By John Gilstrap

By way of reader orientation, this post is built on the premise that the universe of writers is divided into two broad categories–those who outline their stories before they get to the business of writing, and those who plow into the story on page one, not knowing where it’s going to go until they get there. That latter group writes by the seat of their pants, ergo they are “pantsers,” and I number myself among them.

In my mind, there really are not pros and cons to be discussed about one approach versus the other because the preferred approach is writer-specific and hard-wired. I’ve never been able to outline. Even in high school and college, when I was supposed to turn in those damn 3×5 cards along with research papers, I always did them last, after I had written the paper. And story wheels? They make my head explode. This is why writing programs like Scrivener, which so many of my writer friends love, are wasted on me.

Two weeks ago, my post here in the ‘Zone dealt with the perils of pantsing a short story–specifically, how it spun out of control in terms of length. I stipulate that if outlining-then-writing worked for me, that would have been a far more efficient approach. But in the end, my pantsing worked. Once I discovered the real story, I was able to trim off about 2,500 words and turned in a tale I’m quite proud of.

Last weekend, I attended an excellent conference called Creatures, Crimes and Creativity in Columbia, MD, outside of Baltimore. The first panel I was put on was about screenwriting–a format that is very strictly structured. You’ve got 120 pages to tell an entire story for a feature film. Around 20 pages for a half hour TV show, and you’ve got to pace for commercial breaks! (Full disclosure: I’ve written feature films, but I’ve done nothing with television.)

Perhaps the most noted guru in screenwriting instruction is Syd Field, and his teachings clearly influenced the advice given by my fellow panelists. By Page X you have to have the inciting event (or whatever it’s called), and then by page Y must come the turning point(?). Et cetera, et cetera, and on and on. Pantsing a screenplay, they said, is not possible.

Enter the contrarian. C’est moi. Of course you can pants your way through a screenplay. That’s how I find the story. The characters interact with each other, they do stuff and say things, and through that, the creative crew in my mind wakes up and gets excited. I’ll hammer out something that is jumbled and woefully long, but I’ll have a whole story. It’ll be crap, but first drafts are supposed to be crap.

Now that I know the story and I’m excited by the dialogue, future drafts are all about shaping the pile of poo first draft into the beautiful golden structure of a screenplay that works.

It bothers me that inexperienced writers attend classes and take what they hear literally. As a story is first unfolding, I think it would be soul stealing to think that a certain plot point had to happen by page 10. First drafts are all about story flow. Don’t let artificial structures get in the way of your imagination. Get it all out, then fix it later.

To be clear: Structure is king in the world of screenplays, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. I’m merely suggesting that you should not let those structural concerns clog your imagination.

By John Gilstrap

It was supposed to be a short story for an anthology honoring the US Marshal’s Service. Our own Reavis Wortham is the editor. He knows that my great grandfather, US Deputy Marshal Isaac Lincoln Gilstrap has a star on the monument in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, to fallen federal marshals, so he did me the great honor of inviting me participating in this anthology that includes many great writers.

The guardrails on this thing were pretty easy. Short story. US marshal. I even had a preordained main character–Ike Lincoln! I can slam this thing out in no time. What, maybe 2,500 words? Three thousand, max?

Okay, JSB, perk up. I’m going to throw you a talking point here for outlining! (Because I don’t outline.)

Here’s the premise: In 1906, Marshal Ike Lincoln has to escort a witness from Salina, Oklahoma Indian Territory (the area where my kin was shot and is now interred), to the territorial courthouse in Muscogee. There, he will testify in the murder trial of Zebadiah Wycliffe (the family name of the gang of renegade Cherokees who killed the real deal.)

Now, a premise is not a plot. I discover the plot by starting the story and seeing where it goes. Here’s the first image that came to mind:

            Deputy United States Marshal Ike Lincoln smelled the blood before he saw the body. He drew his Winchester Model 92 rifle from its scabbard near his right knee and laid it across his lap. Chambered in .45-40, the lever action repeater could drop any threat. He carried it with the chamber loaded and the hammer on half-cock. Out here in Indian Territory, most gunfights were settled with the first shot.

