July 26, 2005
While I am finishing up the final rewrite of The Serpent's Kiss for my editor at Midnight Ink, I'm still managing to work on Falling Angels, what will hopefully be the third Derek Stillwater novel. To date, both Derek Stillwater novels, The Devil's Pitchfork and The Serpent's Kiss, are very similar in terms of pace and structure. They are flat out thrillers and by definition these tend to be larger than life, with a lone hero facing incredible odds, with very high stakes.

That much is true. What I also did in those two novels is write very, very short chapters. In fact, Serpent has 100 chapters and an epilogue. Each chapter is a scene, basically, sometimes as short as one page, sometimes as long as 6 or 7 or 8 pages. It's the potato chip theory of novel pacing--you can't read just one.

Of course, you run the risk of it being choppy. In my case, the novels are also multiple points of view. If you can handle it in TV and movies, you should be able to handle it in a novel, but I'm very conscious of making sure the reader knows who the main character is, and once things get moving, I try to have the main character in at least every other chapter.

I'm doing this in Angels Falling as well, but of course, being a neurotic novelist, I'm not sure if it's working as well. It can be a problem in a rewrite as well, because in the case of the Serpent rewrite, I'm doing about five chapters a day. Yet the book is designed to make the reader want to flip the pages. Almost every chapter, no matter what pov it's from, ends in a cliffhanger or twist. As the reader reads, hopefully, they will have a larger sense of the whole picture, even larger than the main character, who may or may not be making correct assumptions and actions--hence, suspense. But as a writer, we tend to second guess ourselves constantly in this sort of thing. Dirty Deeds is a first-person narrative, and that solves pretty much all of the pov problems, or at least, I don't have to worry about them much. They're all from Meg's pov. Whenever I need somebody else's pov, say Jack Bear's, he either tells her, or Meg re-tells it.

In his book on writing, David Morrell pretty much says you should never use the first-person. I don't agree, but I sometimes wonder if it's too often the lazy or too-easy choice. It can be damnably hard to create suspense with a first-person narrative, and then there's always a risk of awkward description and rambling. It creates a lovely immediacy, and it solves the problem of how much information to give the reader, which works nicely in a mystery whodunnit, but it's not without its pitfalls.

Ah well. Just thinking.

Best,
Mark Terry