Guest Blog: Author Tom Wright talks about his two novels and how the characters and story in his first book leads into his newly published novel Blackbird




 
In our first Guest Blog, author Tom Wright, talks about writing his first novel What Dies in Summer and how the creative process for that book led on to his newly released novel Blackbird.
 
 

My first novel is titled What Dies in Summer, and most of the action does take place in the course of one summer. It’s a particular summer, but I went to considerable lengths to avoid making it a specific one. The protagonist is a young guy, but I’m not saying how young. It’s not that I have anything against writing numbers, and I wasn’t confused about what numbers to write or what time-anchoring events I might describe. I had a tactical purpose for leaving this kind of information out.
 
 
For a variety of reasons I wanted the story to start roughly in the sixties, which was a time of momentous events, life-and-death policy decisions and tumultuous change, an era so fraught with political and social conflict, as well as historical significance, that on some levels it dominates and defines the history of the second half of the twentieth century. But my story has no point of intersection with any of that; it’s a tale in, but not of, that time. My intention was for it to play out in a once-upon-a-time reality where there was no necessity to relate what was going on in the characters’ lives to Woodstock, freedom rides or the Tet Offensive.
 
 
What Dies in Summer focuses on the lives of two characters who in the course of the story are awakened to a great many things, including sex. Of course everyone who is sexually active had to start sometime, meaning we lost our virginity at specific ages. My problem in crafting the story was that these ages and the awarenesses and value systems associated with them vary so widely among readers that there is no consensus about such things as how old one should be when it happens. I didn’t want to instigate any philosophical musings or book club debates--no matter how much I might enjoy them--about the proper time to lose one’s virginity. To specify the ages of the characters would have been to invite comparison and judgment when what I wanted was for the reader to pay attention to the narrative. I wanted him/her to think about the story rather than about whether the characters’ first sexual experiences came a year earlier or three years later than the reader’s did. My solution was to place that issue in the category of story elements the reader colors in for himself or herself.
 
 
And last but not least, I was committed to bringing the key characters forward in time to the present in Blackbird, just released by Canongate. Bring them up to the here and now but not without conserving some ambiguity, some leeway about dates and ages, because I might need it later. What I wanted to avoid was the predicament one American author found himself in after he described his main character as having served in the Korean conflict. His novels about this protagonist turned out to be hits, giving rise to a long-running series of thrillers featuring a guy whose go-to tactic was fist-fighting. Most of the stories wasted little time in putting him in situations that could only be resolved efficiently by the use of his pugilistic skills. The problem was that in the later books of the series our hero was still running around punching out bad guys at a time when he would have had to be in his seventies. The calendar pages had kept right on slipping away, but our guy was stuck. He had soldiered through a war that had begun and ended on immutable dates, trapping him in a specific and equally immutable time frame, and only readers who either didn’t have, or were willing and able to suspend, their OCD tendencies long enough to get through these later novels could properly enjoy them.
 
 
An essential defining fact about one of my own fictional characters was his combat experience. He was an absolutely essential element of the story, and the story required me to send him off to war. But what war? Where? When? Legitimate questions, but I had no intention of telling the reader these things, because I myself didn’t know the answers. Didn’t need or want to know. Instead I enlisted him in a real but shadowy special operations unit whose missions were and are top secret and parachuted him into a place where “thousand year old hatreds ran like underground rivers.” Since there are always such places to parachute into, I was immediately delivered from the hazards of saying exactly when and where it happened and then having to eat my words later. We may call this a cop-out--because it was--but it was also a tactic that allowed me to invest my writing time and energy where it would do the most good rather than in pursuit of the hobgoblins of a petty consistency.

 
Thank you so much Tom, for appearing on The Crime Warp.  Tom's new novel Blackbird is out now and today, 10 August is on Kindle at only £4.63.  

Please do keep an eye out for more Guest Blogs coming up.


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