While Identity is not my first attempt at a novel length story, it is my first successful attempt. By sucessful attempt, I mean that I finished the story and the people who read it seemed to like it and encouraged me to write more.
I wrote this story one chapter at a time and sent each chapter, in weekly installments, to an email list of about twenty or thirty people. Some of those readers would send back critiques for which I am very grateful. If you are trying to learn how to write, it does you no good if everyone likes everything that you write. It is those harsh, but well meant, critisisms that help you hone your writing.
Delivering a story one chapter at a time as you write it, introduces several interesting challenges. When I began, I had no idea where the story would go. As the chapters progressed, I began to weave together a loose plot. There are some things in the story that tie together very nicely, but the truth is that it was just luck. Sometimes as I was writing, I would throw something in hoping that it would be useful later. And more often than not, it would turn out to be useful.
It is also a bit of a challenge to have to live with things that you did earlier in the story. You think - Oh, if only I had done this or that, the story would work a lot better. That is what rewrites are for. But when you send out the chapters as you write them, you have to live with what has gone before. It is sometimes more of a creative challenge to work with what you have, then it is to go back and change earlier chapters.
Finally, when I began writing this story, I knew that I was sending it out to people who were very busy and received a lot of email. So, in order to keep their attention, I limited each chapter to a thousand words (roughly) and ended each chapter on an unresolved note hoping that they would look forward to the next chapter. This technique seemed to work pretty well. However, when reading the story through in a continuous fashion, the chapters seems to be a little choppy. Hopefully, the online presentation will reduce this problem. But the real solution is a rewrite. Since it is much more fun to write than rewrite, I am leaving the story as it is.
One more interesting point about this story is that most of the characters are based on real people. Since this was my first novel length story, I needed to use real people as the basis for my characters. Now, I can create them from whole cloth, but I've also had a bit more practice. Nonetheless, it made the story more interesting for those who were actually in the story. I suppose that a disclaimer is in order here. Just because I based a character on a real person does not mean that the character represents what I think of that person. In many, if not most (and probably all) cases, the characters quickly diverged from the people they were based upon. One of the things I learned in the process of writing this story is that characters create themselves and the author has a whole lot less control over character development than one might think. Nonetheless, just for the fun of the people who so graciously allowed me to use their persona as clay, I will identify the people upon whom the characters are based.
Identity is the first of the Thaddeus Wentworth mysteries. Like many detective stories it is written from a first person perspective.
I hope you enjoy the story.
John M. Artz
December 2000