My goodness but it seems like a long time since I’ve played blogger. How’s everyone been? I’ve been typing my fingers bloody trying to meet my fast-approaching deadline for the next Jonathan Grave book. That book has a title now, by the way: Threat Warning. Look for it in 10 months.
A dear friend of mine who also happens to be a fan sent me an email a couple of weeks ago in which she wrote, “One day over some drinks, we’re going to talk about what happened to you when you were thirteen.”
She was mostly teasing, but only mostly. She was referring to the recurrent theme in my books of boys who are coping with significant danger and angst. Many of my books do in fact feature adolescent boys who find themselves in difficult circumstances. In my breakout book, Nathan’s Run, the title character is twelve. Subsequent to that, there have been 13-year-old Travis, 16-year-old Scott, and most recently, 13-year olds Evan and Jeremy in Hostage Zero.
Given such a focus, I see how one might assume that I am using fiction to work through my own childhood issues. Honestly, I don’t think I am. Fiction is fiction, and that means it’s all made up. I’ve never killed anyone, and have only been shot at once, and that happened when I was nearly twenty. To my knowledge, I have no demons to exorcize.
I do, however, have nightmares just about every night, and not infrequently, my dream-screams wake my wife, who mercifully talks me back to the present. In one hundred percent of the dreams that invade my real world like that, I am a child and I am terrified, but I never know what the source of the terror is. It never materializes for me in the dream. Once the adrenaline rush subsides, I just fall back to sleep.
Should I consult a shrink to get to the bottom of the dreams? Probably, but it’s not going to happen. I think I bring these things on myself by writing stories about people in jeopardy. Call it an occupational hazard. Maybe romance writers are constantly ripping bodices in their dreams. If the dreams are more than that—if they are representative of some repressed violence from my youth—then I’ll gratefully listen to the subconscious brain that was courteous enough to blank it from my memory. If I’m a neurotic, at least I’m a functioning neurotic, so why rock the boat?
I write about children because families in peril are a recurring theme in my books. I write about boys because that’s what I was, and our only child is male. Write what you know. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Am I kidding myself here? Am I delusional? As a writer, does your made up world ever pay unwelcome visits to your real world?
After a certain amount of time and a certain number of books, does a novelist give attentive readers an accidental look into his subconscious? Or is it all just, you know, made up?
