White Crows: The Bigger Picture in Novels

One of the challenges of writing a novel – or any book – is answering a single question: what’s the bigger picture?

Sometimes, this question is answered in surprising ways – by one of your characters, for instance, who does or says something 200 pages into what you’ve written that twists the plot in a new direction. Right then,  you realize OMG, this is where my novel really starts.

In May, I woke up one morning with an idea for a new novel and got about 75 pages into it when I realized I was approaching it all wrong. So I took the character who made me realize this and wrote a 15,000-word short story that I submitted to a science fiction magazine. It was rejected. Even though the editor was intrigued by the premise, he rejected the story because he felt the ending was rushed (true) and that the story was actually part of something longer (true). But that story provided me with the backbone, the larger picture, of White Crows.

The title comes from the quote by William James: If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.

Once I had the larger picture, it took me about four months to write the first draft. Now it’s with my agent, who will want revisions, fine-tuning.  Here’s the larger picture, which you discover as the story unfolds:

Since 2001, thousands of people worldwide have had encounters with mysterious ocean lights. Seventy-five percent of these individuals die with 48 hours, but the survivors develop extraordinary abilities. As a result, the government created an agency BAP – Bureau of Anomalous Phenomenon – to study the survivors. BAP began abducting some of them, now known as white crows, and imprisoning them at facilities known as the Farms, like Gitmo in terms of dark and terrible cruelties, but pristine and beautiful in appearance, like country estates.

It quickly became apparent that the survivors’ abilities were so dangerous they had to kept drugged and the memories of their lives before had to be wiped clean. Every prisoner was assigned a new name and through isolation and torture, survivors were whipped into compliance.

Those who fell in line were recruited to BAP’s special task teams that worked with other federal agencies in tracking down terrorists, murderers, missing children. Others were recruited for more nefarious purposes – to nab survivors of the encounters with the mysterious ocean lights, gather foreign intelligence, eliminate enemies.

In 2016, fifteen years after the advent of BAP and the Farms, the government is still clueless about the origin of the ocean lights or why these white crows have been endowed with such extraordinary powers.  Various theories have been put forward – that the lights are a result of global warming, an unknown virus or bacteria, a weapon created by a foreign enemy, or extraterrestrial. Nothing has been proven and now BAP is more interested in using the white crows for their own agenda. As far as BAP can determine, the ocean light encounters ended in January 2008.

But in May 2016, the escape of two prisoners from the Farm outside of Gainesville, Florida, changes everything. This is their story. Here’s chapter 1:

white-crows-chap1