A Writer's Tale

They were thirty miles away on the other side of the Hollywood Hills and I had to get home fast.

My car was in the office building’s subterranean parking lot. The lot had an electrically operated gate. Fortunately, the area hadn’t lost its electrical power. The gate was operational, so I was able to get my car away and drive home as fast as I could.

I don’t remember much about the trip. As I recall, however, I got away from Glendale so quickly that I was ahead of any majors jams that might’ve been caused by the disaster.

At home, everything was fine. The quake had been somewhat milder because of our distance from the epicenter. Ann and Kelly and the house had gotten shaken up considerably, but there was no damage.

Though I continued to ‘work at the Glendale office for nearly a year after the quake, I never again parked in its lot. Every morning.

I left my car on the street to avoid any possibility that an earthquake might trap it behind an electrically powered gate.

People are often asking writers how they get ideas for their stories.

That’s how I got the idea for Quake.

But I didn’t immediately sit down and write myself a novel on the subject. The quake happened on October 1, 1987, and I didn’t start working Quake until December 14, 1991.

What took so long?

For one thing, my big idea consisted of a guy trying to get home after a major earthquake.

He would have a lot of adventures along the way. Meet people. Help people. Fight for survival against looters, etc. I needed something more, but wasn’t sure what.

Also, I wasn’t eager to embark on a “disaster novel.” The scope of such a thing seemed overwhelming. A major Los Angeles earthquake? Good grief, how could I even begin to get a handle on such a thing? How could I do it justice?

Plus, there had already been several major movies about earthquakes. While playing with ideas for Quake, I actually saw a made-for-television movie that featured a young woman struggling to get home after a big one. It seemed a bit too much like my idea.

And then there was one more factor. A minor thing. Nothing I took very seriously. On occasion, however, elements of my fiction have a disturbing way of coming true. (The Stake, for one.) So I did rather feel that writing an earthquake novel might be “tempting fate.”

What finally prompted me to go ahead with Quake?

As of December 6, 1991, an attempted novel entitled The Caller wasn’t going well. So I sat down at my computer and fooled around with ideas for a different novel. I came up with several possibilities, but nothing I really liked. So I tried again on December 10 and wrote, “Actually, an earthquake novel could be the answer. Several main characters.

Mainly a guy who is at work many miles from home. And his family at home wife and a kid or two. He urgently wants to get to them, but roads unusable.”

Going on from there, I decided that the wife should be alone in the house. “Someone is after her. Wants to use the quake, maybe, as cover for his crime. Wants to nail her.”

When I came up with that idea, I knew I would do the book. Suddenly, it was not just a disaster story. It was no longer like any of the earthquake movies. It was suddenly a “Laymon story.”

I’d found myself a nifty plot setup.

Could the husband get home in time to save his wife from the sadist who wants to ravish and kill her? Would she find a way to save herself? Maybe she wouldn’t be saved.

The “kid or two” turned into a teenaged daughter. For a while, I thought that she would be in her high school at the time of the quake. Then I decided to put her in a car, instead out taking “driver’s education” lessons with some other students and an adult instructor.

And that was it.

I’d come up with the basics of a major, threeway plot.

It went like this.

After a major earthquake strikes the Los Angeles area, the husband is desperate to get home. Because of the massive destruction, however, it will probably take him all day. In the meantime, his wife is trapped in her bathtub under the rubble of their house with a perverted neighbor trying to get his hands on her. While all this is happening, the teenaged daughter is trying to get home after being stranded in downtown Los Angeles which is not a good place to be.

All three plots needed to be coordinated, the distances and timing worked out so that everything would intersect properly.

I ended up making very extensive notes in which I developed all three plot-lines. The single-spaced plot synopsis turned out to be 15 pages long and contained a total of 62 different scenes. Each scene description included the time of day at which it was supposed to happen.

Because I felt that the climax should take place after dark with Daylight Savings Time in effect the final events of the story were scheduled to take place after 9:00 p.m.

This was to be my working outline.”

As I worked on the novel, I checked off each scene on the outline after writing it.