Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Writing on the novel continues, albeit slowly. In the middle of Scene 3, now.

In talking to my wife about my struggle, I mentioned that it felt like I’ve broken through a barrier, and that both my interest and enthusiasm had increased, to which she responded with a question: why is that?

I honestly hadn’t thought about why—I was just glad it was—but it engendered an interesting discussion.

Last week, I posted about how in this character-driven novel, I must engage in a lot more forethought. As I explained, writing about how a character reacts to action is a lot easier than writing about their motivation before that action is undertaken. That reality hasn’t changed, certainly not in the last week or so.

What has changed, though, is that I’m finally getting a handle on who my characters are.

This is a critical point, for me.

I’ve built and rebuilt my characters’ backstories close to a dozen times. I’ve changed family structure, occupations, names (lots and lots of names), affiliations, history, and well, damned near everything except their gender. I’ve also worked and reworked my outline, refining it, bringing in subplots, dropping subplots, chucking extraneous secondary characters, tightening it all up.

So, when I started writing, I had a pretty good handle on where my main characters had been and where they were headed.

All set, right?

Wrong.

In this new (to me) style of story, knowing a character’s past and future does not help me know their present. Sure, I know the name of their first cat, I know who their high school science teacher was, but what does that tell me about who they are today?

Writing Scene 1 was (relatively) easy. It’s a reactive scene. In it, the male MC from the modern storyline reacts to bad news. He’s reacting, not acting, so his motivation is basically irrelevant. It’s survival that drives his actions—emotional, physical, financial—and that requires no further analysis. He simply wants to survive the encounter, and I was free to take my pick of whether he fights, runs, or shelters in place, depending on the outcome I wanted.

In Scene 2, the going got harder. In it, the POV shifts to the female MC from the modern storyline as she deals with the same bad news. But here I had to dig deeper. Sure, she had to react to the action in the previous scene, but she also had to decide what to do next, and I had to know why she took the action I’d so carefully set up for her in my outline. But while I knew what was going to happen next, but I didn’t really know why it was going to happen, at least not from her point of view. I didn’t know how she felt about it all, not in detail. And here’s where I had to do some brain-diving. At this critical moment in her life, I couldn’t look to her relationship with her parents or whether or not she enjoyed her job for any answers. I had to understand her. Not only that, but as she came in contact with secondary characters, I had to divine how she felt about them (and vice versa) today, in that scene, not how they felt about each other when they were in college or when they were growing up together.

Then, for Scene 3, it was back to the male MC, and this time it’s not reactive. Here, he’s processing Scene 1 and deciding how to proceed.

Much authorial teeth-gnashing ensued.

My point is that, at this juncture, early on in this new novel, I’m just starting to get a feel for who these people are, today, at this pivotal point in their lives. I’m learning not just how they think, but even how they speak, and I’m discovering their inner strengths and weaknesses. I’m starting to learn about them.

There’s a strong tendency to stall here. It’s very easy to succumb to “analysis paralysis,” where every choice, every option, every possible reason must be weighed, judged, compared, and gamed out before I can write the next sentence, but sound the alarm! General quarters! Repel all boarders! At all costs, THIS MUST BE FOUGHT!

Here, my mantra is my saviour: All first drafts are crap.

I just need to write the crap down.

Later, I can purdify it.

k