William "Bill" Petrocelli spent a few years as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of California and then as a poverty lawyer in Oakland, California, before going into private practice. For the past thirty years he and his wife Elaine have owned Book Passage, a highly successful independent bookstore in San Francisco and Corte Madera, California.
His first novel is The Circle of Thirteen, which begins with a mindless act of family violence and spans seven
decades, culminating in the desperate effort by Julia Moro, the
U.N. Security Director, to stop a major act of terror. Underlying the tale are themes of
poverty, political corruption, environmental disaster, and the backlash
against the rising role of women.
Bill stopped by to take some "Author R&R" here at In Reference to Murder, talking about his decision to "Tell the Story Backwards":
Give me a scene, and I felt I could nail it. I’d written a whole series of encounters between the characters in The Circle of Thirteen,
and after a lot of editing I thought they read well. Was I varying my
sentence lengths, as writing teachers suggest? You bet. I had long
sentences with dependent clauses, and they had sinuous phrases that
wrapped around the visceral images. And there were short ones, too.
Three-word sentences. Some two.
The scenes, I felt, all moved along nicely. I didn’t show my hand
too early, give away anything too soon. The key word was always at the
end of the sentence. The sentence with the most punch was at the end of
the paragraph. The last paragraph of each chapter left your hanging,
wondering what would come next.
Still, it was wrong. The scenes all had their share of tension. But
the overall story tended to lumber along from decade to decade, hoping
that the reader would follow the tale through the next phase, trusting
that he or she would know that it would all be resolved at the end. It
was too much to ask – even of me.
Then I saw the movie Milk, and I realized what was wrong. Director Gus Van Sant
did one crucial thing in that movie that made all the difference in the
world. He opened the story with the ending – the tragic assassination
of Supervisor Harvey Milk – and then spent the rest of the movie
bringing the audience back to that point. Even though I lived in San
Francisco and already knew how the story ended, this
telling-of-the-story-in-reverse had a dramatic impact on my appreciation
of the movie.
I went back to my keyboard with a new approach to the story. If I
started with the last scene – or, really, the almost last scene – the
reader could read all of the lead-up scenes with a new sense of urgency
and foreboding.
It was about that time that I borrowed from another writer as well.
(Borrow a little bit, and you are honoring the literary tradition;
borrow a lot, and you are a despicable plagiarizer. It’s sometimes a
fine line). In this case the writer was Robert Wilson, who won a Gold
Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association for A Small Death in Lisbon.
Wilson’s back-story covered several decades. But as he recounted it,
he alternated those scenes with a second, fast-moving narrative strand
that covered just a few weeks. He alternated back and forth between the
two narratives throughout the book, and In the end the two strands come
together with dramatic effect.
Borrowing a little here, borrowing a little there – I finally had what I wanted. The Circle of Thirteen
starts with a dramatic burst – a terrorist attack on the new United
Nations building where all the world’s leaders are gathered. And from
that point on the reader is able to follow the two narrative strands
back to that starting point.
Now, I felt, the story could really begin.
The Circle of Thirteen is available through all the online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. You can visit Bill via his website, or catch him at any of the upcoming events listed there as part of his book tour.
Comments