Tiny Little Troubles started life as a mere tickling, far back in my head. It was like a generalized hunger that gradually becomes a craving for something very specific. Once you realize what it is, you’ve just gotta have it.
What I came to crave was a caper novel, that subgenre of crime novel about robbing from difficult or improbable places: a racetrack, a casino, Fort Knox.
The thing that really fetched me about this subgenre was the guy with the big idea, the criminal mastermind who figures out a way to steal something that no one has ever thought of or dared try before.
This inspired guy--and I only mean to praise him here, really--is like a poet, someone who sees things others miss, and hears the song of the language.
Only, of course, to this guy the thing everyone has missed is how to steal something, and the song is the sound of money, coins falling on a stone floor.
But my problem was that I wanted to write a novel that had already been written. Now I have been known to struggle with the urge to buy books I know I already own, just because I liked them so well. Not new or more attractive editions, the very same books. I don’t let myself do this, but the feeling is there and has to be dealt with.
But writing a novel that had already been written was, aside from the daunting legal issues, just too Borgesian to contemplate.
Plus there was the part where no one would read it.
So I tried to think of a way to update the caper novel. I needed a new Fort Knox, and a new stack of gold ingots. That’s what I needed: a new McGuffin.
I found it in nanotechnology (as faithful readers of this blogweek already know). But I found that once I had my nanobots, I had a lot of trouble keeping them in the box. I wanted to write a crime novel, not a science fiction novel. I was interested in theft, the means and motivations of. But once I had introduced the science-fiction McGuffin of nanoscale robots, the whole novel began to be pushed out of shape. The bots, like movie stars everywhere, wanted the whole book to be about them. They were ready for their close-up, and kept demanding more camera time than I wanted to give them.
This raised some interesting questions about genre boundaries, and how far you can go in crossing them before you pop through entirely into another genre. After setting up what I hoped were the minimum plausibility requirements for the technology, I backed off. I meant to keep things criminal; I wasn’t especially interested in how the things worked, or what effect (besides total and absolute destruction) they would have on the society around them.
The bots were just a bag of pearls to me. But they kept wanting to be more, and dragged the novel off in other directions I then had to prune back. It was exhausting.
Finally I got fed up and sent them off to destroy a small but very corrupt dictatorship (fictional) in southeast Asia. This made everybody happy. The bots got to show off their superior destructive capacities, and (since most of the destruction took place off screen as it were) I got to keep the focus on the criminals and their victims.
It was a close call, though.
I’d like to thank Courtney Fischer and all the folks at St. Martin’s for allowing me a whole week to blather on about my novel at a length and a level of detail that would get me 86’d from most bars and cafes. It’s been a blast.
