Stuff & Nonsense #45: Beginning to See the Light (DANGEROUS ENDS is out tomorrow!)

Julia, thanks for chatting. I want to keep this short and sweet since we're both busy - but we're also in similar spots, I feel like. Conviction is your third novel in the Rebekah Robert series and Dangerous Ends is the third Pete Fernandez book. We've also got pretty challenging jobs and are new parents. I'm still sussing out the answer to this question myself, but I have to ask: how do you find the time?

I’m still figuring it out. I wrote about three-quarters of Conviction while I was pregnant, then didn’t write for the first three months of my son’s life. When I finally got back to it, I had to get really serious about organizing the manuscript before I could finish. Conviction moves back and forth in time, and is told through multiple perspectives. Creatively, writing in multiple perspectives was thrilling, but it was a challenge to pull it off. I asked a friend (writer and professional poker player Matt Matros) to help me learn the program Scrivner so I could map out chapters and voices, and that made it possible to get myself going again.

But it is true that when you have a child to care for, everything in your previously independent life changes. I get less sleep, which affects my creative thinking, and I suddenly have a human being I love who needs hands-on care every waking moment. Presently, I only have one day each week that is devoted to writing the next Rebekah Roberts book, and clearly that’s not enough. But even more than the time to actually get words on the page, I think I had taken for granted all the free headspace I had before becoming a mother. So much of writing – at least for me – is simply living with the characters and story in my mind. Now, my mind is occupied with a lot more than it used to be and it’s a struggle to create enough room for the people I’m writing about to grow.

Yeah, while I'm extremely tough and I'm impressed by everything my wife does daily. I realize I'm restating the obvious, but being a new parent does change everything. The amount of "free time" we have goes out the window. I guess the only easy part of transitioning to being a writer without kids to a writer who is also a parent is that most of my writing happens during "found time." While I wish I had the ability to wake up at five in the morning and write for a few hours before heading to work, it just never materializes. I soon figured out the best way for me to write was to maximize the pockets of time as I found them. Which really keeps you on your toes! Not surprisingly, I had a lot more of that before our son was born. In his first year of life, I've found myself just using the time I often spent on TV or movies or relaxing in the early evening on writing instead, because there just isn't an opportunity elsewhere in the day, especially with a demanding day job and other responsibilities. I'm not complaining, though. Having a kid is amazing and it reminds you why you do the things you do, and helps you prioritize better.

I was in a similar position to yours with the fourth Pete book - I'd written about half a first draft while waiting on edits for Dangerous Ends, and I felt really good about it. Then the edits came back and the next few months were spent in revision land. When I got back to the draft, tentatively titled Relics, I found a lot of the twists and cool moments had organically made it into the third book during revisions. I don't know if it was a byproduct of less sleep or just my subconscious doing its job, but it made revisiting the fourth book harder and with less time to do it. But after a few weeks of banging my head on the wall, I just started over. And that felt liberating and I've made up the lost time and even used huge chunks of the earlier draft. Short version: writing is hard.

You grew up in Miami and write about Miami, but live in New York City. How does NYC impact your work, if at all? And what about Miami keeps you writing about it?

I started writing Silent City, the first Pete book, around the time I moved to New York. And, at the time, I just didn't feel ready to write a New York PI novel. It felt like really well-mined territory, explored by writers that were much more experienced than I was. I just didn't have that familiarity or comfort writing about New York. I also wanted to shed a light on my hometown, and show that it was more than just beaches and Cuban sandwiches. That the sprawl of Miami was home to a lot of different places, people and cultures. Miami is a city unlike any other. It's definitely unlike the rest of Florida. There's also a long history of crime and corruption that is really fertile territory for a writer. Basically, I felt like I h ad a unique perspective I could bring to the table, rather than try and ape someone else. That said, I learned a lot from not only writers who did write PI novels set in New York - like Lawrence Block and Reed Farrel Coleman - but from living in the city and experiencing it. The first year in New York is brutal, I think. For a place that's so densely populated, it can be lonely, overwhelming and intense. But it's great for people-watching. For experiencing the human condition and for tapping into the best and worst of the world. There aren't any filters in New York - you get a dose of humanity right out of the gate. That's something that influenced my writing immediately, and as I've gotten more and more comfortable with the idea of being a New Yorker, as opposed to constantly reminding people that I wasn't from the area, I started toying with the idea of doing a New York novel. I can't spoil anything about Pete or where he ends up, but if you read Dangerous Ends, it definitely signals a change for him and his status quo, and that was a very intentional move on my part to reflect the kind of dual-citizenship I've been working with over these last three books.

Now, we both come from journalism backgrounds and I know I've put the skills I gained as a reporter and editor to good use in my writing. Do you find you approach your fiction in the same way you do your journalistic efforts? Has that helped or created stumbling blocks for you?

Being a reporter has helped my fiction immeasurably. I wrote a pretty terrible novel in my 20s, then stepped away from fiction for a while and focused on becoming a better journalist. When you're writing an article, the story is what matters. Who did what, why, how, where. There is no time for filler. Get to the point fast and keep it straightforward. Bringing some of that aesthetic to my fiction made it stronger. I can enjoy the language and the ideas I'm playing with, but I force myself to come back to the story I'm telling, and to be ruthless with my edits. Each sentence has to have a purpose.

You've been writing a series...do you think about doing a stand-alone?

Completely agree with how you describe journalism, and I think I try to do that with my writing. Keep it clean, clear and to-the-point. If a nice description or joke doesn't push the story forward, I'm more prone to cut it on revision.

I have a few standalone ideas. I find, as I get further into a series, the idea of doing a standalone becomes more appealing. With each book in a series, you have to walk that tightrope of telling a great story but also reintroducing what's come before to appease the series readers while still making it accessible enough for a newbie. It's not easy. But you do come to love your characters and setting - there's some comfort there. I think Dangerous Ends is a good pause point, so I may do a standalone next. But I'm also well into the fourth Pete book, so what do I know?

OK, last question. Your new book, Conviction, deviates a bit from the territory covered in the first two, and I think it happens very organically and effectively. It feels like a great series kicking into gear after a solid start - I hope it's clear that's meant as a compliment. Were you anxious at all about changing things up? I know I was with Dangerous Ends - the first two books had a lot to do with Pete, his drinking and solving a murder mystery - but I wanted the new book to really deal with the bigger picture, and also show Pete's evolution. Were you happy with how things turned out, and what are you planning on writing next?

When I wrote Invisible City, it didn't occur to me until the very end that I was writing a series. I finished the book and realized I needed to write another in order to tell the whole story of Rebekah and her mother, and I was lucky enough to have a publisher that was game to let me do that. But once I finished Run You Down, I felt like I wanted to branch out from focusing quite so much on Rebekah. I love her, and I love that she still has so much to learn - and, in some ways, so much to teach - but there were other people whose lives I wanted to explore.