Why I Only Gave Each Character One Section, and What That Cost Me
When people hear that The Foothills is told through six distinct perspectives and each character only gets one section, I usually get one of two reactions:
“Oh, that’s so cool!”
“Oh wow, how does that work?”
Both are valid, so let me explain why I chose to write it this way.
I loved the structure it created.
The Query Trenches: What Nobody Tells You About Trying to Find a Literary Agent
There is a particular kind of despair that comes from refreshing your email for the forty-seventh time in a day, knowing that the silence you're met with is also, technically, an answer.
That's querying.
And if you've never done it, let me paint you a picture.
On Writing Characters Who Don't Look Like Me… and Ones Who Do
One of the biggest challenges I faced when writing The Foothills was: how do I keep six voices distinct?
It’s a great question. There are six characters, and they each get one section; each perspective is given exactly one shot. There’s no return, no revisits and no second pass. The story only continues from the perspective of the next character.
The more honest question, the one I asked myself constantly while writing, was different: do I have the right to be inside all of these people?