Writers and Authors

Showing posts with label becoming a novelist. Show all posts

What Happens When A Reporter Writes a Novel?

I know how to write fiction, but I don’t know how to make up stories. Well, I don’t know how to make up stories out of whole cloth, I should say. Mystical, real cloth, yes, whole cloth no.

http://amzn.to/2hrAg1v

My novels, like my life as a take-no-prisoners, tell-the-truth columnist for the New York Daily News have both begun with an actual event. And then like the investigative reporter that I am, I followed the trail until I found out the truth behind the event or (in my case) bizarre experience into which I’d been thrust.

Then and only then can I begin to create a story—a tale built around the truth.

But I’m not giving enough credit to the stars here. See, I believe that both of my novels, The Sixth Station published in 2013 and Book of Judas, out September 19, 2017, almost had nothing to do with me. They’re sort of like a news event that I cover—I’m in it, but didn’t start the damned thing.

For each book I was led by the hand like a willing lamb to slaughter. And after going through what I went through to dig out the truth in both cases I do feel like I almost was being, if not slaughtered, well, at least put through hell.

With all the craziness I’m about to tell you about, I had to keep one thing familiar to me. That would be my character, Alessandra Russo. She just happens to be a New York City reporter, who is very much like I am in real life—with a bunch of years and sometimes hair—shaved off.

Russo can’t help getting herself mixed up in bad situations any more than I can. It’s the nature of a journo: Investigating a story can sometimes be dangerous, and is always wrought with complications and risks, but you do it because, well, because that’s just what you do to breathe.

The Sixth Station began when my husband and I took a road trip. But not a road trip like normal people to Disney World or anything. We took a road trip through Turkey. It was all going great until I got to the House of the Virgin Mary in Ephesus. While I am very spiritual I am not particularly religious person, so what happened next was a complete shocker.

Being in that house knocked me flat. I started having visions and was told from somewhere or other that I had to track down this story whatever that would be.

The research took me six years in which I drove through five countries alone, climbed a mountain in France twice, was escorted through parts of France by a motorcycle gang, stayed with monks in a monastery in Manoppello Italy, and spent time with a crazy, cloistered nun who lives up the mountain from that monastery. Oh, and right, I also took another road trip; this one through Italy with an 84-year old exorcist priest from the Vatican.

I did all this until I believe I found what I’d been searching for: a relic in that monastery with the DNA of Jesus on it.

Then the hard work began—the research that doesn’t involve adventure—just intense concentration to detail and an unforgiving quest to find out the truth behind what I believed I’d discovered.

What I discovered too, however, oftentimes discouraging because, well, it’s tough to get half-way through writing a novel, only to find that truth gets in the way of fiction. I’d discover something that would throw my whole story off and I’d have to start again.

Sure it’s easy to just say, well, hell it’s fiction after all, but when you’re a reporter, you just can’t get past that sticky habit of making sure your facts actually are facts and haven’t been debunked somewhere by someone.

My new novel, Book of Judas, began in an equally bizarre way. I’d seen a book on a shelf in a house I’d owned for 12 years and had never seen before even though it was sitting right there. Nobody in my family could have brought it there because it was I, Judas by Taylor Caldwell and Jesse Stern and it was 40 years old!

Intrigued ,I began to read it and was surprised to discover that not everyone thought Judas was an evil villain. Huh?

A few days later, while perusing a bookshop on a girl’s getaway weekend, I saw on the front table, another book about Judas. Weird? Not as weird as it was about to get. The book was about the discovery of the real Gospel of Judas, which had been discovered in the 1970s in a cave in Egypt. The-nearly 2,000 year old codex had been lost and found and lost and found again.

Where was it found? In a safety deposit box in a bank in Hicksville, Long Island. Dear God! I grew up in Hicksville, Long Island.

Weirder still, that Citibank branch turned out to be the very same bank branch where I’d had my first bank account as a teenager!

Judas, scarier even than all the mobsters, and criminals I’ve interviewed in my career, was calling. Who in hell—literally—was I not to answer that call?

My research took me into a 3,000 year old hidden burial cave in Israel and then hundreds of feet underground in the still-unfinished steel and concrete labyrinth of Second Avenue Subway tunnel that looked like something out of the end of the world.

But I did it, because hey, I didn’t expect that Judas was going to take me out on a nice dinner.

LINDA STASI, the popular and well-read columnist for the New York Daily News, and previously for the New York Post, is also an on-camera TV co-host with Mark Simone on NY 1 -Spectrum “What a Week!”

Brash, funny and opinionated, the acerbic Stasi’s first novel, The Sixth Station, published in January of 2013 by Forge Books was hailed as, “A helluva religious thriller,” by Nelson DeMille, while Steve Berry said, “You’ll be grabbing the pages so tight your knuckles will turn white!” Booklist said of the book, “Dan Brown and Steve Berry fans have another controversial novel in which to lose themselves.” For The Sixth Station, Stasi was selected as a finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award.

Stasi’s anxiously awaited sequel, Book of Judas, has received acclaim from mega bestselling authors such as Sherrilyn Kenyon, who calls it, “An innovative masterpiece!”

Stasi has appeared on TV talk shows and news channels such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, The O’Reilly Factor, Hardball, Good Day New York, and The View, as well as CNN, Fox News, MSNBC news shows, and many others.

She is a regular guest on iHeartRadio’s nationally broadcast Mark Simone Show, Boston’s “Matty In The Morning,” and countless others around the country.

Stasi has also authored the non-fiction books – Looking Good Is the Best Revenge, A Field Guide to Impossible Men, Simply Beautiful, Boomer Babes, and Scotto Sunday Suppers.

