"Deep Dive"

Ron Walters is a former journalist, college registrar, and stay-at-home dad who writes science fiction and fantasy for all ages. A native of Savannah, GA, he currently lives in Germany with his wife, two daughters, and two rescue dogs. When he's not writing he works as a substitute high school teacher, plays video games, and does his best to ignore the judgmental looks his dogs give him for not walking them more often.

Walters applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Deep Dive, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Deep Dive takes place in a psychologist’s office. Peter Banuk, the main character, has agreed to a therapy session at his wife’s behest because she’s deeply worried that he’s suffered a nervous breakdown. The first line of dialogue belongs to Dr. Blake, the psychologist, the second to Peter, and so on.

“When did you first begin to believe you have children?”

You mean outside of the last ten years? “Yesterday, I guess.”

“And what happened yesterday?”

I steel myself. Here we go. I start with the crepes and work my way up to using Bradley’s headset.

Dr. Blake interrupts me. “But Bradley died. So you couldn’t have used the headset.”

“And yet here we are.” It comes out more snappishly than I intended. “Sorry. It’s been a long day of rationalizing the irrational.”

“There’s absolutely no need to apologize,” Dr. Blake says. “I understand you’re feeling agitated and a little bit attacked. I’m only clarifying things in order to get a clear idea of your situation. I am in no way judging you.”

I’m not entirely convinced that’s true—therapists are people, and people love to judge—but I pretend like I believe him. “OK.”

“For the sake of narrative cohesion, however, what happened after you used the headset?”

“I honestly don’t know. I was about to take it off when it malfunctioned. One second I was sitting in Bradley’s lab, the next I was inside my truck with no memory of how I got there.”

“At which point you drove home and discovered that the daughters you thought you had did not in fact exist.”

No joke, I’m stunned by how much this exchange perfectly encapsulates what Deep Dive is about. It alludes to every important plot point in the book, from the VR headset that sets the story in motion to Peter’s refusal to believe that his daughters are nothing more than figments of his imagination despite all the evidence to the contrary. From a structural standpoint it serves as the lull before the storm, a moment where I could reassert the book’s themes in a relaxed but active manner (in this case, a conversation rather than, say, an internal flashback) before the shit really hits the fan. From a character standpoint, a psychologist’s office was the best place to do this, primarily because so much of Deep Dive involves the mental war Peter wages with himself. Does he accept reality at face value, or does he do everything in his power, no matter how unhinged it makes him seem, to prove that his memories aren’t the byproduct of a dissociative episode born of grief and burnout?

I’d love to say that I consciously planned this scene to land where it does, because in terms of pacing, page 69 really is the perfect spot for it to occur, but I’m going to have to let my creative subconscious take the credit for this one. That's not surprising, though. For all that I loosely plot my books and always have an ending in mind before I start writing them, a lot of my process involves letting events flow organically from one another. That's likely an offshoot of the fact that I write chronologically rather than out of order. There are plenty of times when I wind up adhering to my outline, but I'm not so beholden to it that I'm not willing to toss it aside if the story goes in an unexpected direction. In the case of Deep Dive I always knew I wanted Peter to visit a psychologist. What I didn’t know was when that event needed to take place. Thankfully it seems to have worked out fairly well!

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--Marshal Zeringue