Q&A with James Maxey discussion

A forum to discuss tips and tricks I've learned about writing novels. Mysteries of the writing life deobfuscated!

When you write how much of the story beats are planned ahead of time and how many occur during the writing process?

Where do you fall in the spectrum of the plot is created to serve the characters vs characters are created to serve the plot?

I know many of my biggest plot turns when I sit down to start a novel, but often don't have much idea of the specifics of how I'm going to get my characters to them. For instance, in Greatshadow, I knew the climax of the book would have to take place in the spirit realm, but I really had no specific idea of how I was going to have my characters make the crossing. But, the funny thing is, if I just sit down and right and trust my imagination, something always pops up at the right moment that gets me where I want to go. A lot of my writing is pure improv, with the advantage that, if it doesn't work the first time, I get a second draft.

My plotting often creates my characters. In my previous Bitterwood series, I'd ended the first novel with a religous fanatic named Ragnar going off with his followers vowing never to make peace with dragons. In the next book, I knew that for Ragnar to be an effective rebel, he needed to team up with someone who was an excellent war engineer, someone who could design weapons and handle the logistics of feeding and moving an army. The plot led me to create the character of Burke the Machinist, who was the brains behind Ragnar's fiery, rabble-rousing leadership. But, after the plot led me to create Burke, Burke wound up creating the plot. I had my big ideas of what Ragnar wanted to do with his army, and as Burke came to life he kept thinking of smarter solutions than what I'd originally planned. By the third book, Burke has become so important to the plot that he wound up on the original cover.

I very seldom start with a character and no plot. But, I also seldom have plots that survive unchanged by the characters. One key is to just keep writing and see who shows up. When I started Greatshadow, I never intended for Aurora to be a major character. In fact, Bigsby the fishmonger from chapter three was going to be going along on the dragon hunt, as was Relic's golem, Patch. Then I started writing the fight between Patch and Infidel and realized there was no way she was going to just shake hands and play nice after he'd swatted her around for a few pages, and that the only proper fate was to have him beaten to death with his own dismembered limbs.

This left an opening in the cast for another big muscle bound character. Aurora was mainly in the book to explain the lore surrounding the Jagged Heart, but the next thing I knew she was along for the hunt and suddenly Infidel's best friend. When characters volunteer like this, it makes my job a lot easier.

That`s quite an amazing way to write James .
Reading this does make me want to read the book !

How does it feel to be back in publication? Were you ever worried you would not find a new publisher for your work?

Why do you write so many stories with a POV character who does not / cannot physically interact with the events that surround them? (Nobody, Stagger, Silent as Dust)

That is an excellent question. Other ghosts/immaterial men in my books are Ap in Burn Baby Burn (who has a ghost mode among his many powers), Witness in my short story Where Their Worm Dieth Not, and Walker, a ghostly character in Witchbreaker.

And, of course, Vendevorex and Jandra in my Bitterwood novels rely heavily on the power of invisibility.

As a purely practical matter, an immaterial character serves me well as a storyteller since they get to witness events that would kill an ordinary observer, like Stagger being caught in Greatshadow's flames. On a symbolic level, I think my invisible, immaterial men stand in for the everyman who is often swept up in events beyond his power to shape. When I placed Nobody in the center of the Arab/Israeli conflict in Jerusalem, his sense of helplessness reflects what I suspect is a common reaction to such tragedies: What can I do? How can I possibly make things better? In the face of such tragedy, am I truly nobody?

On a personal/psychological level, I lived a great deal of my life feeling a bit like a ghost trapped ever so slightly out of reality. I grew up in a fundamentalist church, but by my teens I'd become an atheist. I didn't tell anyone; I felt like I couldn't tell anyone. It would have caused my family great pain, and, vice versa, I worried about being shunned and isolated. So, for several years I withdrew into myself. I kept my nose in books every waking moment, either reading or writing or drawing. My body continued to go through the motions of being the person others thought I was. I went to church, to school, and to family gatherings, but my true self was completely unseen, hidden behind my mask of shyness and bookishness.

