At the behest of no one, I thought I’d describe the creative process behind every novel I’ve written. By my count, I’ve written nine (or eight, depending). Sometimes that number feels like a great accomplishment, other times embarrassing, but regardless: I love writing novels. I think it’s the one creative thing, the one endeavor I’ve managed to cultivate any real skill in doing, and I’ve found myself musing about my process—such as it is—a lot recently.
I’m also feeling a measure of creative fatigue with my latest novel. I figured, what better way to get around it than to prime the pump reviewing my previous work?
If you’re a writer yourself, you might find some insight in these blog entries, both in the craft of novel-writing (or “noveling,” as they’d say on Mister Show) and also the business of it, with which I’ve had some minimal, fleeting, glancing experience.
For each novel, I’ll review its origin and some of the creative process, as well as where the novel wound up, either published, self-published, or in the drawer.
My first novel, Devil’s Jukebox, remains in the drawer.
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I completed my first novel, Devil’s Jukebox, when I was twenty-two. The work emerged from a high-school creative writing prompt: “Write a story about a hitchhiker.” I cooked up a loud-mouthed good-ole boy named “Air” Holloway. I suppose another term to describe him could be “redneck,” though I’m not a fan of that word for a variety of reasons.
The original story followed Air, who (naturally) drove a bitchin’ El Camino as he was hurtling down Interstate 10 toward parts unknown. Interstate 10 has long held a strange pull over my psyche, speaking to my childhood desire to move from the southeast to the west coast; as a kid, it blew my mind that you could conceivably take a single freeway to accomplish just that.
The hitchhiker in question was a strange, tall woman who was attended by an equally strange young man. The story, barely three pages long, involved Air picking them both up, shouting a lot of profane stuff, flirting with the woman … before realizing the young man was holding the woman captive. Air kills the young man in some edgy, violent manner and chucks him out of the car. The end.
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My high school creative writing teacher, bless his heart, was as kind as he could be in giving me feedback—but he praised Air as having, if nothing else, a vividly rendered voice and presence on the page. That’s certainly one way to put it, I guess.
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I kept noodling on the story through my senior year, adding a new scene before the original opening as well as a flashback to Air’s brutal childhood. I wrote a few more short stories, including a brief sci-fi piece that held promise, but when the time came for me to take a crack at a novel, I decided that Air Holloway’s vivid personality was worth pursuing.
All these years later, I certainly can’t say the resultant novel was worth pursuing, but as a formative work, it helped me run out a lot of “brown water,” so to speak. I re-read it a couple years ago, and although I found it mostly cringeworthy, I also recognized several character types, themes, images, and fixations that would appear in my novels again and again. I personally believe that a lot of novelists, good or otherwise, constantly worry at the same thematic knots. I know I do.
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My approach for the novel-length version of Devil’s Jukebox was simple: I thought of a cool setting for the ending and introduced a bunch of kooky new characters, all of who would wind up at that final setting; I’d figure out how along the way.
The cool setting was a supernatural demolition derby, called (you guessed it) the Devil’s Jukebox.
The other characters included:
- A leisure-suit wearing gangster from Arizona named Hacksaw Johnson.
- A pair of wandering friends, Big Boy and Lenny.
- A flinty, angular young man, known only as Skel, who we’d later learn was a serial killer in the midst of a multistate rampage.
- A time-traveling mad scientist known only as Mister Zick.
- A world-class assassin named Bob.
- The woman from the original short story, named Mike.
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I’ll spare you an exhaustive plot summary and simply focus on the parts of this book that, upon my recent re-read, actually turned out okay. (I’ll get to the recurring themes and fixations in a moment.)
When I moved to Los Angeles in 2000, I rewrote the entire novel in a charmingly naive effort to get it published, blissfully unaware that I should’ve simply moved on to my next book. That said, this rewrite was where I finally started to do some actual writing. I don’t mean to completely dismiss my original draft. My descriptions of the final demolition derby are pretty cool—it takes place inside a hollowed-out mesa observed only by a silent audience of faceless wraiths—but it’s the rewritten novel that includes a few moments I’m truly proud of in retrospect.
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Remember the assassin named Bob? I invented him to solve a problem.
