"As I lie in bed with Amanda, ignoring another late-night call from my ex, a shot rings out in the New York night and a beautiful starlet dies outside the city’s most popular nightclub. This is the kind of story I was born to chase but I never dreamed this story began over a hundred years ago.…"
That's Jason Pinter's hero remembering a violent episode that spawned Pinter's second book, The Guilty.
Pinter specializes in intricate mysteries, the kind of story that his reporter hero--the hardboiled journalist Henry Parker--can sort out for the whole book. Today, Pinter explains how he builds his plots--giving us a look at his next sprawling narrative.
This is 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 conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.
Jason Boog:
You said that your next two books will elaborate on a much larger conspiracy. Could you give us a little idea of what's coming next? Any advice for thriller and mystery writers looking to build a larger, more difficult story arc like this?
Jason Pinter:
In my first three books I touched a little bit on Henry Parker's life before he came to New York, but it's never been fully explored. Continue reading...
In THE FURY (which comes out in March 2009), Henry will learn a devastating secret about his life that makes him question everything he's ever known about his family. And without giving away too much, that secret has much larger ramifications that go well beyond Henry.
I like when my books have story arcs in which a little more is at stake than a simple murder, or isolated crime. Each of the crimes in the Parker novels have much more far-reaching ramifications, but each one also needs to be unique enough to be able to exist in Henry's universe without overlapping.
Basically I looked at the next story and took what would have been a conclusion, and made it a beginning. That just when you think everything is wrapped up, you realize you haven't seen anything yet.
It's like staring at a tree, then stepping back and realizing there's a whole forest. I think the more that's at stake for the world the characters live in, and the more that's at stake for the characters themselves, the more enjoyable it's going to be for the reader.
I don't like small stories. I love epic tales, I love 1,000 page books. In some ways I look at the Henry Parker novels not so much as a series of individual books, as one brush stroke on one massive canvas.
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