I've become much more comfortable in my own skin as an adult, but it doesn't take much for me to slip back into the role of detatched observer, with the sensation that I'm watching my life from a distance rather than being emersed within it. How common this feeling is for other people I can only guess. But, I suspect it may not be that rare, which may explain why so many readers do connect with my ghost men.

As for the first half of your question, I'm happy to be back in bookstores, of course. And, two years ago, I was worried that I might not find a publisher for Greatshadow, since the last book in my Bitterwood series had a big drop in sales. (My publisher was in the process of being sold to new owners and when Dragonseed came out, zero promotion was done. They didn't even mention it on their website.)

Today, the advent of ebooks and the ease of self publishing has completely changed my possible career path. I was able to write a book like Burn Baby Burn and publish it myself purely because I loved the project, not because I had to think in terms of what a publisher was willing to buy. Burn Baby Burn hasn't been on the market for a full year, but if sales trends hold in one year I'll have made a comparable amount to an advance from a traditional publisher. And then, the book will keep selling, since I never have to worry about an ebook going out of print, or failing to earn out an advance. It's too early to state this with confidence, but my hunch is that income over the course of five years is going to be much better for a self pubbed ebook with modest sales than it would be from a traditionally published genre paperback from a mid-list author like myself.

I do worry, of course, about losing the very large pool of readers who will never switch to ebooks. But, there are probably some people in the world who never updated from vinyl records. And, I do intend to have my agent continue to pitch by novels to publishers. I've never had a book come out as a hardcover, and if I found a publisher willing to bump me up to that format, I'd probably go with the deal since it's been a long term career goal of mine.

Of course, we live in extremely turbulent times in the publishing industry, so it's difficult to imagine what the book business is going to look like in even ten years. It's possible that publishers will improve terms for writers in order to keep them from jumping into ebook self-publishing. Or, Amazon could change their currently generous royalty rates. But, for the next three books I plan to write, I can do so with the confidence that I will always have a path open to place the work before readers.

How do you stop yourself from overthinking a thing or situation and getting stuck on it for longer than you probably should? It could be anything, from how to kill a dragon to how a particular quirk of someone would logically play out in some hypothetical instance (and then play out to completely ruin everything, ever)? What's the best way forward and through for you?

You know, it's funny you should ask. I just finished the last chapter of Witchbreaker on Saturday. This was my second draft of the novel, but the first time I actually wrote the ending. I confess, I didn't write the ending the first time because I wasn't sure how to do it.

Without revealing spoilers, my final chapter is a big fight involving TWENTY-ONE named characters with dialogue. This is similar to the end of my novel Dragonseed, where I have two big set piece battles, the fight against the Goddess in Atlantis and the fight against Vulpine at Dragonforge. But, in these novels, I was writing from multiple POV's, so I was able to jump around from character to character to keep the action flowing. In Witchbreaker, I have one POV character, Sorrow, who has to directly witness the actions of all the various cast members.

Getting the sequencing right so that everybody gets to say their lines while at the same time keeping the action moving forward at break-neck speed (since they are locked in mortal combat with a primal dragon) is a hyper-complicated logic puzzle. It becomes very easy to plan yourself into paralysis in order to try to write it right.

So, here's my trick: I write it wrong.

I just turn off my filters, accept that my first pass at solving the problem is going to fail, and start typing. Soon enough, everything I need to put into the big scene is out of my head and onto the page. After that, I can edit and revise. Advance readers can tell me what's confusing them or what they think is really cool. By the second draft, it's coherent. By the third draft, everything is in it's place, and then all that's left are polishing drafts to fix all the typos and artifacts created by my initial sloppiness.

Not everyone works this way. I know writers who outline every important event before they sit down to right, and when they finally sit down, they get it in one draft.

Alas, I have to work with the brains I got, and my brain doesn't work that way. I have to shake out all the jigsaw pieces of plot onto the mental table so that I can see how everything fits together.

Your last question, by the way, is kind of a good motto to type out and tape to your monitor: Forward and through. Just keep momentum, stay loose, start typing, and get out on the other side. Writing a bad chapter is never fatal to a novel. Not writing a chapter because you're stuck, however, can be the kiss of death.