One of my editors recently asked me how I can generate the fiction she reads in the volume and variety she is encountering it.

I do not construct a plotted story.

I try and limit intentional use of serendipity as much as possible, preferring to wait for opportunities according to the converging story threads set in motion by the outline.

The outline is a series of character-based narrative paths, each of which has its origin in an over-imagined scene that has come to life in my mind, usually while I am walking at night, but often while I work as a clerk and sometimes as I train.

I never sit at the keyboard and think something up.

When I get to the keyboard I am simply downloading fully imaged scenes, and then connecting them through character actions that are consistent with the psychology of each character.

Some stories are born in my mind and written in the same day.

Some stories are incubated for years. I have been writing Seven Moons Deep since 2012, mostly in my mind, through revisiting the same six scenes over and over again and using this ground to develop the characters in my mind. I have put off completing this story for the reason that I have so many protagonists with depth and a half-dozen crux scenes in the incubator. To date I have 20,000 words written in Seven Moons Deep, which is to say about a fifth of the content.

I do not initially know if an inspired scene that emerges in my mind is worthy of a short, a novelette, or a novel. Novellas are generally novelettes that could have been novels.

Below are two examples of this scene-based process.

In the late 1980s I read a book about a lost Norse expedition to the Americas, which was largely hypothetical. While reading this book, I did find a passage referring to an evacuation of starving Norse settlers from a failed colony. This scene has haunted me ever since. Yet I have not been able to envision a perspective from which to write it.

Since my childhood I have been intrigued and repelled by the coming of winter, and often get an ominous chill when I see the first really gray autumn sky. This past Wednesday morning on September 2nd, just after receiving word from the editor that my story Dream Flower had been accepted for publication, I went down to the ancient filthy kitchen kept by my slacker roommates, which I only use as a well from which to draw water in glass bottles or a coffee pot.

As I washed and filled the coffee pot I felt an unseasonably cool breeze coming through the kitchen window from the east. I looked up into the foliage of the rustling trees and saw that the leaves were already turning and falling, a month early.

I then had a vision of a lone man standing by the sea, stranded in a land beset by an early winter, as his enemies come for him across the encroaching ice.

I have not permitted myself to expand this vision into a story line, and tightly loop the scene over and over again in my mind’s eye, when I wake in the night, when I walk out into the night, and when I open the creaking door of the 40 below walk-in freezer at midnight, as I begin my shift.

This scene could grow into a story arc. However, I have strictly forbidden myself from imagining such an arch, and remain focused on this man by the sea, standing between his proud past and an uncertain future, in the path of a cruel present.

I will not write this story until I see that first autumn sky. Once written, I might be caught up by the urge to expand the tale, or I might just let the man by the sea be consumed by that which takes us all.

Big Water Blood Song consists of 39 chapters and published at 670 pages, including the front matter and back matter. It was written without a plot or outline. The story was based on two scenes that came to me over the course of a month or so during the winter of 2010. These scenes were titled: Beautiful Autumn Hill and Big Water Blood Song. The theme linking the two scenes was the viewpoint. It was critical that both scenes be seen through the eyes of a handicapped boy—a view of horrific adult action through an innocent and impotent, though vested, juvenile perspective.

The idea was born out of the frustrated ultra-masculine fantasies I harbored as a child. I cast these fantasies in a realistic adult light based on my experience and reading, and laid them before my child’s mind’s eye. The Three-Rivers character, who is the viewpoint character, is based partially on my dreamy childhood. The monstrous Bracken character is a complex composite for such a meathead, but is essentially fueled by a remembrance of my radically violent teenage nature. The narration is done from my sedate adult perspective.

Once these scenes were set in my mind I used a map and linked those ‘cross-roads chapters’ with 37 lesser chapter titles. These lesser chapters were not outlined or drafted, and had no synopsis. I wrote them when the characters got there and role-played the characters, letting them follow their nature. Honestly, the characters know each other better than I do, so I just let them decide now. I just hope I can write my way out of whatever hole they put me in. I think of this story-development method as writing from behind the characters.

As a final note, I usually adjust the table of contents when I’m about 30% through the story, sometimes demoting chapters to sub-chapters, which I like using. When I begin a chapter I write [usually 3-5] subchapter titles [essentially story hints] and then write the first draft and at this point, usually publish it online. I will only make online corrections once, if at all. Then, when I begin to piece the book together, copying and pasting from the front end of the site into the book template, I proof it again and make corrections.