Blackbirds

Acknowledgments

Authors all look like we lone wolf it, like we are ronin-ninja-without-clan, like it's just us out there traversing the icy creative sea in our little tugboats. The book has our name on it and nobody else's, and at the end of the day, that's a big face full of nonsense.

No book comes to term without a whole ecosystem supporting the birth of that book. Like Soylent Green, a book is made of people, and I'd like to thank those people, now.

Thanks first to Stephen Susco for helping me hammer this thing in shape.

Thanks to Jason Blair and Matt Forbeck for suggesting Angry Robot as a potential home for Miriam Black.

Thanks to my agent, Stacia Decker, for helping make that happen, and further, thanks to all the great folks – Lee, Marco, Darren – at Angry Robot who are the nicest cuddliest steel-and-circuitboard overlords an author guy like me could ever have.

Thanks too to Joey HiFi for offering up one of the coolest covers I could've ever imagined. Have you looked at that cover? Seriously. Take another long. Stare at it. Go ahead. You can caress it. I won't tell anybody.

Thanks to my many readers at terribleminds.

And thanks to my wife, Michelle and my newborn, Ben. Both of which keep me sane when I need to be sane, and encourage me to be crazy when I need to be crazy. Love you guys.

CHUCK WENDIG in conversation with Adam Christopher

The end! Right? Well, for the moment anyway, but Miriam Black returns in MOCKINGBIRD in September 2012. So while we wait – and boy, what a wait! – let's get the author himself, Mr Chuck Wendig, in the interrogation chair, apply the electrodes, and turn the voltage up. It's okay. He says he enjoys it.

Let's start at the top: where did Blackbirds come from?

The same place all authors get their ideas: a small defunct post office in Topeka, Kansas. We receive a red envelope. We open it with a tincture of tears and blood. And inside is the idea. A ghost waiting to be given bones and flesh.

Okay, maybe not.

Like with most stories, Blackbirds doesn't precisely have a single point of origin – lots of disparate elements came crashing together one night and, boom, an idea baby was born.

First: two songs. "Another White Dash" and "Life Is Short" by Butterfly Boucher. Can't reprint the lyrics here but it's worth Googling – both deal with traveling and crashing on couches and being a bit of a drifter and, in the case of the latter song, how life is indeed an all-too-brief thing. (At least, that's how I read 'em.)

Second: death. Over the period of a few years, several of my loved ones passed away. Both grandmothers, one from cancer, one from a seemingly endless series of strokes. Then my aunt died: cancer. Then my father died: cancer.

Death has this very special way of making you feel helpless – you can't see the Grim Reaper arrive, but arrive he does and with a swoop of his unstoppable scythe the people you love and need are taken away lickety-split.

Cancer diagnoses are double-trouble – you get a clear warning sign that death is coming. Soon as someone goes on hospice care, the great big pocketwatch is made visible and you see that you don't have many hours left before it winds down.

And I thought, what a horrible thing. To know that. On the one hand, great, yes, you have time to say goodbye and make peace, but on the other hand, it offers uncomfortable foresight.

Here the fiction writer's brain does all those cruel leaps and cackling pirouettes – it would be terrible in a way to possess that foresight in a very real, psychic sense. To see how others were going to die.

So, I wrote this document called Poor-Miriam.doc and it was about this girl who could see how someone was going to die just by touching them. The trick was, Miriam could see the death, yes, but she did not have all the details and she could seemingly do nothing to stop it.

Then I paired that with another totally-unrelated document I'd written that introduced the two killers of this piece: Frankie and Harriet. It was a meaningless exercise in writing character, just an attempt to put these two odd and ill-fitting assassins together and see what happened. Though, as it turns out, not too meaningless at all.

Because from there, the story exploded in my head. Miriam and her psychic ability and these two killers and then all the characters and plotty bits in-between. What ended up was fairly different from how I started, but it's in this weird confluence of things that the story's origins lurk.

Frankie and Harriet started life as character studies? How often do you do exercises like that? Is that something useful for a writer? How often have things that have been filed away like this proved useful for other projects?

I take a lot of random notes. If I get a character or a story idea – or hell, even a story title – I'll write it down. Is it useful? Sure. I have a brain like a sieve, so I can't count on my own mind to remember something I thought about three years ago. Or three weeks ago. Or even three minutes ago. Who are you again? How did you get inside my book? CALL THE ROBOT POLICE.

Within these pages, nobody can hear you scream, Mr. Wendig! Times like this I wish I had a moustache to twirl.

Oooh. Sorry. See? Something wrong with my upstairs. Got moonbats in my moon belfry, I suspect. And twirling mustaches is overrated. The new thing is angrily grabbing fistfuls of beard and screaming. Get on board.

