The Game is Playing You

My new novel, "Box of Night"

Sometimes, people ask me how long it takes to write a book, It’s kind of an impossible question. Even if I only dealt with the actual, literal, typing of words, there is no single answer. I’ve written four novels, and each one has oozed from my fingertips onto the keyboard at its own pace. And the actual, literal typing is just a small piece of the puzzle. There’s research (sometimes), outlining, thinking, more thinking, revising the outline, throwing away everything and starting over, and, of course, avoiding the project altogether.

We joke that avoiding writing is a major part of writing, but there’s some truth to that, and it’s not a bad thing. Walking away is important. Letting things bubble and percolate and rearrange themselves in the back of your mind—all of that is part of the process. You write with your whole mind—the conscious and the unconscious; the deliberate and the serendipitous. In the description of my new novel, I say something about how “the game just might be playing you,” and I think that’s actually true of writing. Am I writing the story, or is the story writing itself through me? Maybe it’s both.

Sometimes, I can do all the mechanical prep work and still not be ready to write, because the thing hasn’t gelled and cohered enough in my head to know how to start, or how to take the next step. Sometimes, I get the thing started and then hit some kind of snag that keeps me from moving forward. Sometimes, despite all my outlining, I’m just mystified by the big middle of the story, unsure how to get to the end that I’ve envisioned. I almost always have a picture of where I’m trying to go, but there are definitely times when the Yellow Brick Road gets overgrown in a dark wood.

And sometimes, to be honest, I just don’t want to take the next step, because I know it’s going to be hard. My last mystery novel, Cats in the Cradle, was like that. The subject matter was unpleasant and upsetting. I knew the research was going to be nauseating, and I knew that the writing was going to take me to some dark, bad places. It was my own damned fault; I’m the one who chose that subject matter. But it was easy to find reasons to avoid wading into those murky waters. I avoided it for months. Years, even.

My new book, Box of Night, was both fast and slow. Although the actual writing of the first draft went very quickly, the idea had been rattling around in my head for a long time—maybe 20 years or more. I didn’t have a fully formed idea back then—not a whole story, waiting to be attacked—but there were a few seeds and scenes that have been with me since the beginning. The first two chapters of the novel, I knew completely from Day One, as though they were scenes in a movie. I knew them two decades ago. They just had to wait for the rest to get filled in.

It’s a very different book for me—different tone, different style, different subject matter. I think it’s very current and relevant (even though the idea is as old as my children), so I’m excited to have it out in the world and have people read it.

The story is about old cities and new technology, careless corporations and hopeless people, moral stances and moral compromises. And it starts like this:

Suddenly he is deep in a forest.

If you’re interested, I’m running a book giveaway on Goodreads for the next week or so. Or, you know, you could just take a chance on a hopeful author and buy yourself a copy.

If you do read it, please let me know what you think—here, or on Goodreads, or on Amazon. It’s yours now. I hope you enjoy it.