That felt like a solid start. No idea who the body belonged to or who shot him, but I figured it had to be a bad guy shot by good guys. Why? Well, because someone wanted to kill the witness.

Ah-hah! I had it! Zeb Wycliffe had family, and they didn’t want to see him hanged because of the testimony of our witness. So, they attacked this place and the attack was repulsed.

I said to myself, “Wait! Ike is the hero of the story. He can’t show up after the climactic gunfight.” Lightbulb moment: I’d started the story in the wrong place.

“Screw the lightbulb! I really like that opening!” I deeply wanted to make it work. So, I didn’t change anything. I forged ahead. That repulsed gunfight turns out to be just the first. Not all of the attackers die. And they didn’t run away. They retreated and regrouped.

Regrouped to do what? I didn’t know yet. Some sort of trap, obviously, but other than that, I didn’t know–though I did know that the story would crash and burn unless Ike and company didn’t somehow deal with that upcoming trap on their 30+ mile trek to Muscogee.

By now, I was a solid 1,000 words into a story that didn’t yet know what it was. That’s okay. I’m a professional. I’ve done this before. I did deeply wish that it didn’t read like a cliched high school writing exercise. You know, sometimes an original idea is good for a story.

I found story salvation in my literary comfort spot, which is placing a kid in jeopardy. So, now our witness had name. Tommy Farmer. Now, what about his age? Well, he had to be vulnerable, right? But he also had to be able to ride and shoot, given the story elements that likely lay ahead for him.

Yeah, okay. Okay, we’re on the move now. The 2,000-word mark is far in the review mirror, but that’s okay. Three thousand, 3,500 . . . those aren’t horrific numbers for a short story.

Our little posse is now Bonanza-ing along and I’m thinking. No, this isn’t quite right yet. What to do?

Got it! We’ll make Tommy totally friggin’ crazy with a homicidal streak.

DING! DING! DING!

All right. We’re on a roll now. Is 5,000 words too long for a short story? But it’s really, really good. And now I’m into the final action scene. we’ll get this puppy wrapped up in no time.

At 6,200 words, I’m thinking I might have an issue. Like, a really big problem.

Ooooooh. That would be a really good twist. Yeah, let’s see where that goes.

Twists lead to turns, don’t you know. Fictional actions have fictional consequences.

Dear idea factory: Please stop, already!

Then, finally, it happened. I found the ending. Final count at the end of the first draft: 8,569 words. (Note for the record: this is the first time Reavis is hearing this.)

Clearly, I have editing to do. Perhaps some restructuring, but not a lot of the latter. Fact is, I don’t have an assigned final word count, so that could be either good or bad.

If there’s a takeaway for you, TKZ family, from this post it’s my recommendation that you always let a story drive itself. Especially during that first draft stage, just let it rip. Don’t squander any drama and chase the plot down every rabbit hole. Some will work out, others won’t, but that’s okay.

You can always fix it in post.

What say you? Have you lost control of any stories lately?

By John Gilstrap

Today’s Killzone post will reappear as a handout in a couple of weeks at the end of a panel entitled, “Settings and Secrets” at the always-terrific Creatures, Crimes and Creativity conference in the Washington, DC suburb of Columbia, Maryland. Here’s the setup, what the moderator has sent to us:

This weekend I researched “setting in novels” and found the following varying, although accurate depending on one’s viewpoint, definitions:

• The setting of a story is defined as the time, duration, and place an author chooses to write about.
• The four types of setting are: physical, social, historical, and psychological.
• The five types of setting in fiction: realistic setting, fantasy setting, science fiction setting, historical fiction setting, contemporary setting.
• The core elements of setting are time, place, mood, context.
• There are three different kinds of story setting: temporal, environmental, and individual.

As a self-schooled pantser who’s seen considerable success in the novel writing business over the past three decades, the one rule I preach the loudest to anyone who will listen is that there are no rules in the world of fiction. When I see definitions assigned to the elements of creativity, I feel my jaws lock. Then, when a hard number is assigned to those elements, I growl. Creativity defies numerical value, and I think it’s a mistake to set struggling writers’ minds wandering on a journey down that road.

