![]() ![]() As of writing this article, she has not been seen since September 14, 2017. Aviv details Hannah’s story of being diagnosed with dissociative fugue and going missing three times. I was inspired to write this story by the real-life story of Hannah Upp, which I first read about in Rachel Aviv’s gripping New Yorker article, “How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity.” I was teaching journalism at the time, and my students and I read the piece as a mentor text for writing strong features. ![]() In the end, I mostly assigned that task to three mothers because frustrated women get things done. I restructured timelines and renamed characters and deleted chapters, all the time sorting out which characters could best move Emily’s story forward while she’s lying in a hospital bed. With such a foolproof process, you may be surprised that The Night She Went Missing didn’t just flow out of me. ![]() I write unreadable first drafts and then revise chapters up to twenty times. She can’t remember where she’s been, with whom, or why she went missing ten weeks ago.Īs a pantser, I’m getting to know characters, their dilemmas, and their hometowns as I go. My debut novel The Night She Went Missing opens with one such character: when eighteen-year-old Emily Callahan is found floating in Galveston harbor, she is unconscious but alive. Writing a character who has forgotten creates a myriad of problems and opportunities for the writer.
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