Hanson native uncorks a thriller
ByHANSON – Is Tim Wirzburger clairvoyant, or just an apt history student with the patience to see the value in a story idea that was worth countless rewrites?
About 15 years ago, the Hanson native began work on the idea for what became his first novel “In Plain Sight” [Palisade Media, 2022, 368 pages, trade paperback. ISBN#2370000893932] about a summer camp in western Pennsylvania with a sinister mission: hand-pick the teens to be indoctrinated into a group mentality toward a specific goal – for which some would be later selected for clandestine roles.
“Camp Bohr was supposed to be a normal summer camp: cabins in the woods, a beautiful lake, and dozens of teenagers just like Chris. However, strange things begin happening almost immediately – and Chris seems to be the only one who’s noticing,” Wirzburger writes on his website timwirburger.com.
Social media, the use of technology in such plots and other modern tools of politics and social movements also come into play, but any similarities to coup attempts, real or imagined, is purely coincidental, as the movie disclaimers read. But the novel’s fictional anti-government plot hinged to a date of Oct. 6 was not an attempt to reflect real events.
“I think we all know these kids,” Wirzburger said. “It’s supposed to be universal. … It’s not any political commentary. It’s a story, and I think it’s just coincidental that events in the last couple of years [mean] you might see some of that in there.”
The backstories of some characters and an ambiguous time period lend themselves to helping the imagination to wander into all kinds of scenarios.
“People have always said that something like this could happen,” Wirzburger said of the plot central to his story. “At the time I was first writing it, I was a teenager and I wasn’t plugged into anything political. I think the best books are ones that don’t have to live in a specific time, they can meet the reader whatever’s going on in their lives or in the world around them.”
He started it when he was about 17 and is now a 32-year-old digital marketing, living in Charlotte, N.C.
“It’s been about 15 years [in the writing],” he said during an interview with the Express during a visit home to see family.
What it definitely is, is a page-turner of a suspense yarn – and don’t ask, there will be no sequels to this story. Despite a suspenseful ending, he’s not planning to revisit Camp Bohr, the deep woods surrounding the fictional location in Pennsylvania, or the girls’ camp nearby.
When he began writing “In Plain Sight,” the TV show “Lost” and the film “The DaVinci Code” were both popular, and the plot twists and multiple storylines at work in both, appealed to Wirzburger.
“I never went to summer camp, believe it or not,” Wirzburger said. “But I like that idea and, looking back, I think it’s very similar to ‘Lost,’ in that the camp is like an island where it’s a controlled environment.”
If writers are told the best advice for writing is to write what you know, perhaps there are exceptions to that rule. While not having that summer camp experience for himself did present a challenge Wirzburger said creating those social interactions was fun.
“The suspense – I loved that, and I remember thinking I wanted to write something like that,” he recalls. “I kind of started outlining a story and would show a couple of friends, and it evolved a lot over the years.”
At times, he set the project aside for as much as a couple of years at a time while he was in college, studying history and communications at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H, working or just living his life in other ways. He wrote for the college paper and alumni magazine while at St. Anselm.
“Writing and history have always been two of my biggest loves, so there’s a lot ot both in there, “Wirzburger said. Each time he came back to it, the story still had its pull, even though he admits, whatever he had already written “wasn’t that good.”
“It sounded like a 17-year-old had written it, but the story was still good and I wanted to tell it, so I would start over,” Wirzburger said. Each draft still had its own technical problems, but the story itself kept getting better.
About a half-dozen years ago he took an online Masterclass.com course taught by novelist James Patterson. A commercially successful writer, Patterson taught a method of outlining that Wirzburger found the answer to what he needed.
“He talked about having everything in your outline – the plot, character arcs, if you think of bits of dialog, throw it in – and each chapter [would be outlined by] a full, meaty paragraph about what happens in that chapter,” Wirzburger said. “Then you can see all the pieces fit together.”
His outline for the 368-page book was 30 pages all by itself.
He also enjoyed writing the plot twists that keep the reader off guard.
Interweaving chapters about key characters’ origin storylines of service in Vietnam and the difficult return home, family dynamics and a police officer’s crises as all they stories merge together make for a real page-turner.
“I don’t know what it was about Vietnam specifically, or that timeline-wise it worked out,” he said. “I also like shows and stories that teach a little bit.”
Getting published was almost a story in itself, but after looking into the jungle of processes in the publishing world, he sent out 20 or 30 queries – “not that many,” he said – before deciding to self-publish.
“Lucklily, with my career, I have a background in marketing and digital marketing and I built my own website, I can do social media stuff and a little bit of graphic design, copywriting,” he said.
As for marketing the book, he has already begun plans to reach out to libraries, his college alumni and local bookstores. He has left a copy of “In Plain Sight” with the Hanson Public Library.
A book club in Hanover has also read the book and hosted Wirzburger for a Zoom-based discussion of it.
“They had such good questions, and I love talking about the character and the writing choices,” he said.
Wirzburger is currently working on the outline of his next book, a suspense story he will only say has a more adult story line as teenagers try to save the world from Russians and monsters.
“If this book is Netflix, the next one will be HBO,” he said.
Stay tuned.