Blake Crouch Discusses Sound Science and Magic Boxes in Dark Matter

Your plotting in Dark Matter is so tightly done, especially the way you handle the release of information around Jason figuring out who he is and what the hell is going on. Do you start a project by plotting, or do you figure it out as you go along?
Well, the first thing I do is I try to come up with an idea that is big enough to warrant me spending a year—or in the case of this book, two years—working on it. I mean, it’s a huge investment of time and emotion and effort. So once I land on that general idea, I will start journaling in a notebook. It’s almost like a conversation I have with myself, and out of that journaling process, I’ll see a scene here, I’ll see a scene there, I’ll pick up a detail about a character or a setting. And then it all begins to coalesce and form a picture of what the book looks like. So, for instance, by the time I started writing Dark Matter, I pretty much knew where the book was going up until the beginning of the third act. I didn’t really know beyond that. I had an idea and I just kept writing until I got there. And then, during the writing process, halfway through the book I was on a plane and I just suddenly realized what the end was and what all these things should be and how everything should work out. So as long as I know two-thirds of the book, I can feel good about starting it.
The idea for this book is so massive, encompassing issues of trying to find your way home and fate and love. What corner of that came to you initially? What was the spark that kicked off the book?
I had been trying to write Dark Matter for like ten years, actually. But I had approached it through three different ideas that had all come at different stages. One was the idea of this box. I didn’t quite know what it did but I really liked the idea of this box and a hangar and I wasn’t sure what it did but it was sort of kept under wraps. Just a visual. I had this feeling—it wasn’t really a plot line but just a feeling—of a man being lost in time. I didn’t really know what that meant. I didn’t think I wanted to do a time travel book, but I liked the feeling of a man sort of adrift and he can’t find his way home, and I wasn’t even sure what that meant. And the third piece was [redacted because spoilers]. I wondered what would that look like, what would spring from that. And I tried to write all of those ideas separately at different times but no one seemed big enough to support the book. And when I realized, “Oh, that’s all part of one big book,” that’s when it all clicked for me.
So you kind of have a mind swimming with oddities and they sometimes curl up into a book?
Yes.
As I read Dark Matter—and Pines as well—I couldn’t help but run thought experiments on myself. Like, “What would I do in this situation?” Is playing with that part of your plotting process?
Oh, definitely. I love taking a character and raining holy hell down on them and seeing how they respond, how they react. It’s one of the things I do in almost all my books—my protagonist is put through a very stressful situation that tests their strength and their psychological acuity. That’s one of the core components of who I am as a writer.
Dark Matter concerns some pretty heady concepts. How concerned were you with the science in Dark Matter being sound, and what did you do to make sure it was?
I wanted it to be as sound as could be. The more you study quantum mechanics, the more crazy and incomprehensible it becomes. You truly do need a PhD in very high level math and science to understand it at a high, high level. But that wasn’t my goal, to have readers looking at equations and things like that. I wanted to get the gist of what quantum mechanics and the many worlds theory say about our world and where we live and the idea of choices. So I wrote the book I wanted to write and did the research that I could do, and when I was finished with the book I sent it to a professor at USC—Professor Johnson—and he read it. I don’t know if I sent him the whole book, but anything that had to do with science. Any time I was talking about Schrodinger’s cat or anything like that. I would send it to him and he would read it and say, “Well, maybe you should phrase it like that to be completely accurate.” Yeah, it’s theoretical. When you get to this level of science, a lot of it is theoretical. They’re extrapolating out about particle collisions—what those data readouts actually mean. So you get a little bit of leeway in terms of speculating what it all means.

Let’s talk a bit about Wayward Pines, or rather Pines. How does the world of the TV show look in terms of what you envisioned?
The TV show visually looks very much like I imagined in my head. I was particularly involved in the production of Wayward Pines Season 1, and we’re making Season 2 right now. So, the first thing we did when we started, when we went into production and got the green light, was I sent photos of a bunch of towns from Colorado and Idaho, places I’d been that looked like Wayward Pines in my head—because Wayward Pines is based in my mind on a town in Colorado called Ouray. It’s a beautiful place—it’s all Victorian houses. It’s the look of the cliffs that surround the town, and it’s amazing how close the final product looks to what’s in my head.
What’s the strangest origin story you have for something you’ve written?
Wayward Pines for sure. Seven or eight years ago I was on a long weekend in Ouray, Colorado. I’d come there a lot and I was trying to figure out what I was going to write about, and I was walking around in this valley. It looks just like Wayward Pines. Small, beautiful, surrounded by these cliffs. And I heard a phone ring in a house nearby, and then another phone ring—two of them, but my mind suddenly started going in a crazy direction. Like, what if every phone in every house started to ring, and people came out of their houses and they were chasing me for some reason, but every time I tried to leave town, whether in a car or on foot, they would either stop me or I’d find that there was no road out of town. And I went to this really paranoid place and I thought, “Well that’s cool. That’s something.” So I wrote it all down and then I had no idea what it was. Why are they acting this way? Why are they behaving so strangely? Why would anyone want to do that? But that was one of the moments of total lightning in a bottle inspiration and a crazy moment in my real life landing and becoming a book idea.

