Echoes in a Hollow Space

And so I’m off again on what appears to be yet another novel. I got close to 14k on the other one, Sympathetic Magic, before I realized it just wasn’t coming together. Inside me, mostly. I wasn’t seeing and feeling it like I should and it stopped going.

So I’m letting it rest now and I’ve got this other thing that’s been obsessing me. Since I have no deadlines, as a wise friend pointed out, I might as well take advantage of that luxury to work on something that’s really speaking to me. I hope this one takes.

This character, Carmilla, will be a challenge to bring off. She isn’t particularly sympathetic, although I hope she finds redemption by the end of things. She’s holding her cards close to the vest, though, and not showing me. She’d better give me a glimpse soon. I think she just wants to play with me for a while longer. She does have a cruel streak.

Here’s the opening—still very rough and new.

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Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Being a character-based writer means that generally plots tend to accumulate around who my protagonists are rather than the other way around. So I usually have the illusion of knowing a great deal about my people before I officially commit them to the page—officially being when I actually type “Chapter 1″ at the top of the file. Every once in awhile I get a surprise.

That seems to have happened with chapter one of the new novel, Time in a Bottle. (Really dislike that name, really need to think of another.) As soon as the protagonist, Molly, spilled onto the page, she came across much perkier than I’d originally envisioned her. Younger. More a creature of sunshine than I would have made her out to be. I resisted this pull, even typing a note to myself at the top of chapter one: “Age her up, serious her down.” But she refused my admonition. She persisted in being who she was.

I’ve long since learned that when a character pulls that hard in a certain direction, I really need to shut up and follow. I’m just along for the ride, after all, and most times they really do know best. If I analyze this in that light, I see that the story which is going to unfold might actually work better with this personality. She’s going to be dealing with the shadow world of the subconscious, helping to dispel some of those shadows, so it really doesn’t make sense that she’s as serious as I tried to make her. She’s going to need that sunshine to get through this, to even buy into this mess in the first place. She’s something of a rescuer, after all.

Of course, sometimes I’ve been fooled in this regard, too. Sometimes a character pulls me off in an unexpected direction and it turns out to be a dead end. Generally, this means I haven’t gotten to know them as well as I thought I had before starting out on the journey and they turned out to be tricksters, having their teasing way with me. This can be painful and require much rewriting.

But hey, writing is rewriting, right? There’s always going to be a lot of that in my future.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.