Creating Demon Rising

𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸 – 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗲 𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘀?

aIt has been quite a while since I started writing Demon Rising; quite a while indeed. Over a decade ago, I sat down to begin my typing, but life jumped in my way many. Believe it or not, the idea for a fantasy zombie apocalypse came to me a long time before Walking Dead came onto the screens, the TV series causing zombie mania, and that was 12 years ago. I’d like to think my mind was one step ahead!

I’ve always looked for something different to write in my stories and although one advice giver on YouTube stated you’ll never get something unique in writing (quite right), I came up with techniques the combination of which I hoped would make it special. My first was the idea of a fantasy zombie apocalypse. I’d played Warhammer as a kid and teen so there’s always been zombie armies in my life, but what about that slow build up, infection, survival of the fittest style film that Night of the Living Dead brought into the world? I’d never really seen books or films in this area (though I’d guess there are) so it seems a direction to go in.

My next take was first person. It’s one of the trickier ways of writing, giving too many ‘I did’, ‘I walked’ and ‘I hated’ can really kill the buzz, but that made it more of a challenge. Possibly I regretted this after realising just how often you think in the third person when storytelling. As it happens, the style worked out pretty well with my beta readers so I can be fairly proud in that sense.

Another idea was to do each chapter from more than one point of view. There were questions to be asked about this; how many people should they be viewed from; is each chapter repeated, but from other characters thought; is any text repeated. I slowly answered these questions as I thought about it, beginning to develop a style that I really enjoyed and believed was different. It turns out that A Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin had thought of it long, long before I did and I’m guessing a lot more have done it before and since. With hindsight, it seems pretty obvious that this would be the case.

The style turned out pretty well. For most of the book there were 5000 words per chapter, so doing about 1000 words per character seemed to work out nice. At the start, with fewer characters, some came up more than once but the sequence of events continued, rather than being repeated. As one of my beta readers said: first person is hard to do, but because I’d done a slight overlap between each character (about a paragraph) it made it clear and easy to follow.

My last idea was to throw supernatural in as well. I’d read the Dresden series, where the wizard-detective was set in the real that had supernatural elements. However, they weren’t plodding around your everyday life or hidden in the shadows of secret organisations like in Underworld. I went for such a style where the world I wrote in (that of a 17th – 19th century style with no gunpowder weapons) didn’t realise there were supernatural creatures, and so the events becomes a shock to most of its people. It brought another angle that turned into a style I love.

Anyway, I hope these differences make you interested and pull you towards trying the book. I’d like to think it is unique, or at least the combination of ideas is, and it will draw you in. My beta readers certainly haven’t criticised the style, so I hope you won’t too. Remember, Demon Rising will be free when it comes out, so keep your eyes open and give it a go. Enjoy.

If you want to know more about this up and coming novel, you can like my page on facebook to get tit-bits, read about the characters, and see the history of the book’s world. https://www.facebook.com/HywelGriffithsAuthor

Tags: apocolypse, author, book, fantasy, writing, zombie