Having recently completed the first draft of SEVEN STARS, it feels like a good time to explore how ideas develop in a story. As mentioned in a previous post, I’m largely a discovery writer, so this evolution happens while I’m writing. I’m sure pretty much the same thing happens to a plotter/outliner, though. Just at a different point in the process.
So, fairly early on in SEVEN STARS I had my characters isolated. There’s a war on and because of some imprudent behavior by one of the characters, they’re cut off from their main army, from the capital city, and from the hidden fortress where the women and children have been taken for shelter. I knew from the beginning that at some point they would make it to the fortress through a system of caves.
When I got to that point, I had an idea to have a little fun with them. In battle, the female character is more prepared, more experienced, better trained and not afraid of much. The male character is learning, but he’s never been in this situation before. So, I decided that when they went underground, it would be fun to switch things on them. He’d be perfectly comfortable in the caves and she’d be claustrophobic.
From there, the caves became a sort of almost religious experience for him. It’s like an initiation, but only he feels it. His confidence increases in the caves, which leads to a couple of interesting side effects.
Well, at this point, the caves started to become almost another character in the story. I decided that the caves actually were responding to his presence and that their guide would notice it. When they reach the fortress, the guide proclaims that the caves, by affecting the character in this way, have indicated that he is the heir. He’s the youngest prince, the one nobody expected anything from, and now this guy’s saying that he’s the heir because he liked the caves?
This introduced some more world-building. Not just the caves, but the notion that through the caves the land is supposed to choose the heir. The current king has been trying to circumvent that by not sending his younger two sons into the caves and suppressing the knowledge that the oldest son failed to even get through the caves.
Those ideas only come to me when I’m writing. I would never get that idea while making an outline.
Now, of course, I have to go back and introduce a few elements a little earlier in the story to foreshadow that revelation. That’s okay. It will make the story richer. And it won’t actually take much. A couple of sentences here and there, maybe a paragraph.
Seems like to be a really exciting novel, Meredith.
Interesting post too: I fancy myself an outliner, but lots of cool stuff gets thrown in while I am at the keyboard.
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Thanks. I like it. Better, I had a lot of fun with it and expect to have more when I get to the second draft.
I guess it all depends on when and how your ideas come to you. Mine only seem to really flow when I’m writing.
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Hello Meredith,
Nice blog you have.
Anyway, I feel the same way about writing. Sometimes I have certain scenes planned out ahead of time and usually a basic idea of where I want the plot to go but no outline. Of course the first novel I did I had probably over half the scenes written out by hand, when I got to that part of the novel I had to find the scene. Sometimes I just had to add how the MC got from one scene to another. I haven’t done it with any other novels.
But with your novel. Of course you do it the way you want to but do the caves have to be the only way to ID the heir? Could they be an old way that is usually ignored?
But in either case interestingly done.
Oh yes, have I left a comment here before?
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Thanks.
Of course, this brief post only glosses over the top of the way things work. The caves are the traditional way of identifying the heir, but they haven’t been used in this generation. It actually works well with a bit of conflict I have going between the brothers.
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Yes, Louis. You commented back in January.
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See if this works here too.
[quote]
Yes, Louis. You commented back in January.
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Oops. Could say I’m getting forgetful in my old age but its been that way since I was knee high to a grass hopper.
But that’s why your blog remembered me.
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So that trick doesn’t work here. It has on three completely different sites I have been on but the blog must do it differently if at all. Maybe I should have tried just shading the area to quote, that works on one site.
Oh well…..
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