Chris Holm: I found out early on in my career that I’m incapable of outlining. That said, by the time I start writing, I usually have a decent handle on the novel’s major beats. Red Right Hand was the exception. All I had going in was an idea for the first chapter—in which no series characters appear—and the book’s last line. Everything else, I wung. (Winged?)

That sounds crazy, I know. But my editor said something when we were working on The Killing Kind that helped me prevent the narrative from spinning out of control. He suggested I sequence chapters told from multiple points of view as if they were lines of dialogue. First the protagonist speaks, then the antagonist, and so on. Lesser characters might chime in from time to time if they’ve got something to contribute to the conversation. I dunno—maybe that was already obvious to everyone but me. Maybe I’m the kid in class who can’t be trusted with the paste. But I’ll tell you, it blew my mind, and changed the way I thought about story structure.