Stephen Taylor is an action thriller writer and bestselling author of the Danny Pearson series (think Bond, John Wick, Lock Stock) which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and tens of millions of page reads.
We met in a Facebook group for authors in 2020 and quickly became great friends. Fast forward several years and we decided to co-author a novel.
Stephen has written some pretty nasty characters in his time so I knew when it came to crafting an antagonist for Watch It Burn, he wouldn’t disappoint.
He didn’t.
We wrote on WhatsApp without telling each other…
We wanted to do something different and exciting, so we decided to write it in real time over WhatsApp without telling each other what we were going to do next.
Although the chapters are told from the point of view of each character, the moments inside them were written by each of us. After crafting our individual character’s actions and emotions, we then re-wrote each moment into the viewpoint of one character.
Paul’s actions and dialogue within Millie’s chapters were all written by Stephen and Millie’s actions and dialogue within Paul’s chapters were all written by me.
If you’ve read Watch It Burn and compare it to the screenshot of our WhatsApp chat, you’ll notice that very little changed in the interactions between Millie and Paul, even after several rounds of editing with the phenomenal Linda McQueen.
I think that was because we knew our own characters so well, it just flowed. What we didn’t know was what we would face from each other.
(* note there are spoilers in this WhatsApp conversation)
How the hell am I going to get out of this…
When you write your own antagonist, you know exactly what they’re going to do and what they’re capable of. But we had no idea what our characters would do next or how far they were prepared to go to get what they wanted.
Facing an unpredictable antagonist like Paul was genuinely frightening. I would stare at Stephen’s latest instalment on WhatsApp and think, ‘How the hell am I going to get out of this?’ Then I’d message him with, ‘You’re going to have to give me a minute while I figure this out.’
The scariest thing I’ve ever written…
Figuring out how Millie would react to these terrifying challenges, created a visceral response that I’ve never experienced when writing. It felt like it was actually happening to me and that made Watch it Burn the scariest thing I’ve ever written.
If you give it a go, we hope you have as much fun reading it as we did writing it.
Carrie x