now, what happens in many such places is often more worthy of a Dickensian novel than it is of a glossy sales brochure or a slick radio ad.

If I want to avoid spoilers, I'd better move on.

I am normally a pathetically slow writer. For me, a normal day is somewhere between 250 and 500 words. Of draft.

I do a lot of cycling. That is, I write a passage and then cycle back through it, again and again, until the words convey the images and the meanings and the events I want to use to tell the story.

Making matters worse, all too often, I end up going down rabbit trails, writing in circles, jamming the plot—the story's sequence of events—into one blind alley after another, or, for some reason, having characters doing things and saying things that are, well, out of character.

Yes, characters can and should surprise, and they can and should act in contradictory, complex ways, but characters should never act in ways that don't fit. If a character does some oddball something, then that oddball something has to be explained and motivated. Its foundations have to be laid, etc.

For example, if your fictional George Washington ends up changing sides and joining with the British, as Benedict Arnold did, then you'd better have established a very good reason for good old George to have done so.

Anyway, when such things as those listed above happen, then the writing itself can and often does come to an abrupt halt. That's when I end up wandering around like a lost backpacker in the Montana wilderness . . . until it finally dawns on me that I'm off down a pointless rabbit trail or that one of my characters really wouldn't, honestly wouldn't ever pimp out her bodybuilder husband to the "lonelier" members of her suburban terrorist cell.

Armed with that realization, I rip out the offending material and start over from that point, or, alternatively, I figure out why one of my characters really would, honestly would pimp out her bodybuilder husband to the "lonelier" members of her suburban terrorist cell.

That done, I have to cycle back through the manuscript and change the extant text accordingly, or at least change it enough so that farther along, the character's motives can be explained in a shocking and exciting reveal.

(Note: the five previous paragraphs are an excursion down a rabbit trail. I'm leaving them in because they illustrate the point. However, they are a side trip. This isn't about writing technique as such, but about how I wrote The View that Disappeared.)

As I said, I'm a fairly slow writer. However, I wrote The View that Disappeared start to finish, with precious little cycling, and in record time, for me. Writing it took a matter of weeks, rather than months or years.

That initial draft was followed by a clean-up pass, which in turn was followed by gathering first-readers' comments, followed by revisions based on those comments, which, happily, were minimal, and, finally, a good deal of professional copyediting.

Before the book is formally published, it will go through yet another round of copyediting. Even then, typos will abound.

What kept my writing pace up was that I didn't try to write the book "straight." I used several different points of view, kept the overall tone intimate and conversational, did my utmost to humanize all of the characters, especially the villain, and worked in enough gallows humor to keep the satirical content central without allowing the book to devolve into a ha-ha, murder-can-be-funny comedy.

The book is comparatively short, and, I hope, it does not preach. It is, as far as I can tell, a fast, fun read.

In a sense, this novel mashes up a darker, more urban version of the family-feeling of The Waltons (long after John Boy has grown up), the satirical, contemptuous of M*A*S*H, and the investigative drive and cynicism of a noir murder mystery.

Again, here's the link to the giveaway.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

Here's the link the my website.

http://www.jamiemcnabb.com/

All the best and good reading!