Q&A with the author – Part 3 of 10

Q. So in Time Capsule you just made up the story as you went along?

A. Yes, exactly. I started out with the basics: “Man plants tree, man finds box, man opens box, there’s a mystery inside.” When I wrote that, it was really all I had. Then, by way of introduction, I went back and told the story of how the main characters met.

Next, I decided that I needed a dead body. I didn’t know who it was or how it fit into the story, but I wrote it as a separate chapter that also set the location for the book. I moved it to Chapter 1. That gave me more ideas, but I still had no idea how the book would end or how I would get there. In fact, I didn’t even know what was in the box. So I wrote a couple of chapters, set it aside for a while and kept thinking about it.

After a while, I got an idea to describe some items in the box and have each of them take the reader off in a secondary direction, so I created three new characters, attached each of them to an item in the time capsule and wrote a back story to go with each character.

Then I realized that aside from solving a mystery, Rob and Jennie would have real jobs, so I wrote about what they do at work. As reporters, they cover events, write stories and interact with other people on the job. I brought in fictionalized versions of actual events that happened to me or people I worked with and added them to the soup.

Eventually, I had five threads running at the same time. I had Rob and Jennie pursuing the mystery of the time capsule, Rob and Jennie going to work at regular jobs and three separate characters with their own stories linked through items in the box. I tied them all together and finally an ending came to me. I had a beginning, a middle and an end, so Time Capsule became a manuscript…but it wasn’t yet a book.

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Part 1 - Where do you get the ideas for your books?

Part 2 - Tell me about your writing process?

Next: So what happened after you finished your manuscript?