Post by moonmomma on Feb 18, 2010 10:34:25 GMT -5
My current project is a novel called "The Broken God." (It was "The Empty God" until I changed it last night.) It's a rewrite of a novel I wrote about 3/4 of and then abandoned about 15 years ago. I was writing it longhand in notebooks, not sure why. Anyway, I'm not sure why I abandoned it, but every time I thought about going back to it I had this sense of futility and embarrassment. The characters stuck with me but I didn't know what to do with them. When I looked back at the original manuscript, the writing was so bad - so stilted and maudlin - it physically hurt to read it.
Then a few months ago, while I was riding a creative wave from National Novel Writing Month, the characters from The Broken God came knocking on my brain and made me a deal. If I would do things their way, they would let me know how the rest of the story is supposed to go. Okay, I said. And you're not allowed to do anything else until our story is written, they said. Um, okay, I said.
And then they started talking to me. First off, the romantic relationship between the two characters is crucial to the story. In the original version, in time-honored romance-novel tradition, I was busy making them hate (or pretend to hate) each other through the first half of the story, until external circumstances forced them to marry and they suddenly realized "OMG I reelly reely luvs yoo!! squee!!"
No, they told me. They are both intelligent adults who know what they want, and what they want is to get down to the nitty-gritty of their love affair by, oh, the end of chapter 3, thank you very much. Because of my personal beliefs, I prefer to avoid having my main characters engage in non-marital nitty-gritty whenever possible, but sometimes, darn it, that's just how the story goes. And then it hit me - that bond has to already be in place if the subsequent events are going to make any sense. So, one example of how the characters know their business better than the author does and why we should listen to them.
Also, they filled me in on their backgrounds. This built on ideas I already had, but turned out be much darker and more traumatic than I originally realized. Especially for the male main character. Geez, poor guy. I felt bad about it, but that's the way it is, and the traumas of their pasts really led to who the characters are at the time of the story and why they make a lot of the choices they make.
Once I started listening to them, the rest of the novel just kind of fell into place. I did a little world-building and worked out the magical system, and everything came together a lot better than it had in the original version. I now had a clue about what the characers' world is like and the nature of the problem they were trying to solve.
I wrote the big climactic magical scene last night. There's still a lot of business to take care of, the story expanded itself quite a bit beyond what I had originally envisioned as the end. But I feel like this is one of those stories that's already out there and I just have to type fast enough to get it all written down.
So, The Broken God, starring Roric Rossony as a professor of magical theory (he can't do much magic but he's the world's leading expert in how it works) and Perarre Tabrano as the translator who translates ancient books for him. Together they discover that the things that have always been taught about magic are a lie, told to cover up something terrible that happened in the distant past.
The moral of the story is, Listen to your characters!
ETA: I actually started The Empty God 12 years ago.
Then a few months ago, while I was riding a creative wave from National Novel Writing Month, the characters from The Broken God came knocking on my brain and made me a deal. If I would do things their way, they would let me know how the rest of the story is supposed to go. Okay, I said. And you're not allowed to do anything else until our story is written, they said. Um, okay, I said.
And then they started talking to me. First off, the romantic relationship between the two characters is crucial to the story. In the original version, in time-honored romance-novel tradition, I was busy making them hate (or pretend to hate) each other through the first half of the story, until external circumstances forced them to marry and they suddenly realized "OMG I reelly reely luvs yoo!! squee!!"
No, they told me. They are both intelligent adults who know what they want, and what they want is to get down to the nitty-gritty of their love affair by, oh, the end of chapter 3, thank you very much. Because of my personal beliefs, I prefer to avoid having my main characters engage in non-marital nitty-gritty whenever possible, but sometimes, darn it, that's just how the story goes. And then it hit me - that bond has to already be in place if the subsequent events are going to make any sense. So, one example of how the characters know their business better than the author does and why we should listen to them.
Also, they filled me in on their backgrounds. This built on ideas I already had, but turned out be much darker and more traumatic than I originally realized. Especially for the male main character. Geez, poor guy. I felt bad about it, but that's the way it is, and the traumas of their pasts really led to who the characters are at the time of the story and why they make a lot of the choices they make.
Once I started listening to them, the rest of the novel just kind of fell into place. I did a little world-building and worked out the magical system, and everything came together a lot better than it had in the original version. I now had a clue about what the characers' world is like and the nature of the problem they were trying to solve.
I wrote the big climactic magical scene last night. There's still a lot of business to take care of, the story expanded itself quite a bit beyond what I had originally envisioned as the end. But I feel like this is one of those stories that's already out there and I just have to type fast enough to get it all written down.
So, The Broken God, starring Roric Rossony as a professor of magical theory (he can't do much magic but he's the world's leading expert in how it works) and Perarre Tabrano as the translator who translates ancient books for him. Together they discover that the things that have always been taught about magic are a lie, told to cover up something terrible that happened in the distant past.
The moral of the story is, Listen to your characters!
ETA: I actually started The Empty God 12 years ago.