I’ve Always Been Drawn to Group Stories: A Guest Post by M.L. Rio
After the breakout success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, readers have been waiting with bated breath for M.L. Rio’s next project — and it’s finally here. Our Monthly Pick author has penned an exclusive essay for us on her writing process, what draws her to writing ensembles and the origins of Graveyard Shift, down below.
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Graveyard Shift: A Novella (B&N Exclusive Edition)
Graveyard Shift: A Novella (B&N Exclusive Edition)
By M. L. Rio
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Paperback
$14.99
$16.99
Sharp, gothic and gruesome, this graveyard has a secret to tell — and we can’t wait to uncover it.
Sharp, gothic and gruesome, this graveyard has a secret to tell — and we can’t wait to uncover it.
Writing is a largely solitary occupation. Every novel I’ve written—published or not—demanded not just hours but days, weeks, months, and sometimes years hunched over a desk. Most of my work happens after dark, when everyone else is asleep or simply off the clock and unlikely to interrupt. And while writers do have colleagues, the dozens of people who collaborate in the making of a book, it’s not always easy to find and befriend other writers. Unlike, say, a theatre troupe or a musical group, fiction doesn’t come with a built-in creative community. Being so much alone with your thoughts can be dangerous, bad for your mood and your sleep-wake cycle and your social life, but it’s necessary, too, to the work that we do. There’s no other way to untangle those thoughts and wrestle them into a narrative. Books can be a lonely business.
Maybe this is why I’ve always been drawn to group stories. Writing an ensemble means I’m never really alone with the work, even when I am: I have all my imaginary friends to keep me company. But I’ve also been an actor, and I’ve been a music writer; I spent twelve years in academia, where you won’t survive without your cohort, but the competition just might kill you. No family is lacking drama—even chosen ones. Human beings are messy and complicated and full of contradictions. As the narrator of my first novel, If We Were Villains, remarks, when you throw them all together it’s a kind of alchemy: sometimes you get gold, sometimes disaster.
When I started work on Graveyard Shift, I didn’t have much but the concept: five people meeting in the cemetery to share a cigarette in the lonely midnight hours. I gave them a mystery to investigate without knowing the answers myself. The characters and the story took shape in tandem until I had a mystery that only these five people—with their strengths and their weaknesses, their unique personalities and “weird superpowers,” as Edie puts it—could solve. What grew out of this exercise was an unlikely but (mostly) likable band of misfits who butt heads as often as they put their heads together. You need a little friction to make sparks fly.
Casting, like alchemy, is all about chemistry. You never quite know how a book will work until you put the characters together on the page. Writing ensembles not only offers some solace from the solitude of writing, but multiplies the narrative possibilities: with so many different personalities in the room, absolutely anything can happen.
Photo credit Cait Brady