Some readers like to see how the sausage is made, and some don’t. I’m the former. I used to love the long author’s notes in Stephen King’s books where you heard a lot about where he was at when he wrote the book, what he was feeling at the time (ie, which stage of drug abuse, in his specific case). Writers, of course, love this kind of stuff (craft), and I’m told that bookstagram people do too..? So I’m going to include a post or two on the sausage factory, with stuff redacted out to avoid spoilers, of course.
I posted the below the day after I got the idea—it’s the entire hook.
(Please note that 6 turned into 7 when I wrote the actual book). I kinda got a lot of the idea at once, more or less—I’ve always been interested in psychopaths but one of the main dyads had been floating around in my head for a while, one scene in particular. But by the time I posted this on Facebook to a small group of writer friends I had a fair amount of the first-draft plot figured out. (the plot changed fairly significantly over time.) I’m not including it but the discussion that followed basically had me saying “What if [insert the very ending of the book]?” I’m assuming that most people reading this don’t know me as a writer but I am ARDENTLY, ZEALOUSLY pro-outlining (as opposed to “pantsing”—writing as you go and assuming that it will work itself out somehow). I think it’s really hard to write a mystery without starting backwards. You know who did it, then weave the threads from right to left in order to drop clues in all the right places. It also saves you a lot of time and heartache on revisions. I always write with an outline. This doesn’t mean I 100% know what’s going to happen in every single chapter, but typically I know the end and some key beats, and then I go through and fill in the beats. Inasmuch as I can show you, here are the tools of the trade:
I’m a big fan of bullet journals (as is Chloe, but ironically, she has pin-perfect handwriting and I have (as you will see) serial killer handwriting that I am physically incapable of improving.) I like Leuchtturm softcover notebooks, but I do carry a small hardcover one when I’m at writing-related events. I like how they have numbered pages, an index, and dots rather than lines, which leaves room for drawing.
This is an aerial view of John Adams University. It was really important for the college in NSMC to feel real. Not just that it would feel like college because it’s a college, but that feeling you get when you’re reading that a thing is real—verisimilitude. This comes from a writer having a strong sense of what that place is. For anything I write of substantial length, I like to make maps. It helps me visualize what the entirely fictional place looks like, but also gives the reader a sense that I know where things are, which then gives them that sense.
Below is a (highly redacted) pic of a calendar of events. It has both the literal date but also the daily countdown that Chloe keeps referring to—in the first draft of the book, the countdown was 1 to 60, not 60 to 1— with 60 days to kill Will. When I was doing revisions with my editor at Park Row we talked a lot about keeping the book filled with tension and keeping things pretty taut— one of the things I thought of that was pretty obvious was that a count DOWN was better than a count UP. It doesn’t really matter if the 5th of September is on a Wednesday or Tuesday or whatever, but I’ve found that I like working with calendars and am doing one with my current work in progress. But the actual day, at least for the first 60 days of this book, was really important because I had a countdown going. I wanted to make sure that the progression of events made sense and were fairly paced out over those first 60 days. In the process, you can consider, well if X happened, how soon after would you follow up on that issue? How long would that take? I also think in some books time just sort of bleeds away which takes away from the feeling of reality. Chloe and friends are still in college, still going to classes. It’s August into September in DC, which means you’re moving from sweltering ass-heat to a couple weeks of beautiful fall before an unpretty winter.
Below you can see a picture of the original first draft first page of the book, awfully titled “Dark Triad” back then. A bit about titles, I knew that title wasn’t going to stick, had a different working title when I secured an agent, and when the agent and I went on submission had a third title, which also didn’t stick…
If you’re not familiar with how book titles work, there’s a really high probability that the title an author walks in with isn’t the title that you end up with. The publisher works with their marketing and sales team to see if the title makes sense. You need a title that sounds like whatever genre it is. You can’t have a gory horror novel with a title that sounds like a HEA romance and more than you can have a HEA romance that has a cover like a gory horror novel. You need something that makes sense and hasn’t been used recently by someone big or someone in the same genre. (I believe you can’t copyright an actual title, but someone correct me if I’m wrong.) So I wasn’t super attached to the title we went on submission with but boy did it take a lot of brainstorming to come up with a title everyone liked (this included both my US and UK publishers!) There were multiple rounds of brainstorming lists going around- I think the below is one of my first lists typed out on my phone (probably while waiting for the subway.) You could see how some of these just wouldn’t work. Still kinda fond of “Student Bodies.” I really thought “The Last Thing You See” would stick—it sounds very much like your basic thriller. I think on the third or fourth list, I came up with Never Saw Me Coming, which everyone liked, including me! It sounded thriller-y but most important to me, had a hint of Chloe’s tone/voice to it, her sort of smug confidence. Or maybe… the title doesn’t refer to Chloe..? ?
