A Writer's Tale

Along the way, the story grew overwhelming.

The pages piled up, I checked off scenes, but there were still so many scenes still to go. I soon realized that, if I actually followed the outline, the manuscript would end up over 1,000 pages long.

I was in over my head.

(In retrospect, it seems ironic that my first real experience with getting “in over my head” occurred while working on the most carefully thought-out and outlined novel of my career. That’s what is supposed to happen when you fly by the seat of your pants, not when you outline.)

Befuddled about what to do with the situation, I quit writing Quake on April 3, 1992.

Maybe I would get back to it someday, maybe not. After leaving it behind, I wrote Endless Night (a nice, simple story) and In the Dark (less simple, but still a long distance from the complexity of Quake).

Just a few days before quitting Quake, however, I’d sent a synopsis and sample chapters (a few hundred pages, I think) to Bob Tanner. I did this because Headline had asked for information about my new project.

Bob had not only sent a copy to Mike Bailey at Headline, but he’d also submitted it to Tom Dunne at St. Martin’s Press.

I had no idea that he might submit it anywhere.

About the time I was finishing In the Dark, Tom Dunne made an offer on Quake.

I was shocked, delighted and aghast.

Suddenly, I would have to finish writing Quake whether I wanted to or not.

I suppose I could have turned down the offer…

But I figured, why not go for it?

So I returned to Quake and analyzed the problem with my plot. The problem was easy to identify: there was too much of it. And why did I need so much? Only in order to stretch everything out so the climax could take place in the dark. My solution?

Scrap the darkness. Let it all take place in daylight. Suddenly, my problems with the novel evaporated. On September 30, 1993, I received a letter from Tom Dunne in which he praised what he’d read so far of Quake and offered several useful suggestions about revisions and ways to go with it in the future. The next day, I resumed writing the novel on the sixth anniversary of the Whittier quake that inspired it.

Remember what I wrote about “tempting fate”? On January 17, 1994, about two months before I finished writing Quake, the Los Angeles area was struck by a 6.6 magnitude earthquake. We were shocked out of sleep at 4:31 a.m., the house roaring and shuddering around us. “This is it,” I thought. “This is the Big One.” There was massive destruction. Buildings toppled. Freeways went down. The power was knocked out. Quite a few people were killed, and hundreds were injured. In our own case, a lamp fell on Ann’s head and I cut my foot on broken glass. Kelly, the lucky one, somehow slept through most of the quake. We were briefly trapped inside our house, but finally made it to the safety of our parked car. There, we waited in the darkness.

When dawn came, we were startled and delighted to find that our house was still standing mostly intact. We entered to survey the damage and clean up. Bookshelves and television sets, window blinds and framed pictures had fallen to the floor. Most of our cupboards had thrown their contents onto the floors. Our bed was broken. The inside of our fireplace had collapsed and our chimney had broken away from the house. The walls were cracked.

And about 500 manuscript pages of Quake, stacked on top of a wobbly television tray in a back room of the house, remained neatly stacked on top of the tray as if nothing had happened.

I do realize of course, that I didn’t cause the earthquake by writing Quake. But I may resist the temptation to write a novel about the end of the world.

I finished Quake on March 24, 1994.

The manuscript came in at 679 pages.

It’s certainly not the biggest book in history, but large and complex enough to present special problems.

When writing a small, less complicated novel, I don’t have much trouble keeping track of things. If I want to remind myself of certain details (such as what a character is wearing), it’s a fairly simple matter to leaf through the earlier pages.

Not so easy, however, when there are multiple plot lines, a crowd of important characters, and hundreds of pages.

So I want to tell you about a few methods I’ve developed to help me keep things straight.

If you’re a writer, you might find some of this useful.

First tip. Outline if you need to. Even though I am generally opposed to the use of outlines, they become almost a necessity if you’re trying to write a complex novel with several intersecting story-lines. You have to coordinate the events, or you’ll end up with a real disaster. Just don’t feel compelled, when writing the actual book, to follow every detail of the outline. Follow it like a map, but feel free to take detours.