The Personal Challenge and Reward of Writing

Hi all
In evolving a premise into a novel, yes it was hard, but the real challenge lay with me. The mountain to conquer was myself.

As my wife will attest, my brain is fifty per cent productive and fifty per cent chaotic and random. My earlier school writing was imaginative and descriptive but that was decades back. A commercially viable novel is a much harder proposition. The marketplace has a plethora of writers and books, as well as a number of successful, globally branded authors, some of whom I have read. What did I offer that was new and different? How did I channel and organise what I know into a viable product?
Well, welcome to trial and error and multiple re-writes. Once I knew my direction, I didn’t plan or map out anything. I simply started typing, working through many crappy ideas, dead-end streets and sub-par writing. It felt like journeying through the universe – I reference Chris Nolan’s brilliant movie Interstellar – because the end result was multiple light years away from how I started. I had many ideas up my sleeve. New Zealand is seventy-five per cent mountain and backcountry, subject to often vicious weather, much of which I’ve experienced. In addition, during my tours, I regularly take people into spectacular but remote areas, where it’s best not to break down or suffer a medical event. Rugged, remote, forested gorges twist in and out of the central mountain chain. Privately I’d be quite happy to get lost in some of those places and embrace their primal isolation.

I had to learn to apply such ideas in the context of a thriller. The key is to ask what if this or that? What might happen and with what consequence? Who suffers/bleeds? Who goes down? How do I turn the page? Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s a bust. The gang theme and Matt’s background in that arena was partly inspired by a brief, unpleasant, encounter with a gang member years ago, while on tour. During an early morning walk which, ironically, I wasn’t going to do, I strolled into the local race course carpark and trouble. A notorious gang business had chartered the place for a few days without putting up ‘keep out’ signage. I was eventually confronted by a rugged, six foot three enforcer who would surely have been fit for purpose in the 1994 New Zealand film Once Were Warriors, and who hissed the facts of life at me but without physical assault, perhaps giving me the benefit of the doubt. It was an educational five minutes which compelled me to buy a book on street violence, written by a prison officer.

I wanted Matt to have an edge and be more complex and colourful. I see him as a dude, more of what I’d like to be. I wanted the team to have other characteristics.

I used imagination and physical experience to get myself across the line. I created lead characters that I like and who face interesting, critical challenges. I’m pleased that I persevered through obstacles and self-doubt. It was magic, something I’m attempting to experience again.

Drew

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