Alexander Gordon Smith, author of the Escape from Furnace series, stops by again today - after last week's interview - to talk about the writing process.
Beneath Heaven is Hell. Beneath Hell is Furnace.
Furnace Penitentiary: An underground hellhole. A place of pure evil with walls soaked in blood. Murderous gangs and vicious guards rule the darkness. Horrific creatures steal people away in the dead of night. And the impossible - escape - is the only hope.
Writing at the Speed of Life
I’ve literally just hit the 100,000-word mark on my latest work in progress – it’s the novel that will hopefully follow the Escape From Furnace series, although it’s totally unrelated to Furnace. I started it in November last year, and have been writing in a white heat through the holidays. Not because there’s a deadline – there isn’t one, really, other than a ‘get it to us as soon as you can’. It’s just the only way I seem to be able to write. Like Pringles, once I pop, I just can’t stop (I hope you have Pringles in the States otherwise that reference is going to sound very strange)!
I’ve always written fast. I can’t plan a book – at least that’s what I tell myself, it’s more like I won’t plan a book. I haven’t got the patience for it. I just want to throw myself into the story and start living it. I want to be there with the characters, in their shoes, not really knowing what’s going on or what’s going to happen. I always think that planning is a bit too much like playing God. You’re deciding everybody’s fate way up front, you’re laying down the train tracks of destiny before the characters even know who they are. It isn’t like that for everyone, of course – there are so many amazing writers who plan out every detail and still brilliantly capture the immediacy and unpredictability of the action. But for me the idea of seeing it all before it happens, of having the plan there in front of me, doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem fair on your characters.
There’s something amazing about being in the same psychological space as your characters. Of not knowing what’s around the corner. I often have a very rough idea of what I might want to happen, but when you know your characters like you know yourself, when you know everything about them, then they have a habit of going rogue, of doing things their own way. That’s probably my favourite part of being a writer: that point where your characters truly come to life, when they refuse to do what you tell them. Alex, the main character in Furnace, was like that. It got to the point where I felt like I was just transcribing his actions as he lived them, nothing more than a stenographer. Sometimes I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with him.
The Escape From Furnace books were Alex’s story, not mine. It all began with him because he was a version of me that had lived in my head since I was a teenager – a version of me who took a few more wrong turns. I kind of grew up with this alternate me in my mind, but whereas I got to grow older and live my life, he never did. So the books evolved from him finally being allowed to tell his story. I knew from the start that he was a criminal, and I knew he’d go to prison, to the worst prison on earth. But other than that I had no idea what might happen. It was as much a mystery to me as it was to Alex. I wanted us to discover it, and to fight it – whatever it turned out to be – together.
It seems crazy now, looking back. But I had a good reason. I realized that if I knew in advance what was going on in Furnace and, more importantly, how (and if) Alex was going to escape, then the book might lose some of its edge, some of its dramatic tension. If I wrote like this then I’d know how he was going to get out, and what happened to him through the series, and I think some of that awareness, that relief, might leak into the story. Readers are sharp, they sense things like this. If I’d planned his escape before I’d even properly got to know the character then it might feel like a cop out. Readers would know that everything was going to be okay because it would already be written into the text, invisible but unmissable.
So I just rolled with it, I just started writing. I threw myself into Furnace the same way Alex had been thrown in, without hope and without a plan. Because I’d done it like this, I felt as desperate as he did. Time was running out for him because the Blood Watch and the gangs were closing in. Time was running out for me because I was getting through the book and I still didn’t know how he was going to get out. I didn’t even know if he was going to escape!
I’m not going to say what happens, of course, because I don’t want to spoil Lockdown for anyone who’s planning to read it. But that sense of urgency, of desperation, of utter hopelessness was real (for different reasons too, which I’ve talked about elsewhere on this blog tour) because I didn’t have a plan. I was just another kid caught up in this hellhole trying to do the impossible, trying to escape.
I think writing fast is the key to the book’s pace. It’s unrelenting, it’s non-stop, because I wrote it like that – three weeks of days when I’d look up and realize I’d been writing straight for twelve hours! When you write on the edge it genuinely feels like you’re there in the story. You haven’t got time to think about what’s happening, the same way you don’t always have time to think about it in real life. You have to act, and worry about the consequences later. Occasionally things would happen that I didn’t want to happen, but I didn’t edit them out. They were part of the story, part of Alex’s life. He couldn’t go back and change them, so neither could I. Believe it or not, the finished version of Lockdown – other than a bunch of corrected typos and some major grammar patches – is the version I submitted. Nothing in the story was altered. I wrote it at the speed of life, because that’s the speed Alex lived it.