On Writing Nine Fingers: The Good Wolves

 

I’m on the downhill run toward finishing Nine Fingers: The Good Wolves, the third book of four in the Nine Fingers series, my eighth book writing as Tony Bowman, and my twenty-first book overall. I started planning out Good Wolves right after finishing the original Nine Fingers. 

As happens quite often, another story moved into my head between book one and The Good Wolves. That book was Nine Fingers: The Beast of Bray Road.

So, the basic story of The Good Wolves has been percolating in my mind since 2015. Specifically, the beginning of Good Wolves and the end have been clearly defined for almost seven years. I ‘see’ the scenes from my books in my head and they run on a continuous loop, sometimes for a decade.

Little details get added with each run through. How does it feel when a werewolf is engulfed in flame? Is there panic before they emerge from the fire and begin to heal? What does burning werewolf fur smell like?

Each bit of detail requires a rewind of the scene and a replay with the new detail. How does a werewolf save a small child from a burning building without terrifying them? By not appearing to be a werewolf, of course. How do you calm a child who is frightened when the only sound you can make in wolf form is a growl? That solution requires another rewind, and so on.

That is how I plot each scene.

But, there is an equally important part to writing that also needs to be addressed: characterization. Many would argue characterization is more important, and I don’t disagree.

There are many ways to kill a book. A sloppy plot, bad sentence structure, all can lead to disaster.

But, poor characterization will kill a story in a heartbeat.

There are writers out there who meticulously plan everything about a character, from their appearance to their motivations to the arc of their personal growth. My hat’s off to people who can do that - I certainly can’t. Many of my characters are chaotic in nature. If you ‘plot’ their arc, they come off two-dimensional - at least for me, they do.

I’m a software engineer by trade. In particular, I’m someone who writes ‘object oriented’ software. In layman’s terms, I create programs that react organically to input. My algorithms ‘evolve’ over time given the requirements. They’re like little mathematical models that simulate how a person would perform some task if it were assigned to them.

As it turns out, I can do the same thing in my head with book characters. I start off with some idea of who I want the character to ‘be’. What are their motivations, their drives? Do they have narrow focus? Are they self-centered, altruistic, or something in between?

More importantly, how do they ‘evolve’ as they are exposed to new stimuli? They can go down interesting paths that I never actually ‘plotted’. In Valkyrie: The Road, I have two characters trapped on top of a mausoleum surrounded by zombie-like ghouls. One of them is Rat, a woman who is 100% chaotic in her actions. I never know what she is going to do from one scene to the next.

So, she’s trapped on top of this mausoleum with her lover, Monkey, and they are about to die. Rat immediately pulls out a gun and prepares to shoot Monkey in the head - if I remember correctly, she says something to the effect of “I’ll shoot you, then you shoot me… wait, no, that won’t work.” Is she serious? Who knows? Monkey certainly doesn’t know, but he manages to talk her down.

It’s a fun scene, and it alleviates the extreme tension that led up to that instant. I couldn’t have planned that scene - Rat did. Rat saw they were about to die horribly, and she did something so outlandish that it broke that tension. 

The readers laughed - I even laughed. It was just Rat being Rat - the Rat algorithm finding a way to add some levity to what looks like their demise.

Characters grow the same way. They change over the course of their arc. You could plan this growth, I suppose. I never have.

In Lawman, Nolan Ryan Dolan doesn’t start out wanting to be a father figure. He becomes one through his reactions to the world around him.

Karen Arthur in Nine Fingers has an even more dramatic change. Under Hayden Oswald’s ‘guidance’, she participated in the killing of her ex and her ex’s lover. We’ve now gone through two books of her coming to terms with what she did and finding a way to redeem herself.

Again, this isn’t something you can force. You can’t plot this. You have to let Karen work through it, and, even if she can’t ever really forgive herself, at least learn to accept it.

Nine Fingers: The Good Wolves picks up sometime  after The Beast of Bray Road. Karen’s pack is doing what they believe to be right. They are flawed creatures, as are we all, and they have enemies they didn’t even know existed…