Question: When you have a thing happen and then everything explodes after, so can you go into how you structure that? Is that something that just came out naturally or is that a process that you follow, like, "Oh, things are getting boring. I'm gonna drop a house on somebody.
When you're writing the book, one of the things you have to plan for is, you gotta think of the book like a roller coaster. And the first two-thirds of the book are the ride up the hill, where it's going kachunk kachunk kachunk. And you've gotta do some things to keep it interesting, you know like, on the roller coaster where you gotta have the sign that says, "this roller coaster is, you know, dangerous and still under construction" and stuff like that. You know, to keep you entertained on the way up the hill. When you hit that big middle point, there's usually a big flashy middle point in the books. And then after that, everything kinda goes crazy, and that's point where you get to, where you start down the hill. And the rest of the roller coaster is a lot faster. And really, when you're on a roller coaster, it takes about half the time of the ride going up the hill. But that's not the part you remember, the part you remember is that exciting swirly bit after. So that's what really writing a story is about. You've got to set it up going up the hill, and then you've gotta have the exciting swirly bit after.
The other metaphor I use, it's like setting up dominos. It takes forever to set them up, and then it seems like it goes really, really fast when you finally knock them over and get to see the chain of events that you've established. The important thing is just, as you're writing the story, you've got to be thinking about the swirly bit at the end, so you've got to have in mind, "This is how I want the drama to play out. This is how I want the cool action scene to happen. This is how I want the lightsaber to come into the story." So that you get it set up.
But it's holy, it's a rightsaber.
Source: Dragon Con 2014 - An Hour with Jim Butcher Panel (Timestamp: 4m49s)
Date: August 29, 2014
Note: transcribed this whole damn thing just for a pun
