Usually when I start to write a book, the first thing I have in my head is the character. I have the character, and the character’s kind of formed. I don’t know what they’re gonna do, I don’t know what they’re gonna say, I don’t know what their story is, but I just start writing.
I never outline. I never know where it’s going. I just start writing and see where it takes me. Then I get to a point where I have to kind of figure it out. In the case of Hush which is a story of a girl and her family who become part of the witness protection program, I didn’t know anything about the witness protection program.
When I realized that they were going to be a part of it, I had to start researching it. I have a couple of journalist friends. My friend Linda works for the New York Times, I asked her to gather as much information about it as she could, and she gathered 400 pages.
With Miracle’s Boys which is about three brothers who are raising themselves after their parents die. I didn’t know a lot about what it would mean for a young kid to raise his younger siblings, what it meant in terms of the socioeconomics of it, what it meant in terms of the legal issues surrounding it, what it meant in terms of education and the law.
I know law is the legal issue. I just had to kind of read about if a 21-year-old was raising his kids, who was be involved from the state? Who would be involved at the local level? And how would this all get monitored? Also, I didn’t know a lot about diabetes.
I had to research that. If someone were to die from freezing, what would that look like? Those are the kind of things I read. I’ll interrupt the writing and just spend some time researching it. A lot of it is done on the Internet.
