The Birth of our Dynamic Duo
||| “What’s your process for writing?”
I’ve seen that question asked of and answered by a number of famous literary types. The most common answers I hear usually include terms that I’m conceptually familiar with but have zero practical experience applying. I suppose I developed a homegrown method of getting a novel out of my head and onto the page. Self-taught? You could call it that. It's amazing how much guidance is available online these days.
I knew I wanted to write a thriller. It was a genre I had been reading for years, and I felt I had a decent sense of the patterns and rhythms that made up this type of story. So, I began thinking about a moment in time that might grab someone’s attention.
I began to construct the genesis of Louisiana Hydra.
OK. A hacker. A hacker who… works for the CIA? Sure. Gary Oldman in Slow Horses type of thing? Yes! Gary is super cool. Sitting in a cafe in… Washington DC, of course. Nice autumn day, reading a book and sipping a latte. Naturally! What else would he be doing on his day off?
He’s there alone at this point, and as watchable as Gary Oldman might be, watching him do nothing but take sips and turn pages is not likely to hold anyone’s attention for long. We need some action. Now, with all due respect to Mr. Oldman, a few years have passed since his Drexl Spivey days, so I can’t have him punching or shooting his way out of whatever trouble I’m about to lay at his feet. We need someone to bring the noise, as it were.
Obviously, for anyone trying to imagine the most likely person to show up and bring trouble with them, you immediately think of Helena Bonham Carter. Am I right? And, of course, once she shows up, you’d never want her to leave. So we’ll have to give her a disposable companion, just in case things get messy, which they are about to.
And so it came to pass that William Stinson and Stephanie Borden were born.
Now, to bring them together in a somewhat believable way, I had to shoot that disposable guy in the head, but let’s face it. He had ‘redshirt’ written all over him right from the start. And I did make some people sad about his untimely death in the story, so you can’t say I’m completely cold-hearted.
Anyway, I’ll stop here to cycle back to the notion of having a process. I do actually mentally attach actors I admire to most of my primary characters. And often, as is the case with Gary and Helena, I create a composite character from them using a little or a lot from characters they have played over the years, with some additional herbs and spices of my own mixed in. It gives me an actual voice in my head when I'm working through the dialogue. It also allows me to interrogate my writing a little as I go. "Is that something Gary would say? How would Helena respond to that?" That said, I won’t share any of the other actors I hijacked, just in case you’re the type that likes to build your own mental images of the characters you read. Far be it for me to interfere with your process.
The beauty of writing a thriller is that you are always trying to unravel some sort of puzzle. Now, I spent almost all of my professional career in information technology, which means half of my time was spent trying to make things work a certain way, and the other half of my time was spent trying to figure out why things are not working the way they were intended. It turns out that this experience makes writing these types of stories much easier, if only because you already know that how things are supposed to work and how they do work are rarely the same thing. Further, you find out what you think is happening and what is actually happening is also rarely the same thing.
Having said all of this, it occurs to me now that everything I’ve written here is based on my assumption that Louisiana Hydra is well-written. I certainly have outlined a few things that went into this little project as if it is the recipe for my success. But what I may, in fact, have done here is write a cautionary tale, highlighting some of the things to avoid when attempting to write a thriller novel.
I hope that is not the case. I hope you like the book.
G
Comments