by Aran Jane
I read as widely as I can — books of all types: literature, genre fiction, biographies, history books, academic books, art books. I read Internet news feeds, magazines, the backs of cereal boxes, basically, anything I can get my hands on.
When something catches my eye — and it could be anything — I begin turning it over in my mind to see if I can use it to tell a story. Then I cast about for a protagonist. With The Water Column, it was an article in the Chicago Tribune (and a follow-on article that appeared in the NY Times) about two fatal falls from Chicago high-rises that happened in the late Eighties. The Times headline read: Two Men, Two Women, and Two Deaths. I wanted to write a detective story and cast against type, so I decided my protagonist had to be a woman.
Once I have a protagonist in mind, I start outlining the structural and dynamic skeleton of the story. With a grand argument story, I focus on four sequences of story points, each within a single perspective: the Main Character’s perspective, the Influence Character’s perspective, the Objective story perspective, and the Relationship story’s perspective. My approach is somewhat unique in that I do all my writing in the car. My lovely wife, Sheri, a PICC nurse, sees patients all over Southern California, traveling from Los Angeles to San Diego. We're a team: she places the PICC lines; I do the driving.
In the breaks between conversations on the road, when the two of us are lost in thought, I work out the plot points in my head. When we reach our destination, Sheri goes in to see her patient, and I grab my computer and set to work.
I typically get maybe an hour at each stop, if I'm lucky. We average three to four cases a day. Some days, we get slammed and see five or six patients over twelve hours or more. It all depends on Sheri's caseload. That works out to three-to-four hours of actual writing, five days a week. Occasionally, I get lucky and get to write five or six hours a day. But that's rare.
Kris Kristofferson wrote a song that comes to mind, "The Pilgrim Chapter 33." There's a lyric line that says: "I'm a walking contradiction, partly truth, and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on my lonely way back home."
Since I have so little time, I cannot afford to waste it writing a story that ends up, in Kristofferson's words, "taking every wrong direction." The way I manage to avoid that problem is by using a software program for screenwriters and novelists called Dramatica Story Expert. Dramatica allows me to build a comprehensive outline. By the time I start writing the prose, I can do so with absolute confidence, knowing that my story will make a complete argument without any plot holes. It’s a hat trick, I know, but it helps me get from driving Miss Daisy to writing behind the wheel.
Aran Jane is an author whose novels are billed as imaginative, thought-provoking suspense thrillers, incorporating futurist technologies and the paranormal among more general interests in physics, metaphysics, philosophy, politics, and espionage. The Water Column releases February 25.