As a developmental editor, I’ve worked with many authors in all phases of their career in nearly every genre. In this occasional series, I’m sitting down with an author to talk about their approach to writing, editing, and publishing.
Please welcome Shadows author Lisa J. Morgan as we discuss the challenges she faced during revision, the trouble in developing a narrative that spans decades, how she went about worldbuilding urban fantasy, and more.
Lisa J. Morgan is the author of Closer to the Sun, a new series that combines Urban Fantasy, Contemporary Romance, and Suspense. A lifelong lover of fantasy, and a new fan of romance, she returned to writing novels after a long sojourn in the corporate world. Now, with a head full of books and a heart full of characters, she’s obsessed with getting them down on the page and out into the world, hopefully before they take over completely. @lisajmorganbooks
Jackie Cangro: Congratulations on publishing your second novel, Shadows! I know this is book two in a series. What inspired the premise of the story, and how did you develop the initial concept into a full-fledged series? How do you keep the details straight as the series unfolds?
Lisa J. Morgan: Thank you! I’m very excited to have it out in the world!
For me, it starts with the characters, and more specifically, the relationships between them. The very first inkling of the very first story came from a dynamic I wanted to play with—a natural tension between someone who is closed off and pretending to be emotionless and someone who can see straight through them. Book one evolved in flashes of scenes, like little vignettes or clips from a movie trailer, that were fundamental to the evolution of the characters and their relationship. The plot began as a way to move the characters from one of these scenes to the next, and the world naturally started to draw itself around them.
Each novel I have planned out sprouted organically from the original. A character stepped into the story to fill a space I needed filled, and then that person’s story began to branch out and grow on its own. And inevitably, I always fall a little bit in love with each of my characters, and I need to bring them to life. The stories unfurl naturally from them.
A lot of my best moments come from one character turning to another one in my head and saying something I didn’t expect. That may sound a bit unhinged, but it boils down to this: know your characters, stay true to them, and let the rest unfold from there.
JC: The "Closer to the Sun" series is urban fantasy. How did you develop your characters' supernatural abilities? Was it something that came to you immediately or something that you had to refine during revision?
LJM: I’ve pulled a lot from existing literature—telekinetics and clairvoyants aren’t anything new—but then tried to ground those abilities in the modern world. There are tons of stories about larger-than-life superheroes and villains with special abilities, but often those characters are two-dimensional and idealized. I wanted real people, complicated, flawed, and human.
To me, Urban Fantasy is about mixing the ordinary with the extraordinary. There’s something special in the idea that the real world around us has magic in it. It’s easier to connect with characters and settings that are familiar. So I tried to bridge the gap between the two, and make the fantastical element as realistic as possible. Of course a telekinetic would study physics. And a healer would go to medical school. And what would a clairvoyant do for a living? Disaster prevention.
The closer I pulled the supernatural elements toward reality, the more interesting the characters became. If these are real people, with flaws and weaknesses, what does it do to them to grow up with this ability? How does it change and shape their lives and the people they become as a result?
An empath is going to blow up all of their relationships because they don’t know how to give their partner space. A clairvoyant who can see the future is going to blame themselves for every bad thing that happens. The super-intelligent who can’t get anyone to listen to them is going to become frustrated and bitter. And the person who can kill with a thought is going to rely on force to solve all their problems.
JC: Diana, a powerful telekinetic, is the protagonist of Shadows. Can you share a bit about how you developed her personality and motivation?
LJM: The Diana that we see in Shattered (book one) is a very different person than the one she starts out as in Shadows. When we meet her, Diana appears hard and emotionless, and utterly dedicated to her job. Her humanizing moment, the point at which she becomes a fully realized character, is when we see past that mask to the person beneath, and begin to wonder how she got that way. I wanted to go back and show where she started and how she evolved into the closed-off person she was by the present of the first book.
This was one of those times where everything stemmed from one character saying something unexpected to another. Two stock characters—the mysterious stranger and the hard-as-nails boss—unexpectedly had a history together. A very noir-like moment unfolded, ex-partners and lovers reunited many years later. And as I do, I pulled that back toward the real and the human, and a story of immense pain and betrayal emerged.
In order to heighten the emotional impact of that story, Diana had to be slow to trust and reluctant to rely on another person, so that when all of that was ripped away, she was utterly devastated. The deeper the pain, the more emotionally satisfying the ending is when you finally get there. Ultimately, Diana was shaped by pain.
JC: Were there any specific challenges or surprises you encountered while writing Shadows?
LJM: Absolutely. The main challenge was chronology. We had the present of the story we knew from book one, in the modern day. And then we had these two characters who had a deep history, and that history had to be part of the story I was telling in the present. So that poses a challenge—do you weave it into the present as backstory? Do you jump back and forth between timelines? Or do you go back to the beginning and tell it chronologically from the moment they meet? There were walls of post-it notes with plot points and emotional touchpoints involved in that decision.
Ultimately, there was too much history between them to make it work as backstory to the real story in the present—the backstory was the real story, not an afterthought. I’ve seen books that make the dual timeline work, but I didn’t think the stories would line up in a way that would be satisfying to the reader or paced correctly. So I chose to jump back twenty-three years and split the story into three sections set in 1995, 2003, and 2018, and on this side of it, I feel confident that was the right choice.
JC: As a developmental editor, I'm always curious about the revision process. Can you talk about how you approach revising your draft? How do you know when it's "ready" for publication?
LJM: Once a complete draft of a story is written, major revisions have consequences backwards and forwards through the narrative, and you have to address them, and see how those changes ripple out and change other things you didn’t realize were connected. I start at the core of the change, write the new version, and then work in both directions to reconcile the rest of the story.
The metaphor I have in my head for this is drawn from knitting. I think of it as weaving in the ends—tucking the dangling strings of the changed section backwards and forwards on either side and smoothing them out to be invisible in the finished piece. It’s essentially the same principle as Chekhov’s gun, in different words.
Inevitably, any major change is going to break something else, so once I have the changes in, I do several passes back through the story to see what does and does not still make sense in the new version. Which leads into the answer to the next question.
BONUS QUESTIONS
In the bonus questions for paid subscribers, Lisa offers her a piece of writing advice that she found helpful and the challenges in writing a narrative with large gaps in time.