The 3 Building Blocks of Every Novel, by Josh Stallings

Q: Plot, character, setting - how do they fit together in your work? Which do you find the most tricky (if any) and which do you have the most fun with?

A: I’m drinking a mug of coffee watching the sun creep into our shadowed valley and thinking about this question. When writers talk about “setting” it never feels like the right word. I come from theater and film where a set is only a physical space, it didn’t seem inclusive enough. I prefer milieu: “applies especially to the physical and social surroundings of a person or group of persons.” To my brain it also contains the vibe of a piece and even the sub-genre. WAIT. Oh, I see now that’s exactly what other writer’s meant by setting… Fine. That’s a wheel I don’t need to reinvent.

Now that that linguistic pretzel is straightened out I can continue. 

My first novel Beautiful Naked & Dead started from character. I knew the opening line would be “There is nothing quite like the cold taste of gun oil on a stainless steel barrel to bring your life into focus.” Moses would start every day with this ritual of deciding if today was the day to pull the trigger. The character idea came from thinking about hard boiled tough guys and that the most dangerous person in the room was the one who didn’t care if they lived or died. Moses was suicidal, he saw it as an escape hatch. It was his super power.

Setting was in the background from the start of The Moses McGuire Trilogy. I wanted to write a modern hard-boiled series based in North East LA, a place I lived a large chunk of my life; our family had roots there, my father lived by the Arroyo Seco. It was a place that hadn’t been written about and a place I loved. 

Moses’ voice and the novel’s tone came quickly. But it took many drafts to find the plot. I was lucky to have three good writers, Tad Williams, Deborah Beale, and Charley Huston to slap me around, um, I mean, help guide me. They asked the hard questions like, “Why did that guy do that?” I’d shrug and which ever one I was talking to would say, “You have to know why every character does what they do. Even if you don’t put it in.” It was a brutal learning process, and I’m forever thankful for it. These amazing writers believed in my words, my heart on the page, enough to help me draft by draft learn to tell a story with a plot and all. 

Young Americans started with settings. 1976 San Francisco, a heist in a gay disco. That’s the germ that the novel grew from. Nine words that gave me time, place, social setting and even sub-genre. Heist. The word alone makes me smile. I know there have been dark noir heist stories. Jim Thompson’s The Getaway for one, but those in my personal strange filing system are “robbery” stories. My quintessential heist novel is The Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake, or any of his Dortmunder books. For film references, The Hot Rock (1972) Oceans 11 (1960 or 2001) are great at explaining what I aim for. 

By saying heist I was clueing myself in that I wanted to veer away from the painful hard boiled Moses books and write a more light hearted novel.

The setting made sense, I was a teenager in 1976 in the San Francisco Bay Area. My friends and I were glitter kids*, fans of Bowie, androgyny, tight jeans, and platform shoes. On weekends we’d drive to the city to go dancing at a wonderfully crazed gay disco where the door people didn’t look too closely at our fake IDs. All of the characters in it started out as people or amalgamations of people I knew. As a teenager I didn’t consider myself a criminal, though others might have. I did some shoplifting, breaking and entering, selling weed and hash, from time to time I carried a pistol. Ultimately I was lucky that I had little aptitude for any of it. Jacob, one the protagonists wasn’t me, as much as he was a kid in a circumstance like mine. The plot grew out of these characters. And a heist. I knew they were going to rob a disco on New Year’s Eve 1976. The first question I answered was why they had to do it, what was at stake. From there the plot was driven by character. 

   

Tricky started with character. My intellectually disabled son stood on a porch with an LAPD officer shouting for him to comply, his hand hovering over his pistol. I wanted to write a character based on my son. It took a year of research to find a truthful way to talk about the LAPD and how some of them treat our citizenry. I knew the novel opened with an LAPD officer aiming a gun at an intellectually disabled man. I knew I wanted to return to my beloved North East LA. I wanted to write about a good cop, like the man my grandfather had been. The plot grew out of these two characters, Cisco and Detective Madsen. The setting became three fold, the police department / murder investigation, the intellectually disabled community, and East LA gang life.

As I write this I see that regardless of whether I start with setting or characters, I always have to fumble my way through the plot. Plotting remains low on my writer-brain’s priorities until I’m half way through the novel and it hits me I better know where it’s going, or at least have a general direction in mind. 

I wish I could outline a novel and then write with the security of knowing where the damn thing is headed. My agent wishes I could too. But so far, that doesn’t seem to be in my wheelhouse. It is more important to know how you write best, than to focus on what you don’t do.

If only I could write an outline… I know what my pops would have said about that, “Yep, and if my mother had three wheels she would’ve been a trike.”

The thing I’ve learned speaking with enough other writers is, we all work slightly differently. We aren’t making widgets or painting houses, we’re creating worlds. No method is better or worse as long as it gets you where you need to be to write the book you want to write.

* https://www.encyclopedia.com/media/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/glitter-rock