Three Rooms, One Question
I leave for Franklin, Tennessee, on August 20. Four days at Killer Nashville, in a hotel full of people who spend their working lives imagining harm. The bar conversation is genuinely lovely. Nobody ever believes me about that.
I’ve been invited onto three panels this year: Writing Diverse Characters, Writing Medical Scenes in Fiction, and Writing Stories That Actually Terrify.
For the last couple of weeks, I treated those as three separate jobs. Three folders on my desktop, three sets of notes, three versions of myself to be. Then a few days ago I was standing at the stove doing nothing in particular, and it landed on me that they are not three subjects at all. They keep circling the same thing from different sides, which is what happens when you can’t see what’s actually in front of you and have to guess.
The first room
I’m on the diversity panel because of Dave Everest.
He’s a character in Campus of Shadows, and he’s dyscalculic. Numbers don’t hold still for him. They rearrange on the way from the page to wherever it is he keeps them. He can carry a complicated situation in his head for weeks and still have to stop and build seven times eight out of something he already knows. I wrote him from close range, and I’ll leave the reason at that.
What I want to talk about on the panel isn’t representation in the abstract. It’s what a reader does with a difference they can’t see.
A character in a wheelchair gets patience almost automatically. The difficulty is visible, so it’s granted without anyone having to ask. A character who hesitates over a number gets read as evasive, or as hiding something, and the reader makes that call fast and usually without noticing. Sometimes I want exactly that. With Dave it’s most of the engine of his subplot.
But the thing I’d like to put to the other four panelists is the flip side, which fiction seldom gets to. A person who has spent years working around an invisible difficulty is generally more careful than everyone else in the room, not less. They’ve built the checking in. They say things out loud that other people keep in their heads. That’s the truest part of it and the hardest to dramatize, because carefulness looks like nothing happening.
The second room
I was a nurse before I was a novelist, and the two jobs disagree about almost everything except one thing: the information that matters most is usually the information you cannot see.
A patient sits up, jokes about the food, looks completely fine, and is not fine. The body keeps its emergencies in numbers. Meanwhile the daughter in the corner chair is reading her mother’s face, which is the least reliable instrument in the room.
Fiction runs the other way. Nothing exists unless I put it on the page. So a medical scene comes down to deciding what my character is allowed to notice, and then leaving the reader alone in the gap between that and what’s already true. Accuracy matters. I care about it more than is probably healthy. But accurate has never frightened anybody by itself.
Dr. Ronda Wells will be on that panel alongside me. She’s a board-certified physician who has spent decades helping novelists get the medicine right, and she writes a column for Killer Nashville Magazine called Novel Malpractice about exactly the ways we get it wrong. I’ve been reading her the way I used to read charts, which is to say too closely and at the wrong hours.
The third room
Then the terror panel, which sounds like the fun one and isn’t.
Gore has never impressed me on the page. Neither has a man with a knife, particularly. What actually gets to me in a book is smaller than that. It’s when a character realizes she can no longer vouch for her own account of the last hour. A locked door is only frightening if you’ve stopped being sure you were the one who locked it.
I’ll be sitting with Aimee Hardy, whose Pocket Full of Teeth made Kirkus Reviews’ Best 100 Books of 2024 and won Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion. It’s a southern gothic assembled out of a found manuscript, a police interview, and a daughter’s memory, three documents that don’t agree. Also, Patrick Kendrick had thirty years in the fire service before he wrote full-time. He received a Florida Book Award for his first novel and had years of correspondence with an actual serial killer that ended with the man suing him. He has stood inside the thing the rest of us are imagining. I plan to mostly listen.
What I’m carrying in
I don’t know most of these writers’ work well yet. I’ve been reading into it, and something is clarifying about walking into a room where I’m not the one with the answers.
What I want to find out is whether the connection I keep seeing is real or just my own preoccupation. Perception against hidden truth is the spine of everything I’ve written. Terminal Lucidity is about clarity showing up too late to help. Campus of Shadows is about a place where everyone senses something wrong, and nobody can name it. The Ariel novel I’m drafting now puts her in fields where people say one thing, and the ground underneath says something else entirely.
Three panels. I’ll let you know in September which parts of that survived contact.