Stories are about interesting characters doing interesting things in interesting places in interesting ways. There you have the traditionally accepted three elements of story: character, plot and setting. But they are not separate elements and they cannot be addressed separately. (Okay, that sounded like a rule–but it’s what works for me.)

Setting, per se, in most modern fiction, is important only to the degree that it establishes the place where scenes unfold, since every scene has to happen somewhere. All else being equal, a scene that occurs in an interesting location is inherently more engaging than a scene that occurs in an uninteresting one. Rocket science, right?

The secret sauce in making a setting pop lies in its presentation. I believe in filtering everything through the perceptions of a character with enough detail to orient the reader, but without so much description as to stop the action of the story. I like to stay with suggestive terms that let readers fill in their own blanks.

Irene crossed the threshold into a marble monument to money and poor taste. The footprint of the foyer equaled that of her first house, with pink veined walls that climbed thirty feet to an arched ceiling adorned with images of mostly-naked cherubs swimming through the heavens. Twenty feet straight ahead, at the head of the first flight of the grand staircase, at the spot where the risers split to form a giant Y, stood a stone carving of Carl Adams himself, dressed as Caesar, and looking far more fit than Irene imagined Carl had ever been.

In my mind, as a thriller writer, that setting is a utility for the future. Yes, it’s the place where the rest of the scene unfolds, but note that there’s no detail on the type of marble or on what the cherubs are really doing. There’s a dismissiveness to the tone of the description that lets the reader know that Irene is not a fan without having to actually articulate the fact.

Note that I said the setting was a utility. It’s a storytelling tool. It’s a leverage point for advancing plot or character. In my head, that foyer with the statue seems like a great place for a climactic gunfight, but because I truly am a pantser–I write without knowing what’s coming next–I don’t yet know if the story will take me back around to the mansion to make it happen.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I decide that I do want a big scene of violence in the mansion and I want it to involve the structure being on fire. Well, okay, no big deal. Since marble doesn’t burn, I would go back to the description of money and poor taste and replace that veined marble with mahogany and ebony. Maybe there are vaulted wooden beams and the statue becomes something tasteless in the vein of a cigar store Indian. That would make a great fire. If that was that was the way I went, then I’d have to plant something in the setting that would provide a means of escape for my heroes.

In my stories, setting serves the character and the plot, and is the easiest element to mold to every other component of good storytelling. Depending on your genre and you character, be mindful of the level of detail. If your character is lost in the woods, is he going to be noticing the difference between pin oaks and live oaks and white oaks and red oaks? Or even the difference between oaks and maples? Hardwoods versus evergreens, maybe?

The key questions for you as the writer are, do your descriptions of setting advance both the plot and the character without upsetting the pacing? That’s the test.

By John Gilstrap

Close to a year ago, when I presented my short story, “All Revved Up and No Place to Go,” to the Rumpus Writers, the critique group of which I’ve been a member for roughly 15 years, the ten or fifteen seconds following the final passage were dominated by a heavy silence. I believe it was Ellen Crosby who spoke for the group when she said, “Oh, my God, I hate everybody in this story.”

To which I replied, “Thank you.”

“All Revved . . .” is, hands down, the darkest story I’ve ever written. You can find it in the recently published anthology, Bat Out Of Hell, edited by Don Bruns, and the story is inspired by the title of one of the songs on the famous Meat Loaf album from the 1970s. The story tells the tale of Ace Spade, an off-duty firefighter and search and rescue operator who’s trying to impress a young lady with his four-wheeling skills in the back woods of West Virginia when things go terribly wrong. After he wrecks his Jeep in the middle of nowhere, the man who they think is there to lend assistance turns out to be a killer who wants to hunt them down and kill them.

As regular Killzoners know, I don’t outline, so even I was surprised by the lengths to which our characters would go to stay alive. I don’t want to give to much away, but let’s just say that in the end, everyone acts in his or her best interests.

As a writer who’s carved a niche for myself by writing stories with moral clarity where good triumphs over evil, it was kind of refreshing to clean the creative pipes with a story where there really are no good guys–just . . . survivors.

