Fluid outlines

After six months of steady progress, I’m probably about 60% of the way through the first draft of Wrath of Empire. And this project is posing some challenges that I’ve not had to deal with before.

As this is a prequel, the bare bones – essentially three major events – were already laid out for me in the backstory to Ghosts of Innocence. The novel mentioned them to varying degrees, and gave some sense of the political climate at that time, but I had given no real thought to what happened in any great detail. It was on the level of saying that someone assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, and a few months later the whole of Europe was at war. OK, but what actually happened to lead from one event to the other?

The task, therefore, has been to add flesh to those bones.

I started off with a straightforward outline. Take those pivotal events and try to fill in the gaps. This added a layer, but it was still couched in very general terms, such as “Thwart Ivan’s attempt to claim the throne” and “Huge public turmoil”. Great. I could probably write a history text off those notes, but it would read like a history text with none of the specifics and personal connections that turn it into a story.

I needed to dig into the “who” and “why” and “how” in specific terms that can then be written out as a scene, and brought to life by the actors on the page.

The challenge for me has been this: In the novels I’ve written so far, I’ve had some kind of an outline, but as the story evolves it has always taken off in directions I didn’t anticipate. In each case, there are whole branches of the outline that ended up never being written, because the story took on a life of its own and the early outlines changed dramatically.

Always!

But that is a luxury I can’t afford this time. The story has to arrive at those pivotal events, and it has to arrive on time. Something I’ve never managed to do before!

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