Scavenger Hunt - Writing Process
08/10/22 09:41 Filed in: Writing | Scavenger Hunt
Yes, yes, I know. I haven’t been updating this blog as often as I should, and I need to explain. I don’t blog to garner more “followers” or make more money. I blog when I have something I feel is interesting or important enough to say. Even though a lot may be happening in the writing part of my life, often I don’t feel any of it is worthy of a post. I have something new that is worth a post.
My 7th book, Scavenger Hunt, was pre-announced about a month ago and comes out tomorrow, August 12th. It’s the story of a post-apocalyptic world where military teams hunt mutant “scavengers”. The book is about one such team on their last mission and what they encounter. The book has gotten some excellent reviews and great feedback, overall.
Yesterday, I got a question on social media about what I do when an idea pops into my head and what do I do to follow up.
My basic approach is:
- Get an idea and write it down. I have a file/notebook full of ideas.
- Decide if the idea is interesting enough to start following.
- Work through the idea until I feel I know what I’m writing.
- Write the first draft.
- Then the work begins.
The story grew out of an idea, which is how all of my stories start. Here the idea was the question, “What if zombies were fast and intelligent?” The more I thought about this idea, the more I liked it. But I didn’t want zombies, intelligent or otherwise. This led me to the idea of zombie-like mutants (ZLM). Then the question turned to, “What kind of society would ZLMs inhabit? What made them mutate? How would the rest of society react, and what would that be like?” This led to the idea of governments instituting “hunter teams” to protect the populace.
At that point, I shifted my focus to my main characters. I enjoy writing ensemble casts, so I settled on a team of three. I also needed an antagonist and a ZLM antagonist. Luckily, I’d made ZLMs intelligent, so that didn’t cause problems. At first, I thought I wanted a group of ZLMs, but that would have been too many characters to manage. I settled on one antagonist. Then it hit me that having one ZLM would be more interesting and terrifying than a bunch of them. So my antagonist became an outlier.
Now I needed goals for each of my characters. The team’s goal was to get an intact brain. This led to a complete set of new questions. Why? Why haven’t the teams been able to get a brain before? This told me about the physical capabilities of the ZLM. This led directly to the antagonist’s goal.
I realized I had an interesting antagonist, and I had to spend more time with him. I decided on an alternating POV (point of view) between the antagonist and the team leader. This meant my original idea of having an ensemble protagonist had to be subservient to the team leader. I didn’t feel the original goal was important or urgent enough. I settled on the team leader having to protect his team, which led to the idea that this would be the team’s last mission before being decommissioned.
Then, I dove into the first draft. As I wrote the alternating POVs, I hit on the idea that it would be fun to see the same events from the different POVs. This was difficult to do and took a lot of time and continuity planning. I had to rewind the clock each time the POV shifted, and I had to put myself into the new character’s shoes. I think this works, and I have gotten some feedback that people like how I replay the events. This allowed me to build the character of the antagonist to where the original protagonist and antagonist became co-protagonists-antagonists. That, I think, is my biggest accomplishment in this book.
Once I had the first draft, I began rewriting and editing. This is always the most boring and difficult part of the writing process for me.
Four years later, I have the book. It comes out on August 12, 2022. If you get it (get it here), I hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it. Whether you like it or not, please post a review on Amazon, Goodreads, Apple, etc.
Thank you.