Air, Mike, and Big Boy all wind up together and get captured by some bad guys. I couldn’t figure out how to get them out of this fix, so I invented a “problem solving” character and named him after myself. All of those ideas are stupid and shitty, but ideas that were less stupid and less shitty emerged from them:
First, I made Bob the twin brother of the gangster guy, Hacksaw. Now, “identical twins” is still a pretty godawful idea, but the story that bubbled up from it showed promise. Hacksaw calls on Bob to carry out a favor, cashing in the one chip he has with his estranged brother. They share only one scene together, but in it, I depicted brothers with an old grudge all while describing their physical differences with techniques I’d learned in journalism school.
Bob sat in the chair and pulled off the mask. Hacksaw made a small sound as he looked into a lean reflection of himself: the same nose, the same dimpled chin, the same thin lips, the same blue eyes, and the same bald head.
But although they were the same age, wrinkles surrounded Hacksaw’s mouth and eyes. Bob had none. They had both lost their hair by age 25, but Bob wore no hairpiece. Skin hung from Hacksaw’s neck while muscles bulged on Bob’s. Hacksaw’s paunch strained against his belt. Moonlight accentuated the veins that ran along Bob’s thick biceps.
Of my writing, I often say, “It’s not Shakespeare … but it ain’t bad.” I’d put both paragraphs above in the “ain’t bad” category.
Bob’s storyline also involves his interactions with his superiors, a nameless cadre who communicate with him only through an old teletype machine. Imagine if Solid Snake received his orders over telegraph and had to interpret a series of cryptic orders to stop the world from ending. Fun stuff. I’ll never win any awards for it, but it was fun to write, fun to rediscover.
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There was also one nice flashback I added about Mike—a gothic interlude that depicted her childhood in a crumbling bayou mansion—but I’ll spare you a recounting of that scene in favor of a look at one line I think I really got right the second time around.
Remember the time-traveling scientist, Mister Zick? He has a whole storyline that leads him to the demolition derby. Along the way, he winds up losing his family while skipping through time on a mad quest. At the demolition derby, he unwittingly brings about Air Holloway’s death. (Spoiler alert, I guess.) By this point in the novel, Bob has gotten to know Air and Mike, slowly warming up to them, all while uncovering the mystery behind the demolition derby itself—it’s kindling for Armageddon, and Air’s death forestalls the apocalypse, though he didn’t necessarily have to die in the process. (I won’t bore you with the gory details.) Bob tries—and fails—to save Air. Bob knows Mister Zick is to blame for all of this, and crosses the fiery wreckage to execute him.
Here’s where the two drafts diverge.
Bob allows Mister Zick some last words before pulling the trigger.
In the original draft, Mister Zick says: “All I ever wanted was to touch something divine.”
In the rewritten draft, he says: “I want my family back.”
Like I said, it’s not Shakespeare, but it ain’t bad. I’d never say Mister Zick was a strong character, but as I built out his backstory—that of a disgruntled husband who abandons his family—the vaguest contours of an arc came into view, and with both him and Air, I attempted—in the most halting and clumsy way possible—to depict two people who fixate on a dark obsession only to realize what’s really important at the very bitter end.
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Devil’s Jukebox also revealed many images and themes that would appear again and again in my later novels. They include:
- At least one physically imposing and fiery female lead in Mike, who would take on other forms as Beverly Thundercracker in The Island Circus, Constable Tola in The Odds, and Mac Gresham in Strong Bones.
- The unpacking of childhood trauma.
- A totemic fixation on the Fourth of July, the date of the demolition derby. As I’ve grown older, it’s become my favorite moment of the year, and it makes an appearance in almost all of my books, along with Halloween. (My eighth novel, Strong Bones, opens during Halloween season and ends on the Fourth of July.)
- The “Skel” character was a primordial version of a kind of villain I’d revisit in later works, including Tony Slack in The Island Circus and later (and far more successfully, I think) Lenny Skelton in Strong Bones, who I named in honor of Skel.
- A subplot involving a militia group includes a minor character with a name that still tickles me, Hank Lockjaw. Essentially the world’s most evil high school football coach, he would prove to be another type I’d come back to over and over, later as Bo Colquitt in Strong Bones and most successfully as Beau Bryant in The Island Circus.
- For all of you Tennessee Vols and SEC sports fans following along at home, you might notice that I get a lot of my character names from the ranks of those teams.
Robert J. Peterson, Author 