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Hello Inklings!

This month’s Ink Splat Author Interview features J.R. Potter, award-winning author of Thomas Creeper and the Gloomsbury Secret, and the forthcoming Ragtag: City of Ash and Fire.

J.R. Potter is not only an author, but also an illustrator and songwriter, and in his interview, we discuss how he creates suspense, where he gets his inspiration, and how he navigates creative blocks. You’ll find lots of inspiration in this interview and excellent strategies to try.

Learn more about J.R. Potter at jamesrobertpotter.com.

 

Writing Challenge

Marooned for the Summer

It’s summer so maybe this one might be fun. Here’s a story I’ve always wanted to write, so let’s see how you play with it. 

Your character has been marooned with a weird aunt at their house for the summer. They have an old video game system that’s thirty years old that sometimes works, but all the games are lame. There’s a little free library in town but it never seems to open during the hours posted on its doors. As for new friends, it’s looking like slim pickings. The only other family with kids down the street are new and don’t speak English. 

At the end of the street, there’s an overgrown field where the cicadas buzz so loud you need earplugs to block out the sound.

Late one afternoon, after exploring all the rooms in their aunt’s house, your character wanders down to the end of the block and stumbles on a bewildering scene. The cicadas in the trees swarm together and funnel down to form . . . the shape of a figure. The figure waves to you, beckoning you to follow them through the high grass. Your character screams and runs back to the house. 

Days pass. One morning, in the bleary, blue light of early dawn, the cicadas swarm again, this time right outside your character’s window. They beat against the window with their hundreds of wings and then form into words:

Daniel Reaper

Who is Daniel Reaper? Who is the cicada figure? What is your character going to do about it?

TIPS: Maybe start with giving your character a name and a backstory. Then start laying out this town and giving it a name. Think about what the street looks like (we know there’s an overgrown field at the end, but what else do you see?). Is Daniel Reaper a real name? Where would your character go to investigate that name? Or maybe it’s a nickname. We give heroes and villains nicknames: Jack the Ripper, Magic Johnson, The Joker (for Nikola Jokić. Sorry for all the basketball references, I’m a big basketball fan!). Did Daniel Reaper somehow curse/enchant them? Where they friends? Enemies? Boyfriends? There are no rules here. Scare yourself, make yourself laugh, create magic, and all of those things your reader will feel and will want to follow you wherever you take the story.


You have created a mystery series called THOMAS CREEPER. How do you approach creating suspense for these novels in your writing process?

My answer may seem very long-winded, but I promise there’s a method to my madness!

I’m very interested in the contrasts between films and novels. In many ways, suspense is easier to create in films. The king of suspense, the great director Alfred Hitchcock, built suspense by amplifying what you don’t see on the screen. He tapped into our mind-scape of paranoia and anxiety, because this interior world can be more crippling and consuming than seeing an external source of terror (monster, madman, ghost, etc.). Likewise, Stephen King has been recorded with saying the most frightening thing he can imagine is waking up in his bed and hearing the lock on his front door turn and footsteps sounding through his house—all non-visual terrors. 

As writers, we don’t have a screen to play with, but a portal (a book!). And here’s the great news: we can go deeper than film. There is a delicate relationship between writer and reader, and it’s based on trust. If you can establish a believable world inside your story portal—and this doesn’t mean the world has to be real, it can be outer space or your own magical world—and you fill that world with quirky, dynamic, and sympathetic characters, the reader will follow you anywhere you go. So, for me, it all begins with trust. Even if you are throwing your reader into the middle of the action (in medias res)—say, a character is falling out of a window or a plane, or is struggling underwater with Houdini-like chains—you can still establish trust by describing the terror of the scene with clarity and immediacy (“I could almost taste the morning fog as I tumbled out the third story window”; “The world above the water was an oily, shimmery gasp of hope, and I punched and clawed up through the seaweed to reach it”). If you do your job right and respect the reader’s intelligence, they’ll be game for the rest of the thrill ride.   

In the Thomas Creeper series, I made a conscious effort to make the town of Gloomsbury a character, a kind of sleeping monster that wakes up every now and then. It oozes and collapses in places (sinkholes!); it’s shrouded in mist, though its history is even more mysterious. The dangers that fill my little world of Gloomsbury create a sort of surface tension that’s always there and raises the stakes so to speak. As far as plot tension goes, I often fall back on British mystery author M.R. James’s model which, poorly summed up, is this: let your reader meet your characters in their most comfortable setting with their feet up (not literally, but relaxed, without a care in the world); then, little by little, introduce the menace of the story until it holds the attention for the rest of the story. As a mortician’s apprentice, young Thomas Creeper is around terrifying things all the time. But what’s more terrifying than the dead? The undead! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Do you have any favorite books or authors that inspire you? We read that you have an appreciation for John Bellairs. Has he inspired your writing and illustrations? If so, how? 