Not afraid to say what’s on her mind in her popular Wednesdays and full-page Sunday columns in the New York Daily News, her readership has reached more than 600,000 in a single day.

She was named “One of the Fifty Most Powerful Women in NYC” and has won numerous awards including Best Columnist by the Newswomen’s Club of NY, Best Humor Columnist, and Woman of the Year by the Boys Town of Italy for her charitable work such as driving a tractor-trailer in an 18-truck convoy from NYC to the gulf states with relief supplies for Hurricane Katrina victims.

My first friends, a boy and a girl were figments of my four-year-old imagination. My mother labeled them imaginary friends, more accurately however; they served as my first push to discover a storyteller side of my personality. They were fully formed characters. After hearing radio dramas, with my dad, I decided this would be a way to get my friends’ tales out. Using a portable tape recorder, I used to record adventures for them filled with romance, adventure, and lots of conflict.

Sometimes the stories went so long, I’d talk all the way to the end, and then have to flip the cassette over to continue. I was never savvy enough to realize when space was running out on a side, so the transitions were constantly rough. Though this was a concern of mine, but I chose not to talk to my classmates or anyone else about this activity, so the recordings remained flawed in execution. However, the passion of exploring motivations and minutiae of life through storytelling has stayed with me my entire life.

The passion for creating scenarios took on a new level one afternoon a year later because of a stomachache. My kind father took me to the movies to try to help me feel better. At the multiplex, I cried and couldn’t sit still, but somehow the visuals stirred my mind. I became convinced my destiny was on the screen. While I had remained silent about the auditory adventures I had conceived, my voice was a permanent marker to inform others becoming a film director was going to be my life’s work. I convinced myself nothing would ever sway me from it.

My goal of a future career in the film industry became all-consuming. However, when I learned through various film magazines and behind the scenes specials, how long a film took from page to premiere, I never thought I’d have the patience for it. I had quit little league baseball, soccer, and various other activities so trying to convince others and myself the practicality that somehow being a filmmaker would show them I turn this lack of perseverance thing around was an exercise in futility.

The answer to all the worries came to me when I decided learn the martial arts to defend myself against a growing number of bullies. From the very first day, karate started to awaken a new part of me. I was never the most skilled student, but I enjoyed every minute of class. Just learning how to use my mind and find balance on one foot and within myself. It also planted the seeds of confidence and patience to improve. The determination for self-improvement had gone from foundation, to a place filled with walls to protect me from others’ opinions. Two years in, my mind had built a place where there were windows to see my future, and a door to venture out and grab it.

A decade later while a college junior at Franklin Pierce, I had invited a friend, a flesh and blood one this time to help me tell a story. We had worked well together on a documentary for a class project, so I asked him to join in my quest to make a feature film on our campus. Eventually, we recruited two hundred and twenty-five other people to help us deliver a movie that we felt could move others. It took two years of hard work, and a lot of patience that I had learned in karate to take us ‘from page to premiere’. The greatest moment in my life up to that point was watching the end result play with a full audience in the school cafeteria.

The film never got into any film festivals, and Hollywood didn’t come knocking on my door. Instead, I took a job at a video store to work while I figured out my next move. Not long after I started, I made friends with a co-worker named Rob. When I told him that I was a filmmaker, he wanted to see the movie. I must admit I was pretty nervous feeling that he wouldn’t like it. When he brought it back, not only did he enjoy it, he convinced me to make another.

With him starring, and one-hundred and sixty plus people from across New England performing in front of or behind the camera, I directed this second film. At the premiere years later, one of the people in attendance was a singer on the soundtrack. We struck up a friendship and some time later, he introduced me to an editor via the web. I sent a query to her for a screenplay I had written. She immediately took a liking to it and invited me to send the script on as well.

She enjoyed the story greatly but encouraged me to turn it into a novel and promised to guide me through the process. I realized that writing a novel did share some traits with filmmaking. Laying out a scene on a page was like figuring out where the camera or the focus would be, how you would direct your characters’ actions, and the general mood of each moment, etc. Over the course of the year that followed, we worked on seven drafts of the story. Plus it was very beneficial to have someone reining me back in when I’d go off too far on a certain aspect of a story, as I had on those cassettes many years earlier.

Eventually, the manuscript went out into the world to find a home. While the rejections started to pour in, I got involved with yoga. Similar to karate, with the use of balance and focus, I was centered once again. Though the rejections pile was growing by the day, I never let it get me down for too long. Ultimately, the novel found the perfect place to launch from, MuseItUp Publishing. Being an author for them has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. I like to think those three sides of my personality; my love for storytelling, abilities as a filmmaker, along with patience brought on by karate and yoga helped me to become a novelist. This equilateral journey of self-discovery led me to give you Isosceles.

About the Author:

While this is his first novel, he wrote and directed a dramatic feature, co-wrote and directed a documentary and wrote for an online magazine. He’s also a trained voice, stage, and screen actor. In addition to his creative pursuits, he is passionate about healthy living. He follows a mostly self-directed fitness quest consisting of weight training, walking, swimming, yoga, and hula hooping. When not working out, he also enjoys cooking healthy gourmet meals as well as playing board games with family and friends with plenty of coffee brewing to keep the fun going until the wee hours of the morning.

You can find out more about Scott R. Caseley, his novel and World of Ink Author/Book Tour at http://tinyurl.com/c85xoz4

UPDATE

Search This Blog

Blog Archive

Featured Post

Sites To Promote Your Free Amazon Kindle Books

POPULAR POSTS