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"We took the bad luck and strapped it around our feet like concrete. We did the worst imaginable thing you could do. We ran away. We just got in his beat-up 1974 Dodge Fury and left."

That's the opening of Willy Vlautin's road novel, The Motel Life. It follows the trail of an alcoholic storyteller and his brother, running from a horrible accident. Like any good pulp fiction novel, these characters can't escape their mistakes, and the freedom of a road novel collides with the punishment of a noir novel.

Today, Vlautin is our special guest, explaining how he structured his deceptively aimless road novel, part of my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
Your book has such an effortless, real-time feel as your characters pinball through the world. How did you outline/plot the journey of Motel Life? How do you manage these seemingly random transitions between settings without losing your readers?

Willy Vlautin:

You know, I guess I just followed my gut on plot. Continue reading...

I'm sure glad you think it's effortless!! Thanks. Like I said I re-wrote it so many times that I had all the pieces plus some and finally I just understood the heart of the story.

I understood Frank and Jerry Lee and really began to understand why I wrote the novel.  Once you realize the main guts of the novel then the rest is piecing it together.

And who knows if you do it right, you just have to do it so you like it.