Award-Winning Denver Novelist Shares Key Advice on Writing a Book

Denver author Carter Wilson says he initially got into writing as a creative mental challenge to keep his mind occupied during a particularly boring day of required coursework. "I was working in commercial real estate appraisal back then," says Wilson, recalling "an eight-hour-long class on ethics that was required to work in the field. You didn't have to listen; you just had to sit in a dingy hotel ballroom and physically be there. Mind-numbing."

The conundrum Wilson set for himself was a murder mystery: If three people are murdered at the exact same time, with the exact same method, but in different parts of the world — what's the connection?

"I have no idea how my brain came up with that scenario," Wilson laughs. But the result turned out to be his first book...which didn't sell. But it did get him an agent — so he wrote another. Which also didn't sell. Nor the next one.

For Wilson, the fourth time was the charm. His first published novel, Final Crossing, came out some nine years after that classroom experiment. Since then, he's published seven more, five of which were distinguished by winning (among other prizes) Colorado Book Awards. 

And now comes his ninth published novel, The Father She Went to Find, which will launch with a free reading and Q&A event at Tattered Cover Colfax on Saturday, April 6 (full disclosure: I'm introducing Wilson and hosting the Q&A).

Wilson has a lot of advice to share. He had to train himself to write and produce novels while also working a full-time job, at least at first. "So I only write an hour a day, but it lets me come out with about a book a year," he says. These days, he's now writing as a career, launching the company Unbound Writer, which provides not only editing services to aspiring writers, but also writing retreats and one-on-one coaching, and is about to offer online classes, as well. In those capacities, he teaches a lot of strategies to be sure, but one of the most important involves the bread and butter of work ethic: "Writing is a job," he says. "You have to treat it that way. You have to build the muscle. Write every day, even if it's fifteen minutes. It will get easier. You can't wait for the Muse. If you did that at any other job, you'd be fired. Writing is no different."

A lot of writers might have similar advice, but Wilson takes it even further. He swears it's all an organic process. He doesn't plan. He doesn't outline. "All I usually know is an opening scene," he says. "I don't know who the characters are yet, or why they're doing what they're doing. All I know is that it's a cool scene. And then my process is: 'Okay, now what?' I see where the story takes me."

Wilson adds that he usually never knows his ending until he's "maybe 80 percent of the way through the book, and even then, things are changing all the time." He adds, "I'm a pantser, for sure." (That's writer's slang for someone who flies by the seat of his slacks.)

But The Father She Went to Find came about a little differently. "For this book, I didn't really have that opening scene," Wilson admits. "But I kept thinking about this woman, my main character. I knew who she was; I knew she was a savant; I knew the year was 1987 and she was living in this institute. I couldn't stop thinking about her, even when I was working on other things." That went on for six months, until Wilson finished the project he'd been working on, and all of a sudden it seemed time to figure out what to do with this protagonist named Penny Bly.

So Wilson worked on the book in the way he normally does: through an authorial discovery process, or "planning by doing," as he puts it. But something in the draft wasn't coming together at first — not for Wilson, and not for his agent. "She kept saying that she wasn't connecting with Penny, and I had to admit, I knew what she was talking about," he reflects. "I'd struggled with it, as well as I felt I knew that character. I'd written the whole thing in third person, past tense, which was a departure from most of my recent work. So I told her to let me re-write twenty or so pages in first person, present tense, and see what happens. I did that, and she read it, and she said, 'There's Penny. There she is.' And she was right."

But still, Wilson's reaction was, "Oh, fuck."

Because that meant a massive rewrite of the whole book, from third-person past to first-person present. "At first, I wondered if I should just start over with a blank page and work from memory. Or do I go back in and literally change every single sentence?" he recalls. "Changing a point of view isn't simple; the voice totally changes. But I did it; it worked. It took me four months to do that, but it made the book."

The lesson Wilson took from the writing of The Father She Went to Find?

"Do what comes naturally to you," he says. "Writers are all different; some have more of a distance from their characters, and that's fine. So they embrace that. Others feel more empathy with their characters, and that demands different treatment. Neither is better, just different. But you have to know what sort of writer you are, because that's where the joy comes in writing."

Carter Wilson will read from and discuss his new novel The Father She Went to Find, 6 p.m. Saturday, April 6, Tattered Cover, 2525 East Colfax Avenue. For more information and to register for the event, see the Tattered Cover website.