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Narrators usually treat the reader as a confidant. They tell us secrets, confess their crimes, and in return we share their shocks and downfalls. We solve the mystery with them, and sometimes, possibly depending on how many thrillers you’ve read, you think faster than the narrator and beat them to the solution. It’s a careful game a writer plays with her audience: spinning out details so you walk with the narrator, but don’t solve the case before he does. But what happens when the narrator isn’t fully aware? Maybe they lack something the reader has? Then the game becomes downright delicate and it takes a writer with precise control of her craft to pit the narrator’s awareness against what the reader has already figured out.

Mark Haddon’s the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is an exercise in such craft. His protagonist, Christopher, suffers from Asperger’s (though I don’t believe it’s ever named). A boy on a mission to solve a mystery, he lacks the understanding of other people’s emotions that guides most of us through human interactions. As Christopher’s quest grows more complex, he strains against that lack, even as the reader sees things Christopher can’t.

It’s a beautiful little book that reminds me of how lucky I am that some things, like relationships, don’t come so easily for everyone. Christopher is original character. He’s brilliant at math, affectionate to his pet rat, and exact in the manner in which he follows the spelled out to him: which gives him several clever, logical outs when those rules aren’t expressed in practical ways.

Haddon builds a simple mystery that would fit well in a children’s book, the murder of a neighbor’s dog, into something of much graver importance. When Christopher has to push himself to go beyond the boundaries of the safe world his parents built for him, you worry for him in a very different way than you would worry for a child. I loved this book. My friend Alfred recommended this book to me after we were talking about readers and narrators. Reading it taught me a lot about how to use the reader’s intelligence to the writer’s ends, even in a first person point of view where the reader doesn’t know more than Christopher, they just understand more.

1. You’d written a few Weird Girls books before you landed an agent. How many had you completed and how much rework did you do?

I had three Weird Girls novels, three Weird novellas, and a spin-off novel written before I met my agent. When I signed with Penguin, Book One of my series had actually been divided into two novels. Those took the most work because I had to expand them into two books. The others were easier because they were already done. I rewrote each because my writing style had changed, and I because I had to match them with how the characters had developed. The details, plot arc, etc. remained the same.

2. Do you feel like it was better to have multiple books completed, or would it have been better to just have one?

My agent signed me after reading my first novel, knowing it had series potential. She didn’t realize I’d already written the next two installments and was overjoyed when I told her. Publishers―at least with regard to adult novels―like series. In fact, they expect it. Unless you’re a big name like Stephen King―who has the power to write a standalone novel and have it sell big―publishers want a project that can go on for several books and typically offer 2-3 book deals. Series potential makes an author more appealing. More books equal more money.

3. How much seeding do you do? For example, how much setup for book two did you put into SEALED WITH A CURSE?

I add enough to stir the curiosity of the reader. For example, I had a character that continued to make an appearance throughout SEALED WITH A CURSE. He never said much, but his presence suggested he had a purpose. He, ahem, shows up dead on my “weird” girls’ doorstep in the first few pages of A CURSED EMBRACE. The reader discovers his role as A CURSED EMBRACE unfolds.

4. A lot of paranormal series stretch on for a long time. Kim Harrison’s the Hollows and Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books both come to mind. How far out do you suggest a series writer plan?

I planned closely for the first three that I wrote―hoping for a multi-book deal. However, I plotted out―at least in my head―seven books for my protagonist, Celia Wird. Since my series is about four sisters with unique supernatural abilities, I’ve since been “encouraged” by my agent and editor to start thinking about books for the other three sisters. I think it’s important when a writer creates a storyline to include strong supporting characters so they may potentially get their own spin-offs.

5. And of course, when’s your next book out?

A CURSED EMBRACE, releases July 2, 2013 followed by CURSED BY DESTINY (tent. title) January 2014.

I had the pleasure of meeting Cecy at the Backspace conference a few years ago. Aside from being a talented, dedicated, writer, she’s a genuinely nice person. I really appreciate her taking the time to answer these questions.

Cecy is offering a signed copy of SEALED WITH A CURSE to one of our readers. Like her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter. Let me know in the comments or by email (author@davidrslayton.com), and we’ll choose the winner at random.

I slept and dreamed that life was joy,
I awoke and saw that life was duty,
I acted, and behold duty was joy.
– Rabindranath Tagore

Having finished the work in progress, I’ve moved on to the next project: which means I’ve opened a book about a third done that I started a while back. While I am largely pleased with a lot of what I found beneath the dust: solid plot, good scene breaks, nice levels of action – something critical was missing. My last project had a really strong main character, a real scene stealer. One of the important things for me in the new book is to push myself, try to write a new character (and not just keep recycling a single personality type). While working on this, at making the new guy distinct from the old one, edits and critiques of the last book are coming in. Together, this makes writing more work than pleasure. It’s work I want to be doing, but expressing it raised a conversation with a friend about writing for the joy of it and writing towards trying to publish while another friend was struggling with being blocked too busy with her daily life to find the time to work on her book.