Here’s my take on short stories: They’re not really part of an author’s permanent record, in the sense that I think they don’t necessarily reflect their true storytelling sensibilities. In a short story, I can feel free to kill a cat or cavort with vampires. I could even write a romance–even though I don’t think I’m actually capable of doing that.

This is why I cringe when I hear writerly advice given to newbies that they should cut their teeth writing short stories before they take on the burden of a novel. To me, that’s like telling a budding cook that they need to perfect the art of scrambling eggs before they bake Thanksgiving turkey. One has nothing to do with the other–or where the skill cross, the intersection is so tangential as to be meaningless.

It’s equally important to note that novel-writing skills can get you in trouble when crafting a short story. I was fortunate that submission rules asked for an approximate submission length of 8,000 words for Bat Out of Hell. If I’d had to turn in flash fiction, or anything under, say, 3,000 words, I would have considered myself unqualified from the start.

What say you, TKZ family? Are you a fan of short stories? Do you like to read them? Write them? Where do you go to find them?

By John Gilstrap

I posted here a few weeks ago that I am recovering from surgery on my lumbar spine–a two-level hemilaminectomy. (I just like the way the word sounds.) The surgery was successful, but like any invasion of one’s musculature and nervous system, recovery takes time. For me, that means resuming normal activity with one big asterisk: If what I’m doing at any time, whether walking, doing yard work, or shooting at the range, if the activity starts to hurt too much, I am to stop. There is no glory to be gained by pushing through the pain. Doing so today will just make tomorrow suck.

This advice occurred to me the other day as I was reading a piece posted on Medium entitled, “Write Like the Rent Is Due Next Week” by Felicia C. Sullivan. The piece begins,

My rent is due on Monday. I’ve listed four maxi dresses while shoveling down buttered pasta for breakfast. Refreshed my eBay store at least seven times in the past hour. I scan my home like a thief. What else can I sell?

The fascinating, extraordinarily well-written piece goes on at length to tell us that Felicia was “born to tell stories” while lamenting that “the romantic writer life” was a sham unless you had parents folding fat bills into your hands.” No one

 told me how far you’ll have to hustle to live with integrity. If I didn’t take the fancy marketing gigs, I’d have to hustle like my life depended on it. . . . I’d draft first lines while praying the ache in my mouth I’ve been ignoring won’t turn into another $3,000 root canal.

And then there’s this:

Creating art in the barbaric slaughterhouse that is late-stage capitalism, while you’re wondering how far and wide you can stretch a single dollar — it’s not romantic or noble, it’s messy, often erratic, and filled with crippling self-doubt.

Truly artistic writers, we learn, can no longer make a living, in large measure due to:

dwindling attention spans and an audience seal-clapping for simple prose. Easy stories. Happy endings.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the Readerverse, your selfish desire to be entertained by what you read is forcing some navel-gazing Bohemian aspirants into the position where they must consider the horror of, you know, getting a job outside their own minds and interact with three-dimensional people who exist beyond their laptops.

Want to make money off of your writing?

Dear writers and musicians and artists of all stripes: Get over your precious selves. I am 100% with you when you claim that the thing you create is art–even if it’s ugly or I don’t understand it. The imagination superhighway has no lanes. Let your colors and your chords and your characters run wherever they take you. That’s the beauty of art. It literally has no bounds, no definition.

The instant you put a price tag on it, though, and try to sell it to me, your art becomes a product, and you’ve surrendered the command chair to everyone else but you. If your masterpiece is a self-indulgent, depressing expose of your inner demons and you don’t care about “seal-clapping” readers, good on you. Just expect to sell fewer copies than the author who considers himself and entertainer and writes a potboiler targeting the largest possible audience.

This shouldn’t hurt.

When I read the angst inherent to Ms. Sullivan’s prose, which is amplified severalfold by some of the comments, I find myself confused. If it all hurts that much, why do it? Why not take a break from it? To posit that she’s “born” to inflict this kind of emotional pain on herself makes no more sense to me than to posit that one can be born to pull one’s fingernails out.