Point is, this little mental dumping ground has proved useful more than once. Most of my short stories come out of this space where I stitch together random and once-unrelated elements.

One of the great things about Blackbirds is the strength of the characters, even the minor ones. Miriam really strikes me as a complex, multifaceted personality. As a man, did writing a female lead present any particular challenges, or were there certain things you wanted to include, as well as things you wanted to avoid? Did you consciously plan Blackbirds to have a female lead, or was that what the story required?

It was not a thing that I thought very hard about – from the beginning the protagonist was always a woman. It just seemed that's what the tale demanded. Not sure why. Eventually her being a woman figured into it in greater ways – having a miscarriage is not something a man will ever experience.

(Actually, that miscarriage is another one of those story events that came screaming out of a real-life event. I was at a friend's college and one morning in the girls' bathroom, the floor was covered in dark clotting blood and, true or not, the rumor went around that a girl got really wasted and had a miscarriage right there in the bathroom. Grim business, but the fiction writer's mind is a sponge for such horror.)

It's odd only when I think about it that these books showcase the stories of women, whether it's Miriam and her mother, Harriet and her husband, Mrs. Gaynes and her troubled son. But it wasn't odd when writing them: it just felt like that's the story I wanted to tell and these are the connections buried within.

The other thing I love is that you're very careful to leave out as much as you put in to the story – we have glimpses of Miriam's childhood (shades of Stephen King's Carrie there!), Ingersoll's heritage, and other hints of the magical and perhaps supernatural. But, crucially, these thing only add to the mystery. What do you think the source of Miriam's power is? We've got psychics and bone readers – what else exists in the world?

The source is trauma, I think. Sometimes bad things happen and those bad things unlock other bad things – like letting a monster out of its cage. Miriam almost died and had her baby die and that leaves a very potent psychic scar. You become an antenna that broadcasts pain, yes, but you also receive that terrible frequency from others.

That aspect leaves room for other psychic abilities to exist in Miriam's world. I think her ability is singular (in that no one else can see what she can see), but I suspect that others with different abilities of the mind await. In fact, I'm just being coy. I know they do. You should get a gander at Mockingbird.

As to whether or not this world contains vampires, ghouls, werewolves, zombies – no, I don't see that happening.

That said, Miriam's visions and dreams provide an interesting question. What is it that's talking to her? Is it a ghost? The ghost of her unborn child? Is it some strange spirit of fate or free will, some entity from beyond the veil? Or is it her own active imagination, her psychic will given persona? I think I know the answer, but I'm not telling. Not yet.

The biggest mystery is perhaps unveiled when Miriam visits the psychic – this is a pivotal moment for the character, and suddenly the story drops into some very weird territory indeed. Is Miriam's past and the nature of her power – and what may lie within her – something we'r going to follow in Mockingbird?

Oh, yes. Mockingbird returns to Miriam a year later and sees that she's been keeping her power under wraps – she wears gloves, tries not to touch people, avoids her curse-slash-gift at any cost.

But when she returns from self-imposed exile, it all comes back to her in a big and sudden way. Further, as the story develops, so too do her powers – she gets another couple curious tricks up her sleeve.

We learn too, a little more about her past, in terms of her relationship with her family.

Was Miriam's story always going to be a duology?

Her story was always meant to be, if it needed to be, a standalone one-and-done story. You can come into her life and then be with her during this weird and awful time – a time of great change, upheaval, a major pivot point for her character – and then leave her be, confident that she has changed. For the better or for the worse, who knows?

But to me, the book has always lived on inside my head as a series. Not just two books, but a whole line of tales. Miriam's psychic ability allows for a great procedural hook: she can effectively solve and/or avenge murders before they happen. Couple that with her character – for me, easy to write and damaged enough to see how she both puts herself back together and breaks herself in whole new ways – and it feels to me like she's got legs as a series character.

That's my plan, at least. I know where her story ends. The tale of Miriam Black is far from over, not with Blackbirds, nor with Mockingbird.

Blackbirds is pretty dark, although there is a lot of humour and wit. There's also a lot of swearing and a lot of violence, which reflect the life that Miriam has led and the situation she now finds herself in. Did this require a particular mindset to write? The action sequences are very well choreographed. How much planning does it take to write a really good fight scene?

Darkness? Swearing? Violence? Me? Naaaah.

It actually troubles me sometimes how easy this was to write. Miriam's very comfortable to slip into as a character, and curiously that comfort is uncomfortable – "Hey, I can write this damaged, fucked up human being with no problem! It's like donning a suit tailor-made of bird bones and cancer sticks and the leathery skin of a snarky-yet-forlorn monster."

