Chuck Wendig on Breaking Hearts and Cheating Death with Miriam Black

Upon the recent, long-awaited release of the fourth book in the series, we chatted with Chuck about writing styles, supernatural abilities, and why he continues to strive to break our hearts at least once per book.
Thunderbird is a brilliant return to the Miriam Black series, and I’m so glad we’re finally with her on the second half of her journey.What were some of the goals you had for Miriam, and for the book in general?
The goal with Miriam is always to tell a cuckoo crash-bang of a story—like you’re inside a train full of angry cougars as it crashes into a meth lab someone built inside the Large Hadron Collider.
But here, too, this is the book reintroducing Miriam to the world—like ythe first three books were re-released last year, but this marks the start of a second trilogy for her. Further, the goal is to advance her character. She’s changing. Or trying to change. It’s about what Miriam wants to become, and how she’s desperately clawing her way toward that goal.

I saw in your post for John Scalzi’s The Big Idea, that you hadn’t planned for this book to turn out as, er, timely as it has. How do you parse those feelings against the book being out now, and how people might read it now? Will it affect your work in Miriam’s world moving forward?
No, it won’t really affect much going forward—like yMiriam is who she is, and the stories I tell with her are the stories I tell. The next two books don’t really crossover into anything resembling politics modern or past, and are really more focused on Miriam the character and her journey forward. But it is weird, having this book out that was loosely sort of… presaging things that would come. I hoped all of that was a pot on the stove that someone would handle before it boiled over. Nobody handled it. It boiled over. The things I thought would remain in the background of modern American life are now very, very much in the foreground.
But fiction can be weird that way. It tunes into a subtle, subconscious frequency. It doesn’t predict the future magically, but it picks up a signal of white noise awareness and anxieties about things.

Watching Miriam grow and change over the course of the books has been one of the satisfying things. Do you feel there is a core to her character that is unchanging, a part of her that will never differ no matter what she weathers? And how do you find new ways to test that implacable part of her?
I think Miriam is a tiny little mote of light swarmed in a thousand blankets of darkness. She is that, now and forever. Maybe there will be some variation in how much darkness swarms her, or how much light gets to shine through, but she’s a messed-up character and she’s not going to easily find her way free of that. Testing that part of her…
Well, I ought not to say anymore, but the next two books are gonna be…
*whistles*
Getting to know the Coming Storm and their various abilities was like looking into a dark mirror version of Miriam’s own life, and watching her struggle against them, especially with Mary Scissors, is terrifying. As in the case of Ashley in The Cormorant, her gifts can become quite dark and twisted. Do you feel Miriam may ever succumb that nature of her abilities? Does she even know the full extent of them yet?
Miriam’s powers have another twist or two coming down the pike, no doubt. I think those abilities have already twisted her a good deal – and from this point the story is about how, if ever, she manages to get untwisted.
As a writer, what’s something satisfying coming back to Miriam and her world? What do you look forward to the most when it comes to Miriam Black?

Writing Miriam is some of the most fun I’ll ever have writing a character. When you’re a real person in the real world, you generally approach life in a way where you think, okay, what’s the best move in this situation? It’s not always so explicit as that, but that, I think, is the overall goal.
Miriam… isn’t that person. Maybe she thinks what she’s doing is the best, but when writing her, I get to have her make decisions that are both terrible and therefore very interesting. “WHAT WOULD MIRIAM DO, WWMD,” leads you to answers like, “SHE PUNCHES THE NUN AND STEALS THE COMMUNION WINE.” Because Miriam.
Thunderbird ended on a classic “HOLY CRAP CHUCK WHY?!” moment. Can you give readers a taste of what’s to come in the final tales of Miriam Black?
The next book ends, I think, with an even bigger “HOLY CRAP WHY?!” moment. Actually, several of them. For Miriam, this journey is about to get a whole lot worse and a whole lot weirder…
The first four Miriam Black novels are available now.