The amazing middle grade mysteries of John Bellairs came into my life at the right time and have never left. I was probably eight or nine and my dad brought home a copy of The Mummy, The Will, and The Crypt from our hometown library. The cover by the late-great Edward Gorey floored me. I first read these books as entertainment not knowing that they would provide the foundation for me later as a writer of middle grade mysteries. Bellairs writes about a world that’s very different from ours—1950s America—and yet his characters are so sympathetic and colorful they are timeless. He respects young people’s intelligence and feelings and his heroes and heroines reflect that. He also respects the elderly, often teaming a middle school character with an old professor or librarian. Other authors who inspire me in the spooky middle grade and YA genres are Rick Yancey and his incredible Monstrumologist series (the found diaries of an apprentice to a monster collector!); Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood & Co. books that show us an alternative London where ghosts are appearing and only young people can see them—and battle them; and, lastly, Neil Gaiman’s masterpieces like The Graveyard Book and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. For illustration inspiration, I’m all over the map: a heavy dose of early influences from Calvin & Hobbes, Where’s Waldo, and Roald Dahl’s collaborator Quentin Blake; to comic books and graphic novels like Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and Marc Silvestri’s work on X-Men and Wolverine. Most recently, I’m obsessed with the collaboration between Skottie Young and Jorge Corona in their brilliant dystopian series for Image Comics Middlewest as well as their darker story about a different kind of haunted house in The Me You Love in the Dark. If your library subscribes to the Hoopla app, your library card can get you access to hundreds of great comics. Libraries rule! I’m lucky to work in a library here in Virginia, and it’s a magical place. 

Did you ever get stuck along the way as you drafted? Do you have advice for other writers about what to do when they get stuck?

I get stuck all the time. Sometimes you are “getting in your own way.” Muddying things up. The million dollar question is: how do you know when you are muddying things up? There’s a couple ways you can get un-muddied. If you have a beta reader group—a group of trusted readers who don’t just give you potty praise but helpful, constructive feedback—share with them where you think your story is getting lost or muddy. Maybe five people will tell you five different things; but if three out of five tell you the same thing, that can be revealing. My other trick sounds silly but it works: I go for a run. Physical activity puts the body into focus and allows the unconscious mind to keep working. You may find that stepping away from your computer and getting a change of scenery for a bit may solve your problem. A lot of my plot points I work out on long runs and walks. Find your own system of stepping away and coming back and stick with it. I promise you’ll get great results. 

What’s your next project? 

I have so many projects going at once. It can be a problem because there are only so many hours in the day. But my next big project is a new series about a middle school robotics inventor named Kirby Hart who notices something going wrong in his hometown. Something is moving through the town’s water system and reforming inside people’s houses. It will be up to Kirby and his new next-door neighbor Aisha to use Kirby’s inventions to battle the creatures that are flowing through their town, obviously hunting for someone or something. This will be my first series set in present America with all its challenges. I don’t like political books. Even if I agree with the philosophy and ethics a writer is trying to express, it pulls me out of the story when I’m aware that they have agenda (remember what I said earlier about trust?). What I do love are underdogs. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The town Kirby and Aisha live in is pulling itself apart at the seams over its political identity. I want to show them dealing with that and still finding their own voices in all that shouting. My heart goes out to young people today who are seeing adults behaving badly and not solving any problems but creating more of them. Like Thomas Creeper, I want to communicate that if young people can find their voice and overcome adversity—supernatural, real, or both—than they can do anything. Their eyes are clearer and sharper than ours. We have to trust and respect them to see past our shortcomings and find new, innovative solutions to fixing this broken world. 

A special thank you to J. R. Potter for sharing with us! 

Jamie Potter, who goes by the stuffy pen name J.R. Potter, has somehow stumbled into living his childhood dream . . .

A chance encounter with the gothic mysteries of the late-great John Bellairs as a child would open a door that would never be closed again. Alongside the enchanting illustrations of Bellairs’s collaborator, Edward Gorey, an early masterclass was given on bringing terror, humor, and heart to life on the page. And here we are . . . thirty years later.

Potter is the award-winning author and illustrator of the Thomas Creeper mystery series about a reluctant thirteen-year-old mortician’s apprentice turned detective for the dead. The novel is now carried in libraries across the world from San Jose to Singapore and part of three teaching curricula in the United States and the Dominican Republic. Thomas Creeper and the Purple Corpse, the sequel to Potter’s debut, was shortlisted for the 2023 Stoker Award for Young Adult Fiction. His graphic novel work has been published by Image Comics, and his short fiction has been collected in various speculative fiction anthologies. His third novel for teens Ragtag: City of Ash and Fire, a cyberpunk fairy tale, hits shelves in early September 2024. When not writing about ghosts with vendettas or teenage heroines navigating American wastelands with jet packs, Potter writes and illustrates fiction for educational publishers Pioneer Valley Books and Heinemann Publishing, helping boost literacy, empathy, and wonder in schools across the world.

And when he’s not doing any of these fun things, he’s writing and playing music, another early love. His recent solo record Love Manifesto can be streamed on Spotify and Apple Music along with two records with his partner Amy in their Americana band The Crooked Angels.

Check out J. R.’s book and all of our recent Ink Splat authors’ works at our Bookshop.org Store.

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