I am very pleased to welcome Garrett Addison to Fiction Favorites. He is the author of Minions and The Traveller and a Rave Reviews Book Club Spotlight Author. As a Spotlight author Garrett will be touring some interesting blogs this week. (yes mine included) Go here to see the rest of his tour. Welcome Garrett.

Why ‘The Traveller’?

You ask how or why I came to write ‘The Traveller’?  I’d actually finished my first novel, ‘Minions’ after many months of late night writing.  It was done and I knew I needed to lock it away in a drawer so I could effectively forget about it so as to enable me to re-read it and start editing with a fresh perspective.

I liken it to a ‘now what?’ moment.  Anyone who doesn’t write would probably think it was time to sit back and relax after a period of frenetic activity, but the reality was that I’d established such a routine that I was simple unable to stop writing.  So what was I to do?  My novel was too fresh in my head to start editing, and I hadn’t yet spared a thought as to what my next project would be, so I committed to some professional development.  I listened to a mass of podcasts about all aspects of the writing craft, read a lot and tried some things, but really I was just wasting time.  Funnily enough, amongst the podcasts I’d listened to was one espousing the virtues of ‘writing what you know’.

Not long afterwards, I found myself on a business trip.  I was away from my family, travelling for work and after dinner my mind drifted into wondering about what I was missing at home.   ‘Writing what I know’ at that very moment amounted to a series of anecdotes about work travel.  Really, I was doing little more than putting pen to paper because I couldn’t help myself, but it passed the time between beverages.  After the meal, I was left with what amounted to a rant and some observations for the un-initiated about what travelling with work is like.  I wondered if there was a story in there, but it seemed like a long shot to take a few unrelated tales and extend them into a novel.

Then it happened on the return flight.  I looked at what I’d written and thought of the predictability of a life when travelling and thought about what might make this trip less like every other trip.  It got me thinking.  What if this trip wasn’t like the others?  What if elusive success was suddenly possible?  What would I get up to … what could I get up to?  Over the space of many frequent flyer miles and a few time zones, my travellers’ rant had turned into a story of one man being different to his usual self.

Words continued to flow over the weekend after my return until I’d written what I saw as being the shell of a good story.  Still, after a fast start it still took many months of rewriting to get right because there was a huge difference between that first draft and the finished product.  The characters needed to be developed, I couldn’t decide between first and third person perspectives, there was too much sex (yes, that is possible) and I needed to distil the real story from a mass of conflicting sub-plots.  I got there in the end.

So there it is.  Sometimes you just need to write what you know.

Follow Garrett online:

Twitter – https://twitter.com/garrettaddison

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/garrettaddisonauthor

Goodreads – http://www.goodreads.com/GarrettAddison/

Website – http://www.garrettaddison.com/

Amazon Book Links:

The Traveller – http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AW4EP8W/

Minions – http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AW4EP8W/