L.A. Starks

Why Write? A Story from the Trenches

For LeConte Publishing website

By L. A. Starks, author of the Lynn Dayton thriller series

 When Bill Carl invited me to write about creativity, I was elated and despairing. Elated at reprising satisfaction I’ve gained from writing thrillers for publication by small publishers, being recognized with writing and professional awards, and most of all, connecting with so many readers. Despairing because each person is differently motivated. Providing useful generalizations is a challenge.

Writing is hard. Writing well is harder. Writing well and getting commercially published—particularly in print--is far rarer than it should be.

So, with that warning—why did I write? Why should you?

Introduce yourself and your books. L. A. Starks. I write the Lynn Dayton energy thriller series—three books so far and I’m working on the fourth. They’re global energy thrillers with strong mystery subplots.

*13 Days, The Pythagoras Conspiracy, Lynn Dayton Thriller #1

*Strike Price, Lynn Dayton Thriller #2

*The Second Law, Lynn Dayton Thriller #3

*work in progress, Lynn Dayton Thriller #4

Growing up in a small town in northern Oklahoma with supportive parents, I gained the inspiration to try anything, learn anything. Much has been written about the limitlessness of the Great Plains, and yes, it was a blue sky I saw and felt every day. It was there I first realized I could pursue the two different tracks that interested me so much: engineering and fiction writing.

Ultimately, I learned the two careers are not oppositional but complementary: in both I am constantly judging, working with, and writing about risk. Engineering and writing share traits of exactness unto OCD (numbers and words) and megalomania. (Megalomania=I can figure out how to fix anything; I can figure out how to write anything.)

In this small town, my global sense developed by meeting scientists and engineers from around the world—Poland, Japan, or Belgium. Developing a global sense helped me understand the world, useful for writing thrillers. Energy is an international business; thrillers are written with an international perspective.

So, from this small town, I learned I could try anything. The can-do/will-do positive attitude of engineers and small towns is reflected in my books.

Why do I write? I’m first a reader. Authors are my rock stars.

And the simple non-explanation: I write because I must. We yearn to communicate.

I wanted to portray realistic characters seldom found in fiction, from Native American businesspeople to engineers from all backgrounds to brilliant high-tech computer scientists from India. Thrillers, with an overlay of mystery and suspense, are the genres in which I create these characters.

The global energy business features high-action, high-power (wars), high-touch, high-drama, high-stakes, high-dollar (trillions), and high cultural-conflict scenarios, all of which drive thriller plots.

Take cultural conflict, for example. Places limn stories of the people who live there. From my days selling (invisible, odorless) natural gas, I learned about customers by traveling to see them, be it winters in the Iowa farm belt, steel foundries in Pennsylvania, clay companies in the red hills of Georgia, or gargantuan Gulf Coast chemical plants. Energy is important to everyone everywhere. So, I literally have considerable latitude in my choice of settings. Any ocean or country you name, I can set scenes there.

What inspired me to write this particular series? The real-world energy business is full of fascinating people, and I didn’t see them represented in fiction except as one-dimensional, stereotypical villains. Yet energy is the hidden, massive factor in all we do, from buying truck-farm lettuce to traveling cross-country by airplane to keeping premature babies alive by powering hospitals.

I was convinced that stories needed to be told. No one else was telling them.

Indeed, because I am thinking about conflict and risks—what can go wrong--what I write can be predictive, prescient. At times I feel like Cassandra.

Real-life stories behind your books? With my training and experience in engineering and finance, I inhabit the world of my books. I am familiar with its risks. The risks are not just the trillion-dollar global stakes but more importantly, how lives of millions or billions of people can be impacted by just a few wrong moves. Risks can be as small as being trapped on a narrow walkway inside a barred-from-the-outside cooling tower or as massive as a deadly ammonium nitrate (fertilizer) explosion.

Example of your motivation to finish and push through to publication?

One example, critically, is STRIKE PRICE, Lynn Dayton Thriller #2. This book is dedicated to the memory of my younger sister, who died from metastatic breast cancer. I stopped writing for about two years to spend time with her. After her death, it was difficult to resume writing. I pushed through to completion precisely because I’d promised myself this was her book.