Precious few writers ply their craft full time, and one who’s very close to me chose to go back to a day job just to break the claustrophobia of fulltime writing.

Life is about priorities.

I cannot imagine a circumstance where writing would ever be the first priority in my life. That slot belongs to family, always and forever. And you can’t take care of your family if you can’t pay the rent. If you can’t pay the rent without having a day job, well, I guess that day job needs to be pretty high on the priority list, doesn’t it?

By way of shameless self-promotion, I’ve reactivated my YouTube channel, A Writer’s View of Writing and Publishing, with an episode focused on the very topic of Setting Your Priorities As A Writer. I invite you to give it a look if you get a chance.

By John Gilstrap

During my 35 years as a firefighter and safety engineer, I conducted a great deal of training to professionals whose products and services I did not fully understand. That lack of understanding could become a problem only if I let that happen because let’s face it: the safety and reporting requirements for a degreaser are largely the same whether you’re degreasing razor blades or gun barrels.

To streamline the teaching process, I created the generic franistans and fornasteins to serve my purposes as I needed them. The two items were always incompatible. If it was an electrical safety class, they’d be of different voltages (or different continents), if they were bits of fire apparatus, the threads wouldn’t line up. And in a hazmat class, god forbid that you store franistan chloride next fornastein sulfate, lest you create a cloud of methyl-ethyl badsh*t.

As an aside, a blithwhap is any item that is not a hammer yet is used as a hammer.

It occurs to me that franistans and fornasteins form the basis of a great deal of science fiction and fantasy. Just because a thing or a planet or a people aren’t real doesn’t mean that they can’t be assigned characteristics that make them real. That’s what this fiction gig is all about. In the case of fantasy in particular, it’s a personal bugaboo of mine that if I cannot pronounce a word in my head, I cannot read the story, and as a result, I know I’m being ejected from a lot of really good storytelling.

Want to know what you got wrong?

I was at a party the other night when the hostess told me how much her husband loves my books, but how he makes notes on details that I get wrong. “He won’t share them if you won’t ask for them, though.”

Hell shall freeze over. And here’s why: 1) her husband is a good friend and he’s got a fully functioning voice box with which he could ask me himself if he wanted to share his insights; 2) the book is already out and the damage already done; and 3) I probably won’t care.

<cue organ chord>

It’s not that I won’t care care, but that the areas of this friend’s expertise are very high-tech, and I will therefore always get things wrong, and the mistakes are of a nature that only he and a dozen other people on the planet would notice. This is the wondrous element of fiction: it’s mostly made up.

If your story needs a bajillion millimeter bombinator to launch a thousand-ton projectile to Mars from Bikini Atoll, I say go for it, but be very careful of the point of view from which you report the launch. If it’s from the POV of a kid on the playground, it’s probably just a big loud rocket ship. If it’s from the POV of launch control, well, you’ve got some serious explaining to do. Start with the chemistry and physics. At its heart, though, the bombinator is just a cousin of the franistan.

I set Burned Bridges, the first in my new Irene River thriller series, in Jenkins County, West Virginia, which might as well be Franistania, West Virginia. Set in the Eastern Panhandle, Jenkins County physically resembles the actual Berkeley, Jefferson, and Morgan Counties that define the Panhandle, but it’s got an entirely different political structure. It’s a fictional nonfiction place.

We all know that guns will get you in trouble when you write about them. The average mystery fan is probably fine knowing that Detective Jones is carrying a pistol. The average thriller fan will want to know that he’s carrying a Glock. My fans will know that he’s carrying a chambered Glock 19 in a Kydex holster on his right side with two spare 17-round magazines on his left.

The point here is to write for the audience you most care about, and accept that someone will always be a little disappointed.

By John Gilstrap

About 25 years ago (and at least that many books ago), I was in Hollywood at the Warner Brothers lot, writing a script for a film called Young Men And Fire, which I foolishly thought would be an adaptation of the wonderful Norman McLean book of the same name, but turned out to be something different.

