Peter E. Fenton Newsletter – Writing On A Series

We are now only a month away from the release of The Attercop.

In the last newsletter, I talked about moving from writing a stand-alone book, to writing on the first book in a series. This time I want to share the challenges of keeping my stories straight as I worked towards my new novel.

What I didn’t realize when I told the publisher I would write three novels with the same central characters, while evolving their relationship and offering up a new mystery in each book … well, I didn’t know how challenging that could be. You see, when I write, I am what is called a pantster. The term means you write by the seat of your pants. Many authors fastidiously plan their books down to the last plot point. In the case of The Declan Hunt Mysteries, I knew where the relationship aspect of the series was headed, but I didn’t know what each mystery was going to be. And once I had decided on the mystery of each book, I knew where it would begin and where I thought I wanted it to end, but from there, my plan was to focus on the characters and see where they led me.

Obviously, in the case of Mann Hunt, I thought I knew where the book was going, and then wound up rewriting the last half of the book toward a different killer. This may seem ridiculous, but I was heartened by a mystery writing panel I attended at the Gay Romance Lit Conference. Three of the four writers insisted that their books must be plotted out carefully, or it wouldn’t work. But one of the authors (Ripley Hayes), loudly exclaimed that if she KNEW who did it before she started writing the book, likely she would write in a way that would bias the writing toward that outcome, and the reader would figure it out too soon. She preferred to create a fascinating cast of characters with the means, motive and opportunity to commit the crime, and then let the characters guide her to a solution. I was grateful for this affirmation, and I suspected she knew what she was talking about. Ripley has had a very successful career.

I can acknowledge that this isn’t the most efficient way to write, but what results is less formulaic, and often there are many fun discoveries along the way. For those of you who have already read Hoodoo House, I feel it is important to confess that part way through the book, I was getting lost in the twists and turns of the novel. I showed the first section to my partner Scott to help gain some clarity. With his usual candour, he said that as a writer, it was clear that I had become overly focused on the character Henry Quill, a precocious 13 year old in the book. Henry was taking over the mystery. It was true. I adored the character.

This insight helped me to refocus the writing back to my lead characters. Perhaps some day Henry will get his own book. But in the meantime, Scott had also noticed a few other anomalies. For instance, the central character Charlie Watts had gone from having blond hair to brown hair and his eye colour had changed between one book and the next. I had been caught in one of the traps of being a pantster, and that was … not creating a writer’s bible for my series. I had neglected to provide continuity for my characters because I misremembered their attributes as a result of the down time between books. So what is a writer’s bible?

In writing terms, a bible, is a document that is the official record of details that may be needed as you write forward. Every television series or piece of writing that involves multiple installments with recurring characters is encouraged to have one. So what do you put in a writing bible? Well, for starters, complete character descriptions of each and every character you think might come back, or might be referred to in a future installment. And since I am a pantster and don’t know who might come back in a future book, that means EVERY character needs an entry in my bible.

Locations that might be reused are also important. But of course I wasn’t sure if certain locales would be returning, so they all needed to be noted. My bible was starting to look like a miniature version of the book … which is sort of exactly what it is intended to be. A quick reference guide for future writing. And as I wrote ahead on Hoodoo House, I realized that the more information I had in a quickly accessible spread sheet with key details of characters locations and crimes … well, it saved me a lot of work. Because if you don’t have this document, then every time you want to check something, you have to search through the manuscript of the previous book and locate that exact detail, and it can be really time consuming. And if you don’t keep careful track, it is easy to create inconsistencies from one book to another that can confuse readers.

I felt like I had ironed out most of my inconsistencies, and by the time I finished Hoodoo House, I was feeling smug. I knew there were themes that I wanted to flush out more fully (particularly connected to parental relationships between gay men and their fathers), so to ensure that the relationships evolved naturally, I needed to be sure that I really KNEW those characters inside and out.

One would think that after writing for Declan Hunt and Charlie Watts over all of this time, that I would be very familiar with them. But I found they were sort of like those friends you only see once or twice a year. The general facts were easily to access, but when time passes, other details get blurry. I only write one novel per year. The writing process is about six months, and then there is all of that editing and marketing stuff to do in the middle. There is often a hiatus of several months before I get back to the creative part … and truth be told, sometimes it is hard to keep them top-of-mind all year round. So as I started writing on The Burnt, I needed to do a bit of a refresher course on what had come before. It turns out writing a series is more mental juggling than I had bargained for. There was 530 pages (between the two books) of writing to look back on. And to make matters worse, I had assured the publisher that what I was writing was a three book series. But it turns out I was wrong.

I was half way through The Burnt, and lost in the maze of new characters with new wants and desires. I felt like a painter, putting words on the page, and then after a while, stepping back to see what the whole looked like. The Burnt had a more convoluted plot than the first two books and had a twist that connected to an earlier book, and as the mystery started to come into focus, the remaining thematic work was simply too much to finish off.

And so it came to pass that a fourth book was needed. And that is why my three book series turned into a four book series. The Attercop is a culmination of all of the work that went before it. When writing the book, my goal was to tie together the threads from the previous three novels. If you read all four of the mysteries back to back, I wanted it to feel like one long book (of around 1000 pages) in four sections with Declan and Charlie navigating their relationship as they solved a series of mysteries over a period of a little over a year.

Ultimately, the readers will judge if I’ve been successful, but I truly hope that when readers finish the The Attercop, that they may go back and start at the beginning and see how the threads that had been spun early on, were woven into the tapestry of the final chapters.

I can’t honestly say it was part of some master plan, but I can say that toward the end of the writing on The Attercop, things came together quickly, for after living with the characters in the back of my mind for four years, the subconscious had probably been leading me on the path that I ultimately found.

Of course for every step in the right direction, there were many steps in a different direction. That’s why in the next blog I want to share some cut material from The Attercop which won’t be a spoiler, but might give you a hint at where my characters wanted me to go.

Until next time, thanks for reading,

Warmest Regards,

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/peterefenton…
insta: https://www.instagram.com/peterefento…
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peterefenton…

Need to reach Peter E. Fenton?

Email at peterefenton@gmail.com

By Mail

PO BOX 99900 ZH 136 634
RPO ELLERBECK
TORONTO ON M4K 0A2