 In the first book in the series, 13 DAYS: THE PYTHAGORAS CONSPIRACY, there was a character my sister felt deserved a different fate. Naturally, I took that into account when I wrote STRIKE PRICE.  

YOUR WRITING AND CREATIVITY

First Principles Find the ways in which you best communicate and create—the ways most satisfying to you and most meaningful and easily understood by others. This can be making videos, singing, recording podcasts, composing music, taking photos, painting, sculpting, dancing, or writing, to name a few examples.

An author’s or creator’s first obligation is to herself or himself—to get the words down, the sketch drawn, the vision planned, the score composed.

Your second obligation as a creator is to your readers, viewers, listeners. This is where training, mentoring, and editing come in. You need the second set of eyes, the third pair of ears.

I cannot count the revisions I made to my first book, 13 DAYS: THE PYTHAGORAS CONSPIRACY. (Although to be fair, this is partly because without an outline, I wrote too many wayward tangents. Writing with or without an outline is a choice all authors make. I have since changed my approach.)

Yet it was critical that others, first readers and editors, read this and my subsequent books. Editing is part of the process. First readers are like audience samples—an alert first reader catches many issues an author simply can’t. Conversely, yet as importantly, an experienced professional editor has read many books like yours. She or he understands what you are trying to say and helps you say it more clearly and meaningfully.

Dealing with creative block? The best spur is a deadline. The best environment is a quiet space with as little internet connectivity as possible.

Every parent has the skills?  Anyone who’s raised children has enough experience to write thrillers. Having children, especially small children, means you’re always thinking about what can go wrong or when your kids are older, their narrow escapes.

Similarly, Plot Keys: Emotion. (“Emotion” sounds obvious, but remember I’m joined at the hip with my engineering training). Family. I paraphrase- a famous author said, “all great stories are about family.”

Write what you know? Sure. But second, write about what you don’t know yet find interesting. Third, write about what you THINK you know—you’ll find far more depth than you initially imagined. For example, in writing STRIKE PRICE I knew the Cherokee Nation was significant in Oklahoma history, culture, politics, and business with far more agency and power than most realize, but even I didn’t know the tribe’s budget was $3.5 billion.

Another creativity trick: Turn off the negative meta-voices. Agents and publishers are in the rejection business and reject books for all kinds of reasons. It is especially important to separate story and writing quality (and marketability) factors from a given publisher’s political platform. For example, the “bad oil/good renewables” myth (in fact, all energy is equally dirty and equally good) is monolithic in publishing—even fiction! Early on, an agent told me I could only get commercially published by making monsters of all my characters, which both contradicted my experience and would have made boring reading. For a long list of reasons—especially because most of the people on the globe suffer energy poverty—my expertise informs my books differently from this agent’s view.

Edit for reader interest: In early drafts, it’s vital I like what I am writing. During revisions, translating characters, plot, and storyline flow to appeal to readers is key. I use dialect, jargon, and foreign phrases as approaches to give characters personality and scenes credibility. However, as much fun as coded tech words are, I only want to add context and color. I don’t want to pull readers out of the story.

What about those edited-out wayward tangents? Keep them on file somewhere else. They may not fit your current work but they can become stories or characters in your next.

Tell us two secrets from one of your books. Doppelgangers. A doppelganger is “an apparition of double of a living person.” As it turns out, I have a doppelganger for whom I am occasionally mistaken. There are two sets of doppelgangers in THE SECOND LAW. I didn’t want actual twins, but instead two somewhat-similar people who take different paths.

The second secret is (yes) bacon can be used as a weapon.

 L. A. Starks’ thrillers are available through Amazon (print and Kindle), Barnes & Noble (print), and independent bookstores (print).

YouTube 1-minute videos and buy links:

13 Days: The Pythagoras Conspiracy – L.A. Starks Books (lastarksbooks.com)

Strike Price – L.A. Starks Books (lastarksbooks.com)

The Second Law – L.A. Starks Books (lastarksbooks.com)

Website, including free newsletter signup: L.A. Starks Books – the author of the Lynn Dayton thriller series (lastarksbooks.com)