About the Book

Writing Catch Us When We Fall: A Fluid Process

I woke up one morning on the watery edges of a dream. I can’t remember the dream at all, but a lingering image flickered in my semiconscious: the only two people at a burial. One is furious, one is bombed.

At the time I was wading through research for another project, my first rocky foray into historical fiction, and it was not going well. There were just so many facts. I was drowning in all the things one could possibly want to know about the early 1900s, not yet sure of how to home in on what was truly useful to the story. I was also using a new software program that was supposed to magically organize all the different kinds of files writers use (research, sources, interviews, character descriptions, the odd paragraph that didn’t fit anywhere but you really wanted to keep, etc.). I was spending more time trying to understand all the tabs and merge functions than actually writing.

The drunk woman and the irate man were far more compelling. Why was she drinking? What was their relationship? Who was in the casket? I lay in bed for the better part of an hour that morning imagining answers to those questions, and then dashed off a bare-bones chapter. I figured it was maybe something I would come back to one day after I finished the story that was giving me headaches and getting me nowhere.

But a few days later I was still thinking about those two, whom I’d dubbed Cass and Scott for no reason other than those were the names that had popped into my head that morning. Usually I spend a lot of time thinking about names. I research ethnicity and meaning, and make sure they don’t start with the same letter as anyone else’s. But this story only had two characters, so I was free to skip all of that and just write.

I never bothered to title it anything other than “Cass and Scott” because it was just something I was playing around with while I procrastinated from doing my “real” work of wrestling the early 1900s to the ground. It percolated at the back of my brain, and a week or so later I wrote another chapter just to get it out of my head. I needed to clear the deck for a character named Iris who never really came into focus for me.

Cass and Scott were in high definition, though.

There’s a saying that there are two kinds of writers: plotters and pantsers. The former plan everything out. They make charts and lists and story boards; they know every character and plot thread and how it all weaves together; they know the ending. The latter, no surprise, fly by the seat of their pants. They may not know anything other than Josie’s going out for sushi, and let it roll on from there.

I’ve always been pretty squarely in the middle. I know a lot about the main characters, but rarely the secondaries. I have a general sense of the arc of the story, and a number of plot points, and where it will likely end, but I let things change if the story doesn’t end up heeling to my initial plans. My first novel, Shelter Me, is about a young woman whose life is upended when her husband is hit by a car. I knew she would eventually seek out the driver and had notes on how she would take him to task. But when I got to writing that part of the story, she had processed her grief to a point where she was able to have compassion for the poor guy, who had come undone with guilt. Plot-wise, it wasn’t a hairpin turn—just a course correction.

Cass and Scott found me bushwhacking deep into pantser territory. There was no premeditated story arc—in fact, the research and planning were only ever about a chapter or two ahead of my writing. Every third page took me by surprise. The process was, as they say, fluid.

Okay, Cass is at Scott’s house and he’s at a game, and . . . maybe a kid comes over to mow the lawn? Sure, give that a whirl. Enter Drew Kessler, who would become the glue for much of the plot. It was thrilling and slightly terrifying.

The one thing I did know for certain was that addiction and sobriety would be the central theme. My father is a recovering alcoholic and I have a number of alcoholic friends and family members whom I love very much. I’ve seen the misery addiction inevitably brings and experienced the fallout. And I’ve marveled at the painful beauty of recovery.

I always knew I would write about someone in the grip of addiction; I just didn’t expect her to grab me out of bed on a random January morning when I was supposed to be working on something else. Then Cass and Scott showed up, and in I dove.