Jonathan Maas asked Erica Ferencik:

Erica - one of the subtly disturbing parts about The River at Night is how real the relationships between the main characters feel. They form shifting alliances, do the wrong things, and generally act more real than heroic. Can you give insight into how you got that disturbing real-life and modern-day-alienation feeling into your characters?

Erica Ferencik Oh man, now you're making me think!:) Plot was one thing: I knew basically what I wanted to happen in the story, but at the same time I wanted the action to arise from character, as much as possible. I came at the "problem" of creating real-feeling characters in two steps: one: I had to create four very different people, each with their own dreams, fears, past, and so on. The old backstory creation thing, which feels tedious but pays off in the end. Then, as I was writing the story, I had to "inhabit" each character and try to feel my way into: how would they react, second by second, line by line, sometimes word by word, to each other and what is going on in the story? Queue countless hours of me staring into space...Re: modern-day-alienation, like so many of us, I think my atennae pick up on that every day, so that came pretty naturally.:)

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