by Patrick Weekes 

When I decided to write The Palace Job, I knew that I was entering uncharted territory. I'd written my share of fantasy before, developed magic systems, run endless Dungeons & Dragons games, and gotten reasonably proficient with writing fun fight scenes. But for The Palace Job, I had to learn how to write a heist caper. It ended up being incredibly enjoyable as well as head-deskingly frustrating at times.

Characters: 

One of the most consistent bits of feedback I had gotten on my earlier writing was that people often said that they disliked, or worse, had no strong feelings about, my protagonist... but they almost always loved my minor characters. It was like having thousands of words to devote to character development tripped me up in my early drafts, while having parameters along the lines of, "This guy gets one line per scene, so, you know, get the character out there quickly," actually made me a better writer.

As it turned out, this came in really handy on The Palace Job. The books and movies I was trying to honor -- the Ocean's 11 movies and Westlake's Dortmunder books -- have a large cast of characters, and do a great job of establishing characters for a large team quickly. While the novel still has a protagonist in Loch (and I hope you like her), it ended up letting me play to my strengths of, essentially, goofing around with a lot of fun characters.

Pace:

On the other hand, it turns out that fantasy novels and heist capers have a much different pace. Fantasy is all about setting, and feeling, and the sense of wonder of the unknown. It's about romance and tragedy, and you can't rush it without leaving the reader feeling cheated.

A heist caper, by comparison, needs to move. The first half of the novel has to establish the team and the target firmly and efficiently, and with enough precision that you can essentially spend the second half of the novel at breakneck speed, barely pausing to remind the reader who's who.

When I finished my first draft, I looked at the narrative beats and sadly told my friends that I'd tried to write a fantasy novel by Donald Westlake, and ended up writing a heist caper by Guy Gavriel Kay (both of whom are wonderful). Then I cut about 30,000 words.

Plot:

Finally, it also turns out that plotting heist capers is hard. The attraction of a good caper is the crazy complexity, the multiple steps and sudden twists that keep the team using their unique abilities to overcome an antagonist who should by all means be impossible. After giving myself a headache trying to outline things with bullet points, as I always had before, I ended up going step by step through the entire heist in doodle form, drawing every team member and villain as stick figures and making sure that everyone was doing something that made sense at every moment of the heist. It was humbling to learn that I was trying to use a unicorn in three scenes at the same time while leaving my alchemist hiding behind a hedge for approximately a quarter of the book, and I'm glad that I noticed that before the readers ever had a chance to do so.

I hope that The Palace Job ends up appealing both to fantasy readers and heist-caper fans. Life would probably be easier for me if I stopped mixing up my genres, but I'm having a lot of fun, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Patrick Weekes grew up in California and attended Stanford University, where he earned his B.A. and M.A. in English Literature. After attempting to be deep and profound, he discovered that he much prefers to write quippy banter, swashbuckling fight scenes, and parody song lyrics. He has sold stories containing the first two elements to several anthologies and magazines.

Patrick currently works at the award-winning video-game company BioWare, on the team that created the critically acclaimed Mass Effect trilogy. He is constantly amazed at being surrounded by such incredibly talented people, and also at having gotten the chance to write the aforementioned parody song lyrics for space aliens as part of his day job. Currently, Patrick shares his home in Edmonton with his wife Karin, his two Lego-focused sons, and seven rescue-adopted pets. In his spare time, he practices Kenpo Karate, paddles in dragon boat races, and puts way too much thought into analyzing the fights scenes of bad martial arts movies.