Erik asked Scott Hawkins:

Hi Scott! Mt. Char was mind blowing, thank you! How long had you been holding on to the idea of Mt. Char before you were able to put it into words on paper? Do you have any more ideas percolating? Have you read any mind blowing books yourself? another favorite of mine is "A fistfull of Sky". crazy good!

Scott Hawkins Hey Erik,

I haven't read A Fistful of Sky. I just looked it up, and I see two--are we talking about the one by Nina Hoffman, or the one by Anish Balakrishnan? I'm guessing you meant the Hoffman, but they both look like they could work.

As far as "how long": there's not really a good answer for that. Writers talk about "plotters" vs. "pantser" as in "people who plot things out beforehand" vs. "people who fly by the seat of their pants." I'm very much in the pantser category. I just sit down and start typing whatever seems interesting that day--no real idea of where anything is going. It's really random, and I generally have no idea at all where it's going to end up. No joke, Mount Char was originally conceived as an office drama.

So, I guess the best answer is that the actual plot arose one element at a time from the act of first writing out the random scenes, then coming up with motivations that could plausibly be used to stitch the stuff together.

That said, I pulled elements from previous books that never got published. For instance, my first novel was about a burglar with a heart of gold, and my third had a lot of animal point-of-view. Those popped back up as Steve and the Dresden/Naga chapter, respectively. I vaguely remember having an idea for a short story in the 90s about a gruff old dude and his daughter that probably influenced the Father/Carolyn dynamic.

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