I recently finished the manuscript of Preacher Fakes a Miracle. I’m amazed once again at the role of my subconscious in the writing process. I had no idea how the story would play out when I started writing.

And if I don’t know where it’s going from one page to the next, how can you? Oh, you might have a good guess – several guesses, even. But I’m beginning to think this is a good way to write a suspenseful story that keeps curiosity fully engaged – to the last page.

When I used to write business and technical books, it was all laid out in advance, outlined to the last chapter, peppered with bullet points. The publisher’s editor would track my progress diligently, requiring me to submit one or two chapters a week for ten weeks or more of daily, diligent effort. And I either sketched illustrations for the artist or provided photos I’d taken myself. Then they usually made me build the index (no fun).

But after ten novels now, I can honestly say that for most of them I had little notion of where they would end up, almost from the first page. The exceptions were the three books I adapted from unsold screenplays – the rom-com My Inflatable Friend, the huckster madcap misadventure Mr. Ballpoint, and the family melodrama Christmas Karma. Even then, the writing was beset by inventive surprises. I had to learn the lesson, for example, that the novelist must paint what the camera sees. Duh. Writing between the lines of the script, you could call it. (When it’s in dialogue, those clever actors call it subtext.)

But the joy and the agony and the thrill of making it up as you go along in fiction are bound up in trusting where it’s all going. I’d put in a quirk or a character detail and then forget about it. Fifty or a hundred pages later, that info-morsel would figure into some plot twist – proving to be a significant clue or motivation.

And that surprise is my delight, frankly. I boasted to some of the beta readers of Preacher Finds a Corpse that I didn’t really know how the plot would ultimately get resolved until I wrote the last page. And a couple of them concurred with me that they were also guessing until the very end.

And the experience of finishing Preacher Fakes a Miracle has been much the same. I wrote the last sentence of the last chapter and thought, Wow, that’s what I was going for! That ties it up! And then I realized the next day that there remained an unanswered question (what Dan Brown calls a promise to the reader). So, remembering I had a Prologue (one bookend), I realized that neat construction and a stable bookcase, as well as paying off that debt, required an Epilogue.

Another delicious surprise!