Not just a flashback: Plotting this Hostile Takeover

Posted by on Sep 29, 2012 in new release, writing, writing tips | 1 comment

My latest novel released September 28 from Dreamspinner Press and let’s just say it’s a relief. It’s long, over 100,000 words, and both writing and editing was more challenging than anything I’ve worked on before, except maybe for Italian Ice, where I had to keep reworking the intricate details of the smuggling plot and make sure all the little threads of the three plotlines got woven in and eventually tied up.

I also tried a few things with this book which I knew in advance might not necessarily go over well with readers. The first was to have a character cheating and the second was to use flashbacks as a key component of the characterization. The layers of each character–and their relations–is shown in an unconventional manner and I know many readers won’t like it. But here’s why I decided to try it anyway:

Hostile Takeover is really two stories. One is the courtship and romance of the main characters, Mathias Tobler and Chase Richards, in the past; and the other is set in the present day where they meet up again as enemies in a business takeover, before eventually finding their way to loving each other again. It’s a romance, folks, so yes, that’s a spoiler, but not unexpected.

The two stories are interwoven, and each step back gives you more insight into the characters, and also explains just what went wrong and why. I got the idea to do this from the film Memento. It’s one of my very favorite films because of how Christopher Nolan uses time and slowly fills in missing details. Of course I’m not at all in Nolan’s league, but that was my intention with how I paced and plotted the story. It was a challenge to know which details to put where so that the reader gets hints of one aspect of Chase’s character and motivations, while actually seeing him doing things that are opposite to the way he acts in another scene. But there is a rhyme and a reason behind it all.