Starting a new writing project is like being dropped into a lush landscape with all kinds of amazing plants, animals, people, all of them fascinating and exciting, all jostling in joyous creative cacophony with hidden plots just waiting to be uncovered. It starts off so crowded, I have to get out the machete and start hacking away, or the excesses will bury the story. The overgrowth hides the path that will lead to the spectacular view. A book can have many things, but it can’t have everything.
I am about 15,000 words in and I finally see the plot arch for the first third of this story. Also, I may be finding the narrative voice. Still iffy on that. And speaking of voices, a small gang of key characters is in competition to be the lead character. I’m surprised that I haven’t sorted this out yet.
So many things to think about. Where is true north for this story? I’m beginning to see the path. And this may sound strange to those who don’t muck around trying to craft a compelling 80,000-word narrative, but it’s the characters — characters I have invented — who will reveal to me where they’re going next.
Novelist E.M. Forster — whose book about writing fiction, Aspects of the Novel has been on my shelf for decades — has this to say about characters:
The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves. They try to live their own lives and are consequently often engaged in a treason against the main scheme of the book. They “run away,” they “get out of hand”: they are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying and destroy it by intestinal decay.
My characters are still full of great rambunctious energy. Listening to them and taming some of that energy is the current pleasure.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 