And that was the initial plan for SanClare Scarlet, too, but after abortive first draft, I’ve realized I need more voices in this book. So it’ll still be 3rd/limited but there will be more characters doing the looking.  So far, I’ve written three.  I have at least two more in mind.  The main character will still carry the bulk of the POV as he did in SanClare Black.

Anyway, it’s fun to sort these things out in advance this time around.

Which gets us back to “murdering darlings.”  No matter how much I may love certain scenes or moments or trappings or notes in a story, if they overstay their welcome, even if they are small things, they can sour things.  Because then I have to rationalize why they’re still there and put those thoughts and words into the characters’ mouths, trying to explain away why the issue hasn’t been dealt with or why the thing hasn’t been discarded or why the argument hasn’t been fought.

And that’s the most useful thing I’ve found to do when plotting or writing: Just ask why.  Why is he doing that?  Why isn’t he doing that?  Why would she say that?  Why wouldn’t she just do this obvious thing?  These two little things the main character didn’t deal with in first draft turned into major roadblocks and all because I hadn’t pinned myself to the wall and demanded honest answers to “why doesn’t he do this now?” 

The answer turned out to be, “well, he does after all.”  And now the whole story is different.  And, I think, much better.

‘Cause now I’m really excited about where this is going.

Ye Agent asked a couple of questions on his blog about process.  Here they are with my answers:

What is your favorite part of the writing process?
I don’t have a favorite part. I like pretty much every part of the process. After about the zillioneth round of editing the same thing, I can get pretty sick of it, but otherwise, I do like it all.

What do you do when you know you’ve done something wrong and haven’t yet figured out what the source of that wrongness is?
That depends on the work in progress. If it’s something I’m steeped in (such as the SanClare books), I almost never get that stuck. I go back and reread, and the bit that’s gumming up the flow usually reveals itself. With a newer piece (such as La Cause Sociériste), I generally go back to the plotting and look for the problem there. If I get really hung up (short stories — not my forte), I hand it to my First Readers to diagnose.

What would your answers be?

I’m in the middle of chapter six, and this hop should take me to the end of the first third of the book.  I should adjust my counter as this book is much more likely to be about 120K rather than the 90K I’ve been saying on the counter [but the percentage goes up so fast when I'm only aiming at 90K].

Since there is a lot of existing content from my first draft well before I split the story into thirds (of which SanClare Scarlet is the second), reworking it is a bit tricky.  I can’t just follow it through because things have changed and need adjusted.  There’s some stuff that should just go away, no matter how I like it.  And then there’s some stuff that’s going to be even more useful this time around.

It’s funny to read through this very rough draft — there are parts of it where I had a *terrible* time maintaining POV, mostly because I wasn’t paying enough attention to that — I was just throwing all the ideas, words, etc., at the page as fast as I could type.  But it’s funny to read my usual third person limited turn into third person omniscient with no warning.  I point and laugh at myself, clean it up, and move on.

Real Life^TM has been busy and full of stuff and traveling and exhaustion, so no actual typing on books has been done since my last post (le sigh).  However, that doesn’t mean the work hasn’t been ongoing.  During my long, very damp drives through the state of Indiana, I worked on the backstory and plot of La Cause.  This idea is still new and shiny and not fully-formed, so any thinking time I get to spend on figuring out this new world and its people, I use.  The important part of writing is the putting-the-words-down part, but the percolating, thinking, planning, etc., time is essential, too.   It just can’t be all that gets done, or I’m basically a daydreamer and not a writer.

So this weekend, there will be much typing.  With La Cause it may all be notes and scribbles about the story and no actual wordage, but with Scarlet, there will be word-counter progress made!

Right after lunch…

I keep smacking my own hand and scolding myself to not go back and futz with the rough spots right now.  I even put a note in telling myself to skip over to the next event and go back and fix the bridging scene later because it was being a major roadblock.  The minute I did that, I knew how to proceed and thus was able to delete the note.  As someone (sorry!) in that fantastic panel at WisCon said, you have to give yourself permission to suck [during first drafts].

I switched word counters because the other one is much more complicated to use *and* (important consideration) doesn’t look cute on my new blog.  Okay, this one isn’t cute, either, but it’s clean, and the faux shadow-on-white-background on the other counter was bugging me.

I don’t have a single way of getting to the story I will eventually write. With SanClare Black, I started with the character. The world and the story grew up around him as I tried to find the right milieu for the person he was–with specific abilities and a defined personality–and that took some work to figure out. Generally, I find Lois McMaster Bujold’s story-starter, “What’s the worst thing I could do to this character?” works well for me.

With La Cause Sorciériste, it’s been the opposite: I had the story idea and then needed to figure out who could be the center of this story. This took several attempts and then Sophie-Katrine grabbed centerstage, and the story is off and running.

I’ve heard many other writers talk about how they talk to their characters and vice versa. Not my style at all. My characters never talk to me, and I don’t talk to them. What I do is what I call “method writing,” because I will get into the characters’ heads to work out scenes and will act out conversations (taking all the roles myself, naturally) to get the dialogue or actions correct.

I don’t do much hopping around in the story (though in the editing phase, things sometimes move around). I’m pretty set on writing from start to finish in linear fashion, though I will occasionally write out a future scene if it’s really strong in my mind, and I don’t want to lose it.

I am very visual, and I always know what things look like, but, as one of my First Readers points out, I somtimes forget to mention it to anyone while I’m focusing on capturing the emotions and the feel of the characters’ interactions. Later rounds of edits often involve putting in more descriptions and visual cues.