Out of all my writings so far, Death’s Assistant has been the darkest subject wise. I started coming up with the plot line when I was in middle school, and it was even darker then than what was later released. Several of the people who have read these stories have wondered how I came up with something so dark at such a young age. The answer is very simple; I wrote about what was going on around me.
I may not have been around any shape shifters who were fighting the drug trade and other crimes, but I was very much aware of the crimes that were around me in the little town I grew up in. The town that was the setting of the Death’s Assistant novels was based off the town I spent most of my life in, where drugs and crime was fairly common. As research for these books, I went on a ride along with a police officer who was a friend of the family. While I was with him there was one run away, at least four domestic disputes, and a break in at a store. I was only with him for three hours.
Honestly, I didn’t even need to go on a ride along to see how bad my town was, I could see it quite clearly in my school. I personally knew several drug dealers and several kids who got arrested. One notably went to school with an ankle monitor since he was on house arrest. He was arrested not too long afterward for breaking off the ankle monitor.
This little blog post can easily sum up, what I consider to be, one of the most important things when it comes to writing. You must write about what you know. Write about what you are familiar with. If you do that, then you can write it realistically and draw the reader into your world. If you want to write about something you don’t know about, then you have to research it a great deal so that you can be believable. Understand the world you create so that the reader can understand it too and see what you see.