I love that. That’s like that slip of the mask, very Stepford Wives.
It is! In Stephen King’s book On Writing, and I totally believe this, he describes books as already existing beneath the surface. He’s like, the book is already out there, and the writer is just chiseling away, uncovering the fossil of what it is. Isn’t that a great book? I love that book. It just really supports the idea that all of these books already exist in our minds somewhere. And it’s just about dipping down into the subconscious.
So were you a kid writer? Do you remember?
Yeah, I wrote from very early on. And my first stories were these scary stories I’d tell my brother at night and try to scare him before he went to sleep.
The best inspiration there is. Do you remember some of the stories you wrote, what they were about?
There’s one called “The Castle on the Hill,” I probably have it printed out somewhere on old dot matrix printer. It was this neighborhood of fairly normal houses, but there was this kind of castle on a hill where a crazy mad scientist lived. And these two brothers, they woke up one morning and they weren’t in their house. They were actually in the castle, and this scientist was chasing them around. That’s what I remember of it. (My brother) loved it, though. He always asked me to tell him that story.
If you yourself had to get lost in a fictional world, what would you choose?
If I had to get lost in a fictional world? I would love to go with those Hemingway characters in The Sun Also Rises when they go on that trip in Spain and they go fishing. And they take the wine bottles and they put them in the river.
Don’t images like that stick with you for life?
And they’re staying at this inn and it’s really cold out and the wind’s blowing. It’s always been so vivid in my mind, that little piece of book.

What other kinds of books have stuck with you like that?
A lot of A Wrinkle in Time, especially that opening scene. I don’t know that I’d want to go there because it’s kind of scary, but it’s got the classic dark-and-stormy-night opening. I love that book. I don’t think I’d want to go into any fantasy worlds, though. Those get too crazy.
Well, Narnia’s okay.
It’s kind of okay, yeah. Which one is it, The Magician’s Nephew? With the world in the forest and all the pools?
Yeah, I love that book. I think it’s my favorite, that and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
I just reread The Magician’s Nephew. It’s actually a really funny book.
Oh, yeah. Uncle Andrew is hilarious. And the worst.
Yeah. It’s a very weird book. The first part is scary, but then it’s insane when they bring Jadis back into their world and she’s just losing her shit. It’s totally very weird, out of character for the rest of the books. But it’s one of my favorites.
Yeah, it’s kind of an outlier. Remember when Digory buries toffee and it grows into a toffee-fruit tree?
Yes.
That’s one of the fictional foods I dream about, even to this day.
Like the Turkish delight.

Right? And then you try it and you’re like, “Ew, what?” It’s one of the great lies of childhood. What other books you discovered a kid reader are stuck in your mind?
The Lord of the Rings, obviously, had a huge, huge impact on me. I read a lot of Hardy Boys, also. I liked the equation, that it was always the same but a little bit different. There’s something comforting about those books. I loved Cannery Row. I read really across genres. I always have. A big book for me, the first adult novel I read, was The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy. A great Southern writer who recently passed. That was the first big family saga I read. It’s like nothing I write. But it made such an impact on me that the first novel I tried to write was a big, badly done family saga.
And it never…?
No. It’s in a drawer. I tried. The world sent it back.
Do you have a person in your life who’s your first reader?
Yeah, it changes from project to project. I think in writing—especially in the early stages of a book—there’s always the desire to give out those early pages or to talk about your idea with someone. And sometimes that’s really helpful. But one of my best friends, Marcus Sakey, we’ll get together and brainstorm—we brainstormed Dark Matter here in Chicago a couple years ago and that’s where that book came from. But lately I’ve been trying to write a lot and get it down before sharing it. It takes the air out of the tires a little bit if you talk about it too early. It’s like, you’ve talked about it, what’s the point of writing it?

What books have you read lately that you loved?
I’m reading a really great novel. I guess it’s a bound manuscript. It’s coming out in a year. It’s called Three Years with the Rat, by Jay Hosking. It’s coming out in 2017. I just read Sleeping Giants, that was phenomenal. Marcus Sakey just finished his Brilliance trilogy with Written in Fire. It’s really great. What else am I reading right now? I’m reading scripts for Wayward Pines. The second season premieres in two weeks.
Are you involved in it?
Not in the writers’ room. I’m reading scripts and giving notes, but I’m not writing anything on the show. I wrote on the first season, and I feel like I have, in terms of what I’ve written, said everything I can say about Wayward Pines. There comes a point where in terms of writing new things, it’s time to move on, for me. But we have an amazing writers’ room turning out these incredible scripts, so.
What is it like, sitting in a room working with people on your stuff and hearing them bring new ideas to the table for it? Is that refreshing or strange?
Well, it can be both. A lot of times the ideas are great, and what’s great is when they get what the tone of the show is and what the characters are. Every show has an established identity, and then you play around in that space. And when you’re playing in that space and all the ideas are coming out of that, it’s not violating the ideas you’ve started with. It’s amazing. They’re coming up with stuff I never would have imagined.
That must be so weird and satisfying.
Very weird and satisfying.
I think we have time for one more question. I want to ask you because your plotting is awesome, who do you consider—especially in genre fiction—to be like the best plotters out there?
That’s interesting. The best plotters.

Or just the best “stay up till three in the morning reading them” writers?
Harlan Coben is just tough to beat when it comes to pure calling the shots and then totally doing something you did not expect. I think Lee Child keeps the pages absolutely racing. His books are so light on their feet to me. They just vanish. I don’t know how they do that. Someone said, “easy writing is hard writing.” When it’s easy, there are a lot of people who are like, “Oh, genre fiction. That’s easy to do.” That is the hardest thing to do: to write a book that’s light on its feet and the pages just go and go and go. It is sneaky how they do that. I still have not quite figured it out.
We disagree. Dark Matter goes on sale July 26, and is available for pre-order now. Its pages just go and go.