Guest Author: DC Corso

Today, I would like to welcome DC Corso to Literary Escapism, the author of the newly released Skin and Bones.

FBI Special Agent Severin Ash lives in a world haunted by people he’s never even met — the missing and the dead. Working out of Seattle’s field office, Ash is assigned to coordinate a child abduction investigation in the small island community of Carver Isle, WA. The case at first seems to be open-and-shut, but when another child disappears on Halloween, Ash realizes it’s far from over. He teams up with local woman Parker Kelly, who has her own ideas about what may be happening. Together, Ash and Parker must solve this puzzle of deceit, identity and manipulation, exhuming secrets and memories both would prefer to leave undisturbed.

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A Story of Character

I know there are writers out there who can successfully outline an entire novel before starting it, from planting important clues throughout straight through to the Big Reveal.  Me?  Not so much.  I will take many notes and toss around several ideas, including a rough sketch of characters and their backgrounds, but ultimately what shakes out of the tree doesn’t come close to resembling those original notes.  Once the characters begin to develop, they more or less mutiny my notes and steer the story where they want it to go.  And I’m always pleasantly surprised by where they take it.

Writing without an outline firmly in place to keep me on the path may seem foolish to some, but to me, it’s the only thing that makes sense.  It is the character who should be making plot and action decisions, not me.  Yes, I write for the characters, but what they would do and what I personally would do is almost never the same thing.  I won’t launch into a detailed discussion of why tailoring characters around a pre-planned plot is bound to result in stilted, forced storytelling…but basically, that’s what happens more often than not.

When I first was laying the groundwork for my first novel, Skin and Bones, the end is what came to mind first, strangely enough.  I could see the scene in my head, but wasn’t clear on the characters or how they would get to this end scene.  I tried writing out a vague outline, but the more I wrote for those characters, the more I realized they would never do what I had originally planned.  Every time I tried to make them go in one direction, they ran off in another.  But it always seemed far more important to have them behave believably rather than to try and force square pegs into round holes. So the plot shifted…and not just once.

No matter how genius the mystery, no matter how ground-breaking the fiction, no matter how scary and new the horror or sci-fi tale, unless the characters are relatable in some way, no one will care in the end. This isn’t to say plot isn’t terribly important, because it is. But let’s try and limit the plotting within believe character actions – because believable characters are what make a plot something we care about.