I’ve been talking with T.H.E. Hill, the author of Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary, the Military Writers Society of America "Book of the Month" for September 2009. (Read the reviews of Voices Under Berlin and the interview with Hill on Blogcritics: Review 1, Review 2, Interview.)
Hill is currently working on his next novel, Reunification: The Tale of One GI's Return to Post-Wall Berlin, quite an appropriate topic for the twentieth anniversary year of the Fall of the Berlin Wall which led to the Reunification of Germany. I asked him to talk about how he goes about the creative process of writing a novel. The comments below are gleaned from a lively eMail exchange on how it works for him:
A novel starts out in my imagination as a single sentence that begins with "What if?" The answer to that question is the novel. Reunification began as "What if a GI who had been stationed in Berlin in the 1970s went back today and met his old German girlfriend?"
I'm one of those writers who lets his characters tell him what to do. I just put them on-page in some situation, and let them start talking. Once they get going, it's really hard to get them to shut up. That's not to say that I never get writer's block. Every now and again my characters go "on vacation" and things grind to a halt.
I have two ways around writer's block. One is that I'm a compulsive outliner. I let the characters do the talking, but I have a list of situations to put them in that forms the outline of the novel. If they quit talking in one situation, I move them to another. Most of the time that gets things going again. The other is that I never only work on one project at a time. I normally have another novel and a non-fiction project in various stages of completion in addition to the "active" project I'm working on. If the characters in the "active" project develop 'lock jaw,' I move to one of the others, and come back when the characters have started talking again.
That fits in with the way I write. I write everywhere: at the computer, on 3X5 cards, old paper napkins, and scraps of paper; at home, walking down the street, on campus, and in restaurants. For some reason, however, I can never write while I'm on or in a mechanical conveyance; a bike, a car, a train, or a plane.
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