TMM asked Carter Roy:

What's so brilliant about your book is the way you grip the reader with each chapter. The twists and turns are great too. How do you maintain those elements of suspense and surprise? Do you plan them out before you start writing?

Carter Roy Thank you for the interesting (and flattering!) question—especially useful when tackling your own writing.

Some writers follow very detailed outlines, so that they know every beat of every chapter of the story before they ever set pen to paper. Others fly by the seat of their pants, making it up as they go along.

I use a mix of both methods. I outline in great detail before I start writing, so that I have good ideas about twists and surprises to come. But then, as I write, I also feel free to throw away what I've outlined if something better suggests itself, or if I start feeling that the pace of the storytelling is off-kilter somehow.

As an example, in the first book, Jack Dawkins finds a ... shocking way to short out the power in the sub-station at the end of the book. In the original outline, I had him create a simpler short, by grounding the electricity via some other means. Which, on reflection, was lazy on my part. And worse, lacked urgency. To save Sammy, he needed to do something radical. And voila, he almost seemed to suggest what that would be. I liked the new solution, and also, it provided for lots of humor—always a plus in my book.

For that matter, in the original outline, Sammy was not going to be a test subject, either. But somewhere along the way he ended up getting caught by the Bend Sinister, and one thing led to another.

It's great fun to come up with surprises along the way, but doing so is much easier if you've planned most of them out to begin with.

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