Now what?

So the first draft of The Far West is done at last, turned in a bit over two weeks ago, and I'm past the first walking-around-in-a-daze bit where I spend all my time feeling as if I ought to be finishing the book and then remembering that no, I'm actually done until the editorial revision requests arrive. I already know two fairly important things that need fixing (the current climax is a bit of bait-and-switch, and also not nearly as dramatic as it would be if I can rearrange it a bit so as to have my two different Solutions To Big Problems happen in one giant emergency, instead of two; also, the final chapter sort of dribbles off into "…and then we got home," instead of, you know, actually ending), but those can wait until I've recovered a bit, run the draft through my new crit group, and have the editorial requests in hand.

Which means I am now looking at my huge list of Possible Things To Write and contemplating which idea(s) to start poking at. My agent has weighed in, and so have several of my friends; they're all pretty much in agreement, so unless my publisher gets really demanding about some other possibility (and does so pretty soon, before I'm totally committed to this project), I probably have settled on The Next Thing.

And what it started with was this:

No shit, there I was –

What, you don't like the opening?  Listen, it's fairy tales that start "once upon a time."  War stories are supposed to start "No shit, there I was."

So, no shit, there I was, thread in one hand, needle in the other, and a silk bolt worth four thousand isiri spread over my lap, when -

Now what?  Oh, you think this doesn't sound much like a war story?

In the last few weeks of thinking about this rather minimal story-seed, I added a McGuffin (although I have no idea yet why it's significant), a notion of what happens in the first half of the opening scene, and the barest hint of a plot thread. Oh, and two, count them, two secondary characters, one of whom probably won't be around for more than two chapters, tops.

This is not much to start writing a novel with.

I could just take what I have and keep writing for a while, to see what happens and what I come up with. I already know, however, that this seldom works well for me, so I'm not going to start by trying that. I need to develop what I have a bit more, until it gets past the Critical Mass point and really starts rolling, and that means poking at what I have until new things show up and start to gel.

The question always is, where and how to poke. Up until last weekend, the obvious point to poke at this story was the characters. The story needs more of them, and I need to know more about the few that I already have (well, about two of them, anyway. I don't think I really need to know much more about the one who's disappearing within two or three chapters). And characters and what they want or need (but can't have…yet) are the heart of most stories.

So I've been thinking about these people off and on: who they are, where they come from, what they're each trying to do and why. I was thinking about the second character, the one who's not the protagonist but who will be a major player, and why that was happening…and I figured out something about the McGuffin. And suddenly, I had a structure for my plot.

As soon as this happened, where I need to poke at this idea changed. See, structure is fundamental for me. It's what goes under the plot, to hold it up. What I need to know next, for me to be able to finish that first scene, is what I'm going to build on that structure and why. Once I know that, I'll know who the rest of the characters have to be and what they'll have to do. Undoubtedly, that will change the plot - once I have characters and they start acting and interacting, they always end up changing the plot details. That's what makes it all work, for me.

But the characters and incidents won't change the structure. That's solid. I know how many incidents I need, and the effect they have on the McGuffin; now I need to figure out what they are and why the villain set things up this way and how they're going to affect my characters. (I'm not too worried about how my heroine is going to mess up the villain's plans; after that opening, I have no doubt she'll think of something.) Oh, and I need a villain…the structure requires one.

If this were going to be a different book, or if it had started with a different set of bits - say, a well-developed setting and a bunch of characters, but no plot or structure - I'd probably have started by poking at the characters. The point isn't how I'm doing this, or that anyone else ought to work the same way. The point here is: 1) The basic idea needs a lot more development before I can make much forward progress; 2) The development doesn't just happen; it requires poking; 3) Where I poke keeps changing, depending on how much I've already figured out.

Changing where I poke at ideas is part of the process of developing them. I don't make up a list of characters, then figure out everything about their backgrounds and personalities and desires before I ever start thinking about plot or setting. I think about a character for a bit, then about the McGuffin for a bit, then about a different character, then maybe about the setting/history/culture.

This morning, in conversation with Beth-my-walking-buddy, I got a handle on the villain, and the whole plot changed. So did one of my two supposedly-known secondary characters. The structure's still the same, though, and so's the McGuffin; a little more background, and I'll be ready to start writing my first totally-wrong outline.

(Julie D, I'll put up the post on agents on Sunday, when I've had a chance to think about it a bit more.)