Why Set a Mystery in a Little Arctic Town?
Because in this novel, it’s loaded with deceit
Utqiagvik — the end of the Earth is here.
Why, for godssakes would any writer set a mystery inside the Arctic Circle? Simple answer — because it’s so damn different from any other place I’ve ever traveled (well, maybe the Amazon Rain Forest, but that’s another story). When I first touched down in Utqiagvik’s small airport, I wasn’t sure what I’d find. The jet had roared in from Fairbanks to Wiley Post-Will Rogers airport, and dropped below a cloud deck so deep I don’t think the pilot had more than 100 vertical feet to get the jet properly onto the tarmac. We hit the ground like a hammer. I was there to research bowhead whales and the unusually long lives they live for my Nat Geo, non-fiction book Immortality, Inc. (Spoiler, these huge mammals live over 200 years and don’t seem to age.)
The airport is an immense barebones Quonset Hut with no more charm than a slab of cement. I walked outside with my backpack and saw the October sun had already set even though I don’t think it was later than 3:00 pm. About a half-mile to my right, Ahkovak St. took me to the Eider Inn Hotel. I listened to my boots crunch on the icebound road, and two thoughts came to mind: this is one of the ugliest towns I have ever seen and I am totally taken with it.
The more I explored the more I loved the starkness of the tundra that surrounded me, the more fascinated I became with its hodgepodge architecture — Quonset huts, box-like clapboard homes and shops sitting on pylons, the hardtack roads so frozen they required no pavement, the vast wind-whipped Arctic Ocean that surrounded the town, and its inhabitants, bundled everywhere in parkas and boots as if it was all the most natural attire in the world. I knew anyone who lived here full-time had to be fascinating for the simple reason that they were here!
Almost immediately a mystery began to emerge and the more I explored the more convinced I became this place screamed story! The problem was, I didn’t really have a precise plot in mind. No beginning, middle or end. I did have a character making the rounds in my head (read about Schuster McCoy) and that was a start, but truthfully I was too focused on my research for Immortality, to think on much else.
The good news is that thanks to the inscrutable machinations of the human subconscious, a plot has emerged, and a murder and a mystery. I now have completed a second draft of the novel and am shaping and scraping it into version three. This is one of my favorite parts of the writing process because now I’m tweaking, adding (or subtracting) better (or worse) words, getting a feel for whether the story flows and makes solid sense, understanding whether the location and characters feel authentic and speak consistently throughout the novel. Have I successfully brought the story and the people in it to life? At least I was past getting words on the blank page (the most painful part of the job for me). Now it is about making the story better — getting the funny parts funnier, the scary parts scarier, the twists more twisted; less about baking the cake and more about putting the icing on it.
Version two has already been shared with a few readers kind enough to slog through 50,000 of the words I’ve strung together, and the same version is in the hands of my agent to provide brutally honest feedback and, with luck, begin to suss out any publishers who might be interested. A later version will go to a production company showing some interest in the story for a movie or streaming series. All VERY preliminary. But as with Pirate baseball in March, hope springs eternal.
Most of my previous books have been non-fiction and gratefully, I’ve been successful enough to make a living at that. Novels are different creatures though. Not just the writing of them, but the business of getting them into readers hands. Spoiler to would-be authors. You can’t write a proposal for a novel if you want to find a publisher. You have to wrestle the whole beast to the blank page and bring it to life. And then it’s take it or leave it. Publishers don’t say, “Well get back to me with a new draft.” It’s yes, or no. To be fair to publishers, a completed manuscript is the only way for them to really know what they are getting. The days of Maxwell King cleaning up Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolf’s manuscripts are long past. These days, in a publishing world that is changing beneath our feet, publishers are mostly looking for writers who are already selling well (Stephen King being the most obvious example), or someone famous (let’s say Barack Obama). I do not currently fall into this category. Most writers don’t. It used to be publishers looked for promising writers and books that were simply good, but in a world where there is so much media, publishers are forced to evade risk and embrace almost certain profit. With Facebook, Tik-Tok, Netflix, endless games and other forms of Internet content universally available, there is precious little room for reading these things called books. And the competition is only getting tougher.
The other route to authoring is self-publishing. But that’s a whole other bag of cats. It’s relatively easy to self-publish a book nowadays which means there is a lot of crap out there clogging the Internet for those searching for good stories. In a world where there were 5 million books published last year, it’s a crap shoot to hope yours is found. The problem isn’t getting the book on Amazon, it’s getting readers to know it even exists. This is NOT a case of build it and they will come. It’s build it and they will join the millions of other needles in the book world haystack.
But I don’t worry about that for the simple reason that those things are out of my control, and the control of 99 out of 100 other writers. I have people come to me all the time asking how to get their book published or written or marketed. There are strategies for this, but mostly and honestly, if you want to write a book, and hope to find people who will read it, the only thing you can fully control is you sitting down and hammering the thing out on your keyboard. I have always said that if you’re writing books in the hopes of making money, you’ve made a strategic error. You have to write for the pure love of it, write because you have something you MUST share, something that gives you no choice but to bring that story to life. Because without that, you’ll never get through the joy and pain of completing the final page.
As for White Out, I’ll be keeping you posted!
Take care!
Chip
This post is part of an ongoing series about the creation of my next novel, currently titled White Out. From early inspirations and research travels to character development and plot twists, I’m sharing the journey as it unfolds. Read the entire White Out creative series here. To get future installments delivered straight to your inbox, join my newsletter.