How I Wrote It

SHATTERING GLASS began over twenty-five years ago. I just didn’t know it then.
I was substitute teaching in an Art class at Brazosport High School. The lesson plans said that the students could study for another subject. Student translation: Free period. We can talk. As long as we don’t set fire to the furniture or the sub herself, there’s no prob.
I, never without a book, was reading, while my teacher third eye and fourth ear watched and eavesdropped. At the table closest to my desk were four students. Three attractive, animated girls and one, quiet, shy boy. As I covertly listened I learned that the girls were cheerleaders, very much High School Royalty. The boy was a Bill Gates prototype. But, the girls had gotten to like their nerd tablemate. They were complimenting him on the fact that he had taken their advice and stopped belting his pants under his armpits.
However, they said, there were more renovations necessary. One girl said that they needed a seminar. They made plans to meet the boy at the mall and take him shopping and get his hair cut.
The thing that caught my interest was the boy’s attitude. He enjoyed the attention, but I could see in his face and his demeanor that while he trusted that the girls sincerely wanted to help him--he would never be squiring any of the three to the Prom.
And I was off in thought. What if the girls weren’t just being nice--suppose they had some kind of agenda? A dark one. And what if the boy had an agenda of his own? And what would happen when those secret agendas came into conflict? And what if they weren’t girls, but boys? What would the dynamic be between boys? Would one lead and the others follow? Why? How much would the followers do for the leader?
I shelved the idea in the back of my head where it stayed for years.
Then a young man that was doing some work at our house told a story about his father. The father had made a life altering decision that affected the young man so adversely that he had dropped out of school, lost all his friends and generally made a mess of his life. I went back to the idea of a boy that was a charismatic leader, then made him someone who had been warped emotionally by something his father had done. And the book began to percolate on the front burner. I began to structure the story, develop the characters, and devise the scenes.
Two books influenced me. LORD OF THE FLIES, one of my all time favorites, made me think about the ability of power to corrupt. I even named my nerd character Simon as an homage to the book. Simon is beaten to death in a frenzy of group rage in Goldman’s story and my character was going to be beaten to death in much the same way.
THE GREAT GATSBY also influenced the book. I liked the narrator, Nick, how he was enamored of the main character, so that his voice was not quite reliable. Now, Nick, in Fitzgerald’s novel, is also the moral center of the book and I needed Young not quite that honorable. Enter Ronna, the conscience of my novel.
The flash forwards came late in revisions. When you have written an unreliable narrator, you close the door on seeing some characters as they really are. By letting other character show themselves in another light, I could offset Young’s narrow vision. The idea for the reader to meet a character before he appears in the linear story was a decision to kind of mirror image the opening paragraph in which I tell the ending of the book.
Why did I choose to give away the ending? The ending is violent and the book is not about the violence but what caused it. How things spin out of control. About little wrongs leading to big ones. If I gave the violence away at the beginning, I felt like I defused the shock—and shock wasn’t the reason for this book to exist.
Now, let me tell you a secret. This book almost died an early death. I worked on it for almost a year and felt like I had dead-ended. I scrawled across the last page, “And they all died.” I scratched that out and wrote, “After achieving great personal growth—they all died.” And put the manuscript away for over a year.
But, I pulled it back out and fought my way through the problems.
And that’s the truth.