By nature, writing novels is a weird exercise. You work alone, maybe talking through ideas or discussing elements of the book, but ultimately, you do it by yourself. You steal time away from friends and family, forgoing television or the gym to find the time to put hand to keyboard. Then you start to share it with others, getting input, and learning that you completely fouled something up in the first act. Critical feedback too early in the game can crush your motivation, so you ignore it until you’re ready. Then you rewrite, edit, rewrite, for what feels like forever. When you’re finished, no matter how hard you worked, there’s no guarantee of success. So how do you keep going?

Write the book you believe in, the story you want to tell. This way, when the rejections come, and they may be little or they may be huge, you can keep going. It takes a little delusion to believe in your writing, but not too much. Over-confidence can blind you to self-improvement. I think one of the hardest things about writing a book is learning that you may never sell it. You might never make it big enough to see one of your books on the rack at your local bookstore. Each rejection can dissuade you, get you down. You’ve got to push past this, improving and striving while you sift through the feedback to learn what’s useful. This is where writing for the fun of it comes in. Take pleasure in the craft, in the work. Don’t give up, and keep getting better. It’s toil. It’s hard. And it has to be worth it even if you never publish. Write because you love to.

We all have multiple selves, the version we think we show the world, the version we actually show the world, our inner self who our outer self never quite resembles, and countless others.

One intriguing way of handling character is the secret identity. You can’t wear a mask too long without it becoming part of you. Superheroes come immediately to mind, and we’ll probably forever ask if Superman is Clark Kent or if Clark Kent is Superman? Which is his authentic self, or are they both true versions of a single man?

Princess Katya Nar Umbriel has a few secrets. One is that each member of her family houses a bit of Fiend inside them. But Katya also has a secret job. As the second child she leads an order dedicated to containing threats to the throne. Guarding her loved ones forces her to play the rake, seducing courtiers who want only the favors Katya’s position can win them. In the middle of her toughest investigation yet, hunting highly-placed conspirators, she’s tired of the string of meaningless bed-mates. When she meets Starbride, a foreign scholar with no interest in court affairs, Katya finds someone she hopes she can be herself with.

Starbride hasn’t come to court seeking a spouse, regardless of her mother’s hopes for her. Despite being encumbered with a wardrobe that evokes more than a few comparisons to pastries, she’s come to study law, and wants nothing more than to while her time in the library. A brief encounter with Katya, the princess who loves and hates hunting, can’t help but intrigue Starbride, especially when Katya conceals her identity long enough to show Starbride a bit of her true self.

Barbara Ann Wright’s the Pyramid Waltz, is at its heart a love story, but there’s a juicy game of who’s who built into the plot. Katya has a lot of selves, a lot of layers, and their revelation makes for an enticing read.

Autumn is coming. Yesterday, I pulled some onions from the garden, felt the first cut of cold in the air, and watched some leaves fall. I took a walk with a friend through the neighborhood last night, admiring the odd mix of little ranches built in the 50s and the McMansions sprouting up where houses like mine have been scraped away. We passed a lot where the hot water tank, the air conditioner, and other metal objects lay in a twisted heap. We spared a moment, trying to identify the remains of whatever appliances had died there. I mused that there will probably come a time when the rental houses around me sell and get replaced, leaving my green little house to cringe in the shadow of the great boxes looming around it.

The walk got me thinking about setting, how important it is, and where I can strengthen it in my current work in progress. A great setting can be an amazing character in of itself, vibrant or treacherous. And of course setting can be overdone, loom so large it overshadows the characters, plot, and story. In fantasy, whether urban or epic, setting plays a crucial role, though I suspect urban often has a lot more fun with it.

Most urban fantasy works with transitions from the mortal or daylight world to another, more mysterious realm. The Never Never in Jim Butcher’s the Dresden Files, the Nightside in Simon Green’s Nightside books, or the Summer Lands in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series are all excellent examples of worlds living just beneath our own. This approach gives the authors the ability to move from the mundane to the magic without warning. It also grants the chance to dial it back when needed, thus avoiding the problem of scenery overwhelming story. In all three examples I listed above, scenery is nearly a character. It lurks, entraps, and awaits the unprepared. Only the Nightside is the magical setting you might want to live in, and even there, the unwary don’t fare very well.

The danger, as always, is to overdo it, provide too much detail and choke off the reader’s imagination. Once you bleed the life out of the scenery it grows tattered and tired, and I suspect this is partly why epic fantasy, based on the medieval European society, gets wearisome sometimes. Epic fantasy has reached the point where castles, knights, and swords are all nearly as mundane to us as cars and concrete. Like anything else in literature, the trick is to give them a new spin or angle. Opening a door to a world of the imagination, like Faerie, brings endless potential. Never is an alternate world just one thing, one place or flavor. This doesn’t mean that non fantasy writers can’t leverage setting to great effect. I read Pat Conroy’s the Prince of Tides twenty years ago, and I still remember his descriptions of the protagonist’s home town. Its denizens and downfall still come to mind.

Regardless of genre, a writer can twist scenery to their advantage. It can symbolize and express where the characters cannot. It’s one more important tool in our kit, one more to master, and learn to use just right.