Digging tunnels
I’ve been writing the sequel to My Heart is The Tempest for almost a year now. At first, from December 2021 till April 2022, I mostly focused on the narrative arc of the entire story, so now I basically have both the start and the ending, and part what’s in between. At some point, though, I stopped worrying about the plot and realized the characters were slipping away, like arias lost in the flowing symphony of music. Then I knew what I needed to do: I spent part of spring 2022 and the entire summer to work on one single character only, devoting my time to what I call “tunnel digging”. Basically, it means writing only one character at a time, putting all the pre-existing pieces about that character together and start “digging” them into a tunnel to explore the character’s thoughts and moves in detail until I find their real motivations and feelings, thus helping them reach their full potential and goal ‒ getting out of the tunnel, that is.
As I watch the character move towards their personal sense of purpose and revelation, I slowly reach the end of the tunnel myself and understand how they can interact with other characters in a more genuine way. In the very moment I’ve reached the other side of the tunnel, I know I can move on to a different character and start digging again. Both my scifi novel “La foresta delle idee” (Forest of Meanings) and my China-inspired horror novel “Fiori nell’ombra” (Flowers in the shadows, neither available in English, but they may be in the future) were built that way. I feel it is an effective way to delve into an in-depth analysis of each character and their motivations. Although the writing process for My Heart is The Tempest felt more like a free-flow recording of voices running in my head than a “tunnel digging”, for Volume 2 I felt like I needed to go back to something I’m more familiar with, because it helps me develop my style in detail while following my characters’ steps more clearly.
Being the protagonist of the entire trilogy, of course Sycorax was the first I worked on until spring 2022, while I spent summer 2022 expanding the scenes on the “mysterious queen” (who is actually just a voice and the missing piece of the story in Volume 1 but becomes one of the leading characters in Volume 2). Both Sycorax and the queen are very dark characters, so I enjoyed the ride immensely. They are not exactly villains, but they tend to have a very dark take on reality at times and their dark nature always leads them into something potentially dangerous and lethal, for them as well for others. I find these the most exciting parts to write, because I tend to relate to dark characters more easily at a basic, instinctual level.
Then it was time to move on to the brighter side of the novel: Ariel, Miranda, and someone new we’ve never met before in Volume 1. Since September 2022, I’ve been focusing on Miranda, who’s not so easy to pin down and work on, perhaps because she’s meant to be quite the opposite of what the other two turned out to be. In a way, she is everything that Sycorax cannot be (at least for the time being): the compassionate one, full of wonder and genuine enthusiasm over everything. Surprisingly, I’ve found her brightness refreshing and contagious, my creative life pouring into my own like a new breath circling my own breaths. Perhaps, writing can truly lead us to a better undestanding of ourselves and shed light into a better version of ourselves, giving us new purpose and a new sense of direction, despite being so different from who we are. After all, the writing process leads to a series of affirmations about each character, so why shouldn’t we use this same process to lead ourselves into a kind of affirmation which might work for our lives too?
