Dennis McFadden gives us an in-depth look at his writing process for his latest mystery,”The Tower at Coffin Rock,” which you can read in our July/August issue, on sale now!

I was sitting around not long ago with some time on my hands and started thinking I should write a story. I’ve written plenty, but take-off is always the hardest part. Some stories taxi down the runway, lift off and soar. Many more sputter and stall, chug, cough, wheeze and barely make it into the air, wings wobbling.

Ignition issues aside, it always starts with two decisions: What type of story? And, who are the main characters? The first decision didn’t take long in this case: I hadn’t written a mystery in a while, a literary mystery; one was due. I like ’em. They’re fun.

Next, I rummaged through the attic in my head and found an abandoned character under a pile of musty old magazines and faded book covers; his name was Jack Slattery, he was a sheriff, and he’d been on the verge of existence when his story-in-progress took a sharp left a couple of years ago and threw him off the wagon. (I’d been considering “Slattery Will Get You Nowhere” for a title. I still am.) Slattery was already gelling in my mind, having had a trial run; he was based on a hybrid of a couple of real acquaintances (coincidentally name Jack and John) and how they might have behaved had they grown up to become sheriffs.

When I started thinking about other characters, my first thought was Slattery needs a partner. A buddy story. A buddy story with a twist: the buddy would be a woman. A strong, smart woman with a good sense of humor who would make an excellent foil for the sheriff. Actually, I don’t know which came first: the traits I wanted, or the model for the character, Bobby Jones. The traits, and an old boss of mine, a wise, strong, funny woman, arrived at the scene of the crime neck and neck.

Then I spent some time panning for peripheral characters, sifting through people I know or knew, people I’ve read about, people I’ve heard about, people who are rumored to exist (yes, most of my characters are based on “real” people; those that are purely inventions usually come along during a story, not at the conception of it). These are the nuggets where Steve and Casey and Annie began:

• a long-ago co-worker who woke up one night, still drunk, to find his wife and his brother on the floor in the bathroom shivering their timbers (she left him soon after for his brother);
• a former acquaintance, something of a hippie, who, among other quirks, wore sandals year-round, rain, slush or snow notwithstanding;
• an ex-friend, a high school teacher, who boasted about the sexual conquest of a student (emphasis on the “ex” before friend);
• the falsie: when I was a freshman in college, I took a shy coed on a hayride and, much to our mutual embarrassment, encountered her falsie—which I did not pull out, nor wave about. Now I started thinking, what if I had? How might this shy little coed have reacted? What might she have done? Annie Reed was being born.

I left plot for last, where it belongs. After you know what kind of story you’re writing, characters should come first. Always.

I’d read a Donna Tartt novel featuring a water tower scene that stuck with me. I started to think about towers and their perilous heights, their inherent danger, my thoughts drifting toward towers of another sort, a sort more familiar to me. Around western Pennsylvania where I grew up, there are quite a few fire towers, from which lookouts keep watch for early, tell-tale smoke of wildfires; best of all (for my plot purposes) some of these towers are abandoned. In my youth we climbed one or two. (Fortunately, this was long before the day of risky, stupid selfies.)

Bingo. Down the runway, lifting off.

I invented much of the rest of the story. Not all of it. From my memory archives:

• the time when I was about six and tried, unsuccessfully, to fashion a loincloth out of washcloths and string; when it failed, my sister’s hysterical laughing and pointing added a nice, piquant flavor to my naked humiliation;
• my same sister, sixty or so years later, when we were possibly a little more mature, telling me about helping her elderly friend plan her own (the friend’s) funeral;
• another friend whose beloved dog he named Shuvee;
• my own dog, Bud, who was so dumb he caught rocks in his mouth, no matter how high in the air I tossed them (yes, I was just as young and dumb as he was);
• another friend telling me about her and her husband arguing over which way a rabbit in their yard was pointing—toward them, or away from them (she doesn’t remember telling me about this, has, in fact, completely forgotten the incident; I wrote it down);
• Casper the Ghost’s last name is really McFadden. I had the good sense not to use this, however.

Now the story, for better or worse, was in the air.

I called this piece “Building The Tower at Coffin Rock”; not “Creating” or “Inventing” or “Conceiving.” It makes you wonder (made me wonder, anyhow): How much of the making of a story involves actual creation? How much is invented from whole cloth? Conversely, how much is merely mined, excavated? Selected from among objects already lying around, waiting to be plucked up and put into place like a craftsman constructing a, say, tower?

Is there a difference? In the end, does it really matter?