First, I am terribly embarrassed.
I was so excited to be a part of Dave Cole's tour for his latest novel THE WINDOW. Well, my brain sometimes takes a holiday, and I am late with my post. But you have to read this, the reason he decided to write THE WINDOW. Enjoy.
Why I Decided to Write The Window
Dave Cole
I’ve written
seven books. Six were part of series called The Math Kids. Those books
were well thought out prior to writing, carefully plotted, with clear ideas on
individual story lines which seamlessly fed an overarching series theme. Care
was taken with crafting the characters, with character arcs planned over
multiple books. I had, as they say, planned the work and then worked the plan.
And then
there was The Window. That one had no planning, no firm plot, and no
idea how it was going to end. I probably broke every rule on how to write a
book, but somehow it was also maybe the best way to do it. It started with a
two second audible inspiration. I was working in my office when I heard a
screech of brakes. I immediately looked out the window, but I wasn’t quick
enough to see what had actually happened. There was a car and a kid on a bike. That
much was clear. There had probably been a near collision, but that was
speculation on my part.
I went back
to my work, but that unwitnessed scene stuck in my head. How close had the car
come to the bike? Was it going fast enough to have seriously hurt, or even killed,
the child? I thought about it all day, and while I drifted off to sleep that
night, my mind wandered back to the incident. More questions came: What if I
had seen the kid riding in the middle of the street prior to the near accident?
Would I have thought to have warned him? Given more time, would I have stopped
the driver and told him to watch out because kids sometimes rode their bikes
right down the middle of the road? Those questions led to a more random
thought. What if I had a portal to the future, a magic window which would allow
me to see what was coming? What would I do with it?
That was it.
That was all I had when I sat down at my keyboard. A magic window to the
future. What I didn’t realize at the time, and still didn’t until I typed the
final few pages, was that the future might not always be something I wanted to
see. What if I couldn’t change events for the better? What if I was stuck
knowing that bad things were coming whether I liked it or not?
I worked on The
Window over the course of a year or so. Some days I knocked out a couple of
thousand words. Other days I just read the story that was unfolding. As a
reader, I wanted to know where it was going, but as I writer I still wasn’t
sure. And so it went, writing and reading until I finally saw where the story
had to go. I couldn’t have told you the ending even a week before I finished.
As a writer, the lack of planning was risky, but as a reader it was oh so
satisfying.
So back to
the originl question: why did I write The Window? I think Stephen King
said it best when asked in an interview why he wrote horror stories. “What
makes you think I have any choice?” he answered. I wrote The Math Kids
series with a purpose. I was in complete control from beginning to end. But with
The Window, the story took over and didn’t give me any choice.
