The Reader Is Not the First Victim

Every book is an hallucinatory experience for a reader, isn’t it? as all its grand and awful characters rise up from the page. You meet someone you’re delighted to know or wish to God you had never met and then snap! that vision is gone at the last page. You have to read the next book in the series to grab that wonderful hallucination again.

It’s all a writer’s trick to keep you stuck on buying his books, you say? Noooo. The truth is far more terrible. Because the trick isn’t a trick. And the writer is its first victim.

Just for you and just for now, I’m going to break my oath of eternal silence to the Secret Society of Writers and reveal the unbelievable truth: No writer has any idea what’s going to pop off a page until he or she writes it there.

Not those who meticulously plan a novel. Not those who merely bang away from page one with no idea what comes next. Not the guy who wrote Beowulf, or Agatha Christie or Gabriel García Márquez.

Here is what really happens, and it’s so unbelievable to experience I will have to give you an example or you will never grasp the metaphysical mechanics of the marvel:

The book is called Dead Hand, a Western in the classic style and true to its historical context. I wanted it to say something special about the Old West and the hard men and harder women who lived there.

So this gunfighter is my carefully chosen protagonist. He rides out of a bitter cold Arizona winter into a village of Exodusters, his trail-weary horse scattering children at their play, and into the warm, straw-smelling comfort of a stable. Where he has an argument with a boy in tattered jacket and broken shoes about the cost of caring for his horse.

Up to this moment, the gunfighter is my chosen protagonist. He’s going to carry the story along and embody what I want to say about those people in those times. But a man in a flat-brimmed Stetson comes out of stable shadow raising a Buffalo Soldier’s old rifle to end the argument between gunfighter and stableboy. And bingo! he’s my protagonist now.

How the dickens did that happen?

I don’t mean the man in the hat blazes away with his rifle to grab the novel’s lead role. No, far worse. He and the gunfighter and the stableboy share a bit of limburger cheese while ghastly shadows creep into their conversation. And suddenly my chosen hero is unemployed!

This other guy is just too interesting, too dynamic, too much more the Western man. He grabs the protag’s job. He takes over the story. And he drives everything to a boil until it all ends where I never expected the story to end.

Now that’s some weird and freaky magic. But it happens all the time to a writer. You’re popping along with a scene and suddenly Annie Oakley walks into it and where did she come from? Or you finish an especially good line of dialog and wonder, What would happen next out of all this? and the “next” pops up on the page and you wonder how those sentences got there.

Or you’re coming to the end of the story and you’ve no idea how to get to The End (as with my first draft of Prince of Cowards just finished) when suddenly your hero runs off thataway and slaps The End at the bottom of the page for you and it’s all done.

There’s the writer’s most secret secret, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls - no writer knows what he or she is doing. It all just happens. Scary, yes, but wonderful. And it’s best when the reader finds it scary and wonderful, too.