What I feel I get to do as an “active author” is create situations and scenarios to put the characters in and then see how they will react to them. For those of you with tabletop gaming or Dungeon & Dragons backgrounds, it feels like I am a Gamemaster/Dungeonmaster and the characters are people playing the game. I get to create the adventure they’ll go on, but they ultimately make the decisions themselves. I can “guide” the story, but I don’t fully “control” it.
I can create a character and throw them into the story, but once they are in there they get to make their own choices. The more a character starts to “come alive” for me on the page, the more they get to control their own destiny.
So there are no scenes in the book that are pre-planned or thought out ahead of time? The whole story is just spontaneous?
Most of it is created that way, yes. But there are a few scenes I get to plan out. It’s just rare for me to plan them out a certain way and have them actually occur like that. Usually I have an idea for how something is going to happen in the book, but by the time we get there some other event has changed the plot line and it no longer works. But there are exceptions. I foresaw the ending scenes of both Catalyst and Catharsis, and they never wavered throughout the writing process.
Cat standing over Mr. Black in the dark bedroom in Catharsis as she makes her fateful decision struck me as powerful and something I wanted to see happen. And that scene didn’t really change from how I originally envisioned it. But, and here is where my previous caveats come in, I had no idea who the man in the bed was going to be. He wasn’t named Mr. Black at the time, and he wasn’t a drug kingpin. And I didn’t know why she was there. That all came about over the course of the story. I just knew how I wanted it to end. I left it up to Cat to figure out all the in-between stuff.
And same with Catalyst. One day while I was showering, I saw the vision of Cat being trapped in a hallway with her sister while the girl bleeds out. To make the situation even worse, Cat was exhausted and weak and doing her best to resist the temptation to give in to her Darkness and feed on the one person she truly loved. That scene was devastating to me and yet compelling. I thought it would be a great way to end the book. Unfortunately, I had no idea where that hallway was, why her sister was there or who had made all the events come together. Those details were all created by the characters throughout the course of the story.
What do the book titles mean? Aren’t books supposed to have titles that connect to what happens in them? I never once heard Cat say the word “catharsis” or “catalyst”. What’s up with that?
Correct. Books should have a connection to their titles, and both Catharsis and Catalyst have that. But it is a connection that I don’t expressly state throughout the course of the story. If you know what the words in the titles mean, and you follow Cat’s journey then you should see a connection.
The word catharsis roughly means “the physical act of relieving pent up emotions”, and that is what Cat does in the first book. She becomes infected with a horrible disease that ruins her life and she deals with it by acting out and trying to accomplish something good. Her hunting down drug dealers is a “cathartic” journey for her that keeps her from going insane.
Catalyst, in turn, means “something that causes or creates change”. Chadwick plays the role of a catalyst in Cat’s life. He causes her to go from a disturbed but well-intentioned hunter of street scum to a macabre, death-loving terror. This book was about Cat’s change from one type of person into another, and Chadwick’s involvement in that.
Finally, how does your editing and writing process work? How long does it to go from idea to finished book?
It has taken me a year each to write, edit and release both of my books so far, and I foresee that being a doable schedule for the future. If I was writing full time and had no other commitments, then I imagine I could get a book finished every 4-6 months. But that isn’t how life works right now. Most of my time is spent teaching or with my family, so writing comes in a distant third.
I typically get a chance to start writing around the time school begins in August, and I continue writing at night or on weekends throughout the school year. In order to get enough free time to write effectively (I do better with long stretches at a time where I can really commit mentally to the characters and let them run.), I have given up most other hobbies. I no longer watch television shows except when I’m with my wife, and I don’t read as much as I used to. Fortunately, that is where audiobooks have been a lifesaver for me.
Often “writing” is what I do during my down time at night once my daughters have gone to bed. But the problem is that when I write I have to be secluded so as to avoid distractions, and that means I can’t be around anyone when I do it. I try to strike a balance in the evenings of spending time with them AND spending time writing.
At my house, I converted one of our spare bedrooms into an office so I can cut back on distractions while I write. My biggest obstacle when I sit down to write is not letting myself become distracted by all the fun things that aren’t writing. Internet newsfeeds, email and social media are killers. They can eat up time that I should be spending writing. To help counter that, I don’t write using my office desktop computer. Instead I use a simple tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard, and I set it up in a small closet in the back of my office on a folding table with a chair. I turn on a box fan to create white noise so I can’t hear the kids playing, and I focus on just creating. The tablet makes it a little tougher on me to distract myself as I write, since I turn off all “pop up” notifications. If I want to check social media, then I have to consciously switch to an app to do that. Mentally, that makes it easier for me to focus and not come up with ways to distract myself.
I also have gotten better about trusting my own editing process as I write. With Catharsis, I would spend an hour sitting and staring at the screen trying to find the right way to word a certain sentence so it would sound good to me. But it wouldn’t always come quickly, and I would get frustrated. It was a tremendous waste of time. Now when I come to a passage that doesn’t sound right in my head after writing it, I just highlight it so I’ll remember to pay special attention to it later and then I move in. That one small step drastically changed my writing process for the better. I am faster and more efficient, and it made my editing skills stronger.
The actual writing of a book takes me most of a school year, but it’s been my goal to always have a manuscript completed within a week of classes ending for the summer. That schedule has worked for me so far. After that, I spend the summer months re-reading the story, editing it, re-reading it again, working on the cover, having other people proofread and critique it and then editing it again. Then before school starts, I send it off to be finalized and published so that the paper edition is ready for when my new students enter my room.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catharsis is D. Andrew Campbell’s first novel. He has loved being a junior high teacher for over fourteen years and continues to teach seventh grade English in Fishers, Indiana. His free time is split between making up stories to tell his students (some people call it “teaching”), playing sports (cross country, wrestling, soccer and basketball) and spending time with his family and two daughters (Kailey and Jenna).
The completion of this book is just one more way he can teach his students that every dream is achievable once you commit to it!
He can be reached via email at [email protected]
You can follow him on twitter @DAndrewCampbell.
Or you can find him on Facebook using D. Andrew Campbell.
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Catharsis (Book 2): Catalyst Page 24