The action scenes are a whole other enchilada. I do find them fairly easy to write, but I don't choreograph them before hand. While Blackbirds represented a very important lesson for me as a writer (about outlining and planning), I don't find much value in sketching out every detail of a fight scene before it happens. In any of my preparatory notes I just write FIGHT SCENE in the ink brewed from the blood of my enemies and then, when I finally get there, I make it up as I go.

Which befits fight scenes, I think, especially ones that you want to feel brutal and surprising: they're going to unfold unexpectedly and it helps to kind of put yourself into that moment and see how it plays out. The bar scene, for instance, was very much that – you pause, consider the next action beat, put it into play, pause, consider the next action beat, and so on. Consequence tumbling after consequence with every knuckle-busting fist thrown or bottle broken.

Of course, like any scene, the fights are really forged in the rewrite.

When we were talking about my book Empire State, you asked me a very difficult question – what makes Empire State an Adam Christopher novel. Reading Blackbirds, I'm struck by the fact that this cannot possibly have been written by anyone other than yourself, and I'm sure readers familiar with your work – including your blog at Terribleminds.com – will feel the same way. So let me throw that question back at you: what makes Blackbird a Chuck Wendig novel?

I knew you were going to ask this, and yet, I don't have a good answer.

Voice is a tricky thing for a writer. If you work to develop a voice, you'll never have one. If you just… well, as the saying goes, lie back and think of England, the voice will come to you. Meaning, you write how you're going to write and do so to the best of your technical abilities and somewhere therein – in the smashing together of word choice, linguistic style, character, dialogue, story, plot – a book ends up being indelibly yours as an author. You claim ownership by not claiming ownership.

How is this book mine specifically? Well. Part of it has to be Miriam. We're nothing alike, she and I, and yet I can hear her stomping around my brain sometimes, chain-smoking and cursing her fate, your fate, everybody's fate, the fate of the soda machine that doesn't have any orange Fanta in it, and so on.

The other part of it has to be the profanity.

Because, ahh, as many of my readers know, I'm fond of profanity. Creative profanity in particular. (If I recall correctly, Miriam calls someone a "fuckpie" in this book. Which sounds like the most undelicious pastry one could find. What's in a fuckpie, exactly? Lubefroth and used condoms, topped with a latticework of pubic hairs?)

My love of profanity comes from my father. His ghost, rattling around in my head, too. See? More death. The motif ever-present! Death and birds and bad words and all that good stuff. We authors are who we authors are, built from our obsessions.

You've written a series of YA novellas, beginning with Shotgun Gravy. Blackbirds is very much not a YA book – so how do you switch between one "voice" and another.

I guess that's the nature of being a writer, right? Just as actors must hop from persona to persona, writers must ease into and out of dozens if not hundreds of characters.

That said, the voice – meaning, the authorial voice – is actually common ground between Blackbirds and a novella like Shotgun Gravy. Both explore similar themes and feature two female protagonists who have been changed by traumatic experiences and have chosen paths that are not particularly sane. Shotgun Gravy is more of a twisted, darker take on Veronica Mars or Nancy Drew, and the protagonist there – Atlanta Burns, a 17-year-old girl – is very different from Miriam, but they share a core darkness and both travel the same troubled road.

For a long time I was concerned about certain themes and ideas that keep popping up. But then I realized, that's part of me, part of my voice. As long as it's kept in check and doesn't end up redundant, it can be a good thing for one writer's body of work to traverse and explore the same themes and motifs.

Blackbirds is written in the present tense. Was that a conscious decision, or is that just the way you write?

It was conscious, but the book didn't start out that way. The first draft or two – which were largely incomplete – ended up in past tense.

But Blackbirds has a curious procedural journey that involves a screenwriting side trip – and scripts are, of course, written in the present tense. Very active, very direct. And it dawned on me that Blackbirds really needed that. Especially given the nature of Miriam's power which demands a certain timeliness in the plot – that way, the reader is seeing what Miriam is seeing as it happens.

Some have said present tense is more "cinematic," which I don't know is true – but it does ape how screenplays are written, and further, does force every moment of the plot and the action to pivot on the head of a pin given that everything is happening at that precise instance. Present tense for me creates a greater sense of tension and urgency. It's saying, things are not yet written. And with a story asking big questions about fate versus free will, that seemed apropos.

"Procedural journey?" Tell me more!

It's like this:

Blackbirds is… I want to say the sixth novel I wrote. (All five novels prior to this are, in fact, garbage and should not be spoke of lest they hear us talking about them.)

The big problem was, I couldn't finish it. I just kept writing myself into corners. Worse, even before I found myself nose to-narrative-corner, I took long circuitous routes to get to that blockage. Endlessly rambling plot. I convinced myself that this was a good thing because it was a "road novel," but this was just one of many writer-fed delusions that needed swift extermination.

