Writing Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows.

Part 1: Structuring a blockbuster story

Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows, the first novel in a series I wrote with Blink 182/Angels and Airwaves front man Tom DeLonge hit stores a month ago and promptly sold out. The book has been featured in numerous magazines and websites, from GQ and Esquire to Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. In fact, of course, most of those articles have been less about the book and more about Tom’s fascination with UFOs which was the origin of the book. I don’t blame all those journalists who have deadlines to meet (and at 700+ pages the book is what we in the trade officially call a Chihuahua killer) but I thought I’d take a little time to talk about how the book got written and how the least likely partnership in the history of fiction got started.

I don’t often get calls from rock stars. As a theatre person and Shakespeare professor my paths cross with famous actors from time to time, but rock stars? Not so much. I knew this call was coming, however, because my agent, the indomitable Stacey Glick, had given me the heads up. It had all begun a few weeks earlier at the start of the 2014 fall semester when she had asked me if I would be interested in being considered for a co-writing project with a guy called Tom DeLonge, front man for Blink 182 and Angels and Airwaves. The book would be a thriller of sorts involving the “secret space program.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I said “Sure,” partly because it was all very preliminary and these kinds of projects rarely get off the ground. I wasn’t working on much at the time, but I was teaching a thriller writing class for graduate students at UNC Charlotte, where I usually teach Shakespeare. If this did come off, I figured, it would be an interesting process to discuss with my class. And I was curious. It sounded like a challenge, and that’s always tempting.

I should say that my sense of who Tom DeLonge was was fuzzy. Though—as a card carrying music-head—I knew of Blink’s music, I was a bit too old to have been caught up in their first successes, and I had only recently discovered a few songs by Angels. So while I liked what I knew, I wouldn’t call myself a hard core fan. With hindsight, that was just as well, because if I had been that first phone call—and the dozens of others thereafter—might have been too intimidating, which would have been a disaster. Because what quickly became apparent in that first call was that Tom was looking for a collaborator, not a yes man. This was to be a creative partnership between two people with real but radically different skills, people who would contribute in completely different ways to the project, but who would share a passion for making it as good as it could be.

I think we did that.

As all those magazine interviews demonstrate, Tom is immensely passionate about the subject of what he calls The Phenomenon (Unexplained Aerial craft/lights etc.), but what was quickly clear was that he did not believe he had all the answers. Indeed, part of what appealed to me about the book we were to write was that he framed it as an exploration, a raising of questions touching on real issues but structured as fiction. His interest in me came not from my experience as a fantasy writer, but as a writer of historical fiction, contemporary thrillers with their roots in actual past events (The Mask of Atreus, Tears of the Jaguar etc.). These were books which looked at history and archaeology and asked a What If? question which set the core plot in motion. They worked by interweaving what was real with what was made up, hopefully pulling the reader into a story which seemed all the more plausible because so much of it grew out of documented truth. That was what Tom wanted.

To get there we came up with a basic division of labor. He would send me raw materials, data, evidence, things he thought relevant or wanted to include somehow. I would build the story, write the actual sentences, and show him what I had as it grew so he could redirect or make other suggestions based on his own research. The grand vision was largely his, the way it got enacted was largely mine.

But coming up with the way to tell the story was no picnic, and I went into our first in-person meeting (in a San Diego hotel lobby) very anxious. In truth, I thought we might be attempting the impossible. You see, Tom wanted to tell the modern story of the UFO phenomenon, which he saw beginning in the 1940s, but he wanted it to extend into the present. Now, my impulse in thrillers is that you need a pretty good reason not to set the book in the present, because the past has, you know, already happened. I realize that sounds dumb, but I do think it’s harder to maintain a sense of edge-of-the-seat excitement when you are dealing with a period which is crucially over. It’s pretty hard, for instance, to build a real white knuckle thrill ride about whether the Nazis will develop and use an Atomic bomb during WWII when your readers all know (I hope) that, in fact, they didn’t. (It can be done, of course, Ken Follet’s Eye of the Needle being a great example, but it’s tough to pull off and most, I’d say, don’t work unless they make the deliberate and self-conscious step into alternate history.)

But the flip side of the problem is that if you opt to set the story in the present, then your characters are constantly looking backwards into history, discovering old documents and clues to what is (again) already finished. Evidence gets revealed second hand and we never get to actually see those past events unfolding unless we resort to that most wooden of narrative devices, the flash back. If not done really well, this preoccupation with the past tends to lower the stakes for the characters in the present. Okay, says the reader, we’re learning interesting things about history, but why should I care now? What does all this dusty old stuff have to do with the fate of our heroes in the book? A good thriller needs a sense of urgency, of a ticking clock which marks our journey to (hopefully averted) disaster: how do you generate that when your interest is in the past? Again, it can be done, but it’s hard, and if it doesn’t work, your novel is dead in the water right (to mix my metaphors) out of the gate,

We wrestled with this as we sat among our charts and diagrams, hastily scribbled timelines and historical notes, and the difficulty came down, in a way, to the dreadful math of mortality. If we wanted the story to span a period from the forties to the present we had a real problem because only the youngest of kids around during the war would still be alive now. Most of the adults who had reported seeing Foo Fighters (the name given by US/UK bomber crews to the strange lights they saw in the sky) during their combat missions in World War II, were long dead. How do you make a book hold together when the period it spans means that the characters at the start can’t be the ones we root for at the end?

Tom had drafted a screenplay containing some of his early ideas about what the book might be, and one of the elements from that which we opted to keep was Alan Young, a modern day fighter pilot who gets drafted into a secret aircraft testing program. How could this character co-exist on the page with 1940s Nazis?

The solution we landed on came about as we were discussing narrative technique in George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones, in which each chapter is written with a limited third person point of view which stays close to a single character. Point of View characters shift from chapter to chapter, allowing Martin to build a comprehensive sense of intrigue and tension in which the characters only know their parts, the things they experience, but the reader sees a much fuller picture. As their various story lines intertwine, the author gets to have his cake and eat it too: a complex macro social world constructed out of the micro specifics of individual characters.

What if we did something similar with Sekret Machines, but as well as using multiple characters with different experiences and points of view, we added an extra vector: time period? That way we could tell our macro story across seven decades, while still being up close and personal with individual characters. Better yet, we hit on the idea of weaving those characters’ stories so tightly together that however different they were, how disparate the worlds they came from, they would increasingly enter each other’s orbits, pulling them all closer and closer together so that—as literally as the story would allow—they would eventually all wind up in the same place at the same time.

But we also wanted to take our characters seriously as people, and that meant making sure that they all felt real and that they all had room to grow and learn. The characters we settled on each came at the phenomenon from a different position and world view and we wanted to be sure that they would each contribute a special piece to the larger puzzle, a piece that fit with who they were and where they came from. One of the reasons that the book is as long as it is, frankly, is that when you are writing four separate POV characters and want to be sure they each have a full and satisfying narrative arc, then however unified the overall book is, you’re not writing one novel, you’re writing four!

For that to work you need a very precise architecture so that the various plot/character strands feel balanced and the whole runs like a well oiled machine. Or looks like it does. Writing it felt more like one of those plate spinners you used to see on variety shows, the ones where some guy sets a plate spinning on top of a pole, then sets up another and another. Soon the poor sap is running from plate to plate in a constant battle to keep them all spinning, lest they shatter all over the stage. And just to make it a bit harder for myself, I also decided that it would be really cool, and would build the sense of tension and energy as the 4 plotlines came together if the chapters would all start getting shorter and shorter, so that by the end it would feel like a movie, cutting from shot to shot…

Did it work? I’m a little biased, so I’ll let you be the judge…

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