My boss at the time was Len Amato, then a producer for Baltimore/Spring Creek Pictures, and more recently president of HBO Films. Len was a great guy to work for–very patient and a solid mentor to young and inexperienced screenwriters. I remember turning in a scene I’d written in the script that had some really cool, innovative stuff going on. If I recall properly, it was about secondary characters doing the cool stuff to rescue the lead character, who would be listed as the “star” of the picture. Len read it, said some complimentary things, then smacked me with one of the great lightbulb moments of my writing career:

“John, remember that the star gets to do all the cool stuff.”

Extrapolating out, this means that the star (main character) should own every scene in which he or she is present. Because they’re the ones driving the story, they should also be the ones driving their scenes.

I was reminded of Len Amato’s mentorship a week or so ago, when my editor at Kensington, the wonderful Michaela Hamilton, sent me her editorial letter on the manuscript for Scorched Earth, the next Jonathan Grave thriller, due out next spring. In it, I presented scenes where the bad guys were setting up their bad guy stuff in active ways, while Jonathan and his team spent most of the first third of the book researching databases and connecting dots. They really don’t do much of anything. If Scorched Earth were a mystery, then the quiet sleuthing would be fine.

But my fans are not looking for a mystery from me. They’re looking for a thriller, and in thrillers, the main character (the star) makes things happen. Plots points are revealed kinetically, the results of the star’s actions.

I’d forgotten Len Amato’s Dictum.

And heres’ the thing: While I was and still am very proud of the story, I knew something was wrong with it. I told my wife that the story’s heartbeat didn’t seem quite right. For the life of me, though, I couldn’t see what was wrong.

But Michaela Hamilton did. This is the wonder of a long relationship with a fantastic editor. Once she showed my how in the first act, Jonathan processes and acts on information that is provided to him, rather than hunting down and finding the information himself.

Well, crap. I don’t mean to sound un-humble, but it’s been decades since I’ve been compelled to a massive rewrite of a manuscript because of editorial input. More than a few of my books have required no change at all beyond copy edits.

At their face, the changes I’m making affect only the first act. In reality, because my plots are tightly woven and fairly intricate, there’s no such thing as a first act change that doesn’t have impact on some scene or line of dialogue later in the book.

It’s my own fault. I’ve been wildly distracted by various life events in the past 12 months, and in retrospect, I tried to get away with a shortcut that didn’t work. I didn’t do it intentionally, but if I’d been 100% mentally in the game, I’d be on to my next project by now, not causing stress for myself and the entire production team by stopping forward progress and working backwards to fix a problem that never should have existed.

I think it’s important to understand that every observation made by my editor–and the changes they triggered–were all presented as merely suggestions. They were willing to publish the book exactly as I had written it, but “maybe it would be better if . . .”

There’s no maybe about it. I’ve given myself two weeks to make the changes.

By John Gilstrap

By John Gilstrap

You don’t work in this business for very long before you’re hit with what I consider to be the largely unanswerable question: Where do your ideas come from? Generally, my truthful answer is, “I have no idea.” They just somehow arrive when I need one.

But with the upcoming release of Burned Bridges, the first entry in my new Irene Rivers thriller series (launched yesterday!), I finally have an answer.

But first, let me share a little bit about the premise of the series. For those who are not familiar with my Jonathan Grave series, Irene Rivers serves as the director of the FBI in each book. At the conclusion of Zero Sum, Irene torpedoes the presidential administration of Tony Darmond, a corrupt, largely incompetent criminal who uses the clout of the federal government for his own personal gain. (He’s been president since I started writing the series in 2007, so don’t read present-day politics into the narrative.) The blowback on Irene is enormous. She resigns her position and intends to escape the madness and corruption of Washington by moving to family land in Jenkins County, West Virginia.

I loved the idea when I pitched it and Kensington bought it, but then I was left with the challenge of hanging a plot onto the premise. That’s always the challenge. But while the Irene books are thrillers, they’re different than the Grave books. I didn’t want to merely create a female Jonathan Grave.

One late autumn afternoon, as I was walking around our property in West Virginia in the company of Kimber, my 22-pound protector and watchdog, I was squeezing my brain to hatch an idea that felt right. I wanted it to be West Virginia-centric, but in the way that C.J. Box’s works are Wyoming-centric.