The extermination came, though perhaps not swiftly. My sister wrote me one day to tell me she saw a screenwriting contest where you could win a year-long mentorship with a screenwriter – in this case, Stephen Susco, the guy who wrote both of the American Grudge adaptations (as well as Ketchum's Red adaptation).

His specialty was, in fact, adaptations. I thought, "Hey, it would be hilarious if I won the mentorship and then used it to workshop Blackbirds, thus turning the unfinished novel into a finished screenplay and then back into a finished novel." Of course, I had no interest in screenwriting and no talent in that regard and I expected nothing. Blackbirds – which then remained without a title – threatened to become just another useless junk drawer manuscript.

Except, oops, I won.

So, I got to spend the year workshopping the story into a script. Susco, it turns out, grew up like five minutes down the road from me and went to my high school, so we had that connection going for us, and I found his advice always spot on. His first and most critical piece of advice was the one I'd longresisted:

Outline your work.

Outline your work.

I thought, "Eeesh, that'll kill my story! It stomps on all the magic." Which is a lie, of course, a chumbucket brimming with gory gobbets of self-deception, and he made it clear that the business of screenwriting was very much about outlines. He told me to learn to write them and, even better, learn to love them.

A year later, the Blackbirds script was complete and the story was done and I spent time again turning it back into a novel. I followed the script (which was now itself a big giant outline) and deviated where appropriate, as films are not analogous to novels.

I think all told, between script and novel, Blackbirds went through eight or nine solid drafts. Some drafts operating as total rewrites.

And odd process, but it found its feet in the end. And now I know a lot more about writing novels (rather than thinking I knew a lot about writing novels).

Okay, so outlining is key. But how do you do it? You're the king of online writing advice, so: what's Chuck Wendig's Official Guide to Outlining a Novel?

The king? I demand a crown! And a jester! And a throne made of the bones of failed writers! I shall sup from my goblet of ink and bark commandments at floundering penmonkeys everywhere! Fetch me my whisky, lackeys!

Ahem.

I do dispense what I call "dubious writing wisdom" at my website, terribleminds.com, but writers shouldn't hope to find any gospel there. That said, I think it's important that writers talk about what they do, and one of the things I talk a lot about is outlining. Some writers can get away with not outlining – "pantsing" is, I believe, the favored term – but some writers can't and then try anyway. I was one of those writers, as noted. Panster at heart, plotter by necessity.

Just the same, I don't outline in any one specific way. Every book demands a different outline. The one common technique between all my outlining is that I always like to identify my tentpoles – what five or ten plot points absolutely must happen for this whole thing to stand up? Plot points that, if I miss them, the whole tent falls down and smothers both writer and reader under a polyester death tarp.

Some books demand chapter-by-chapter outlines. Some ask for beat sheets or synopses. Every story is different and hungers for different preparation. Same as how the preparation of different meals demands a different mise en place.

What else did the scriptwriting workshop teach you? Something I find fascinating about scripts (whether they are for films, or television, or even comic books) is tha they're almost entirely dialogue. Do you think it is beneficial for writers of prose to at least make a small study of other forms of writing, such as scripts?

The best screenwriting workshop I attended was when I got accepted into the Sundance Screenwriting Lab with my writing partner, Lance. For several days we hunkered down with a number of top shelf screenwriters and incubated the very concept of story and character and what it all means. Very potent experience.

And what it taught me is that story is story. Whether we're talking games, novels, films, comics, whatever – story is story. It's still beholden to narrative ideas and rules and tradition. Sure, each format brings its own challenges and advantages, but at the end of the day a good story is a good story no matter the format.

It is beneficial, then, for writers to become more versatile and try other forms – from short stories to comic scripts to game material and back to novels. If anything, it teaches you to identify those things that work across the board, those things that speak to the heart of the reader and, even better, from the heart of the writer.

Consequently, what impact has the scriptwriting tangent had on your subsequent work after Blackbirds?

That's the funny thing – I kind of snuck into screenwriting through the back door hoping only to workshop a then-failed novel, and what happens? I end up a bonafide screenwriter, it seems. Had a short film go to Sundance (Pandemic in 2011), have a larger film from that transmedia storyworld in development (HiM or Hope Is Missing), took an original idea to pilot with my writing partner for TNT, had a transmedia project (Collapsus) nominated for a international digital Emmy award. Been a crazy ride. And all of it, really, thanks to stalling out with Blackbirds!

Each writer's journey is ever the crazy one. We all dig our own tunnels in and detonate the path behind us.

Chuck, thank you very much! Um… did you want me to detach the electrodes, or are you okay for a while?

No, no, I'm good here. The puddle of my own urine is somehow comforting. Like an old friend.

Adam Christopher is the author of EMPIRE STATE and the forthcoming SEVEN WONDERS, both from Angry Robot books. You can find him online at adamchristopher.co.uk and on Twitter as @ghostfinder.