Goodreads asked Michael Vorhis:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Michael Vorhis For me, story concepts come from wherever they come from; I don't control that. I know I don't make them up...they seem to do that themselves. They're an independent life form, in that sense.

But what I can say I do is recognize them as interesting possibilities when they parade themselves through my mind. I jot down some for later, and I daydream about the ones that grab hold in a bigger way.

But no story idea goes very far unless I sit down to a keyboard with it. I have to commit--to invest something of myself in making its acquaintance. It's the process of adding my own suggestions and curiosities to the thing that hooks me on the project.

In that process, characters begin to take shape--that is, they drift in out of the gloom and I begin to get to know them. Character fascination is what makes any story (or any image, for that matter) work; without the personal connection, the individual intrigue, a reader's or writer's emotional investment will never be enough to even make it to the end of the tale.

So for me it's the "discovery" of how the people intertwine with a concept that makes my pulse begin to quicken. It's why I greatly prefer to write or read "Suspense" (wherein the protagonist is personally at risk) than I do the more academic "Mystery" genre, where mere puzzles are solved. I get involved too...I too start to be at risk...and the tale takes shape.

My recent novel OPEN DISTANCE began with the realization that my hang gliding competition experience could be extended, with a very small technological stretch (just the barest tickle of a sci-fi element). It could apply to another equally wild exploratory venue. That idea came to me--it invented itself somehow, and hit me on the forehead. And I wrote a short story for a major aviation publication about it, which was very well received, as far as it went.

But it always nagged me that I'd left it at that. The characters in the story hadn't really been done justice. So their saga hung out there in the shadows until I was ready to think about them more, to understand their motivations, their attitudes, their limitations and fortes...to really begin to feel what drove them.

And when I began to see WHY it had all happened the way it had, then I dutifully obeyed their command and wrote the whole story, and the "adventure thriller" / "suspense" / "meditation on what is really meaningful in life" novel OPEN DISTANCE was born. It's as tense and vivid as a thing can be, and yet it also makes grown men cry.

I'm one of them.

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