About midway through the walk, Kimber became fascinated with one of the many limestone caves we have around here. She was pulling on her leash to go into the hole (that’s the Boston terrier in her). As I pulled her back, I said, “Whatever’s in there, you don’t want to meet it. It will ruin your day.”

Ding ding! There it was. The beginning spot to begin building my story.

It’s hard to see, but that hole is the entry to a cave that I will never explore.

Suppose one of Irene’s kids discovered the skeletal remains of a body stuffed into a cave somewhere on her property. Clearly it’s a murder victim, an adolescent male.

Who killed him? Because I write thrillers, the killer has to be someone local.

Suppose the murder happened over 30 years ago. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, so to what lengths will the murderer go to protect his secret?

Now suppose the murderer is an established member of the community–part of a family who’s lived here for hundreds of years. What will the reaction be from the locals when this interloper from Washington, DC, starts uncovering secrets that have long been buried?

Meanwhile, how about Irene’s kids? They’ve been forced to move from the bustling DC suburbs to the middle of nowhere. How are they going to take the move?  One of her kids is a teen, the other a tween, and they have to make their way through new schools where most of their classmates have known each other since kindergarten. How does that go for them?

This is how I “pants” my way through the writing process. Every question needs an answer, but to keep things interesting, each answer needs to trigger a new question. I’m very excited about this book. I love the characters, and I love the twists in the plot.

So, what about you, TKZ family? Can you articulate where your ideas come from?

By John Gilstrap

My natural storytelling instinct for my books leans exclusively to third person, shifting points of view. I’ll write an occasional short story in first person, but those are rare, as well. I don’t know why that is, and as with so much else as a self-taught writer, I try not to dwell too much on the whys of my process for fear that if I think too hard I screw something up–much as my one and only golf lesson did to my golf game. Once you start thinking about every movement, no movement feels natural anymore.

Over the course of writing the past few books, I’ve run into an interesting challenge, where the timeline of one groups of characters, and the events of their lives is unfolding weeks earlier than those of my primary characters. Ultimately, the two groups will come together in a tumultuous manner in the same time and place, but the journey to get them there bears a high risk of confusing the reader.

The problem is even more challenging because the separation consists only of weeks, not years. It would be easy to drop in slug lines like 1847 versus 2026, because readers can keep track of those. I don’t think you can say the same about May 14 versus May 5. Readers would be compelled to flip back and forth just to keep up.

My upcoming thriller, Burned Bridges (May 27), begins:

Chapter One

Thirty-Five years ago

Then chapter one shows two teenagers disposing of the body of a third teenager in the opening of a limestone cave. Truth be told, I could legitimately have written that chapter as a prologue, but I have a visceral dislike of prologues. Then, the second chapter begins:

Chapter Two

Present day

In this chapter, we meet my protagonist, Irene Rivers, and her family, and discover that her nephew has discovered a body that had been stuffed in a cave on their property. And then the story remains exclusively in the present day, so I don’t use any more time stamps.

In my Victoria Emerson trilogy, I figured that after a nuclear holocaust, all time would be tracked relative to Hell Day–the date of the attack, so as I moved from one timeline to another, I used Hell Day as the anchor at the top of each chapter:

Hell Day Plus 22

Where events spanned consecutive chapters, or where I was shifting the point of view on a single event, I’d make sure not to lose to the reader by putting a slug like this at the top of the chapter:

Hell Day Plus 22 (Same Day)

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on Scorched Earth, #18 in the Jonathan Grave thriller series, and I’m wrestling with a new twist on the timeline problem. In this case, the other timeline is presenting essential backstory, lived out in real time for the reader, but I’m finding it hard not to squander the big “organ chord” reveal sooner than I want the reader to know it.

I know that in a conference setting or in an academic setting, many of us like to express this thing we do in term of art. But sometimes, it feel more like carpentry–making those pieces you cut wrong somehow join together anyway.

Y’all got any tricks for writing conflicting or parallel timelines? Anybody else had an instructor ruin your ugly yet perfectly passable golf game and turn you into a worm burner?