Intuitive Writing and the Horse-Lord’s Soap

I just got home from work, and I’m still in my work clothes when I rush over to the little experiment that has taken over the kitchen. I have a bunch of glass bottles holding Q-tips soaked in essential oils- different combinations of sage and cedar and cinnamon and orange. I’m trying to isolate a combination so I can make the soap that smells like the soap one of my characters uses in the shower.

I am delirious over this guy, Gabriel Sanchez. I call him the Horse-Lord for the lethal Apache helicopters he used to fly in the Army. My POV character in the new book, General John Mitchel, is also delirious over Gabriel. John uses Dial soap and he would not consider letting me find him some new soap. He thinks it’s nonsense and has no time to waste on soap. But he seemed interested when I said I was going to make Gabriel a couple of sweet-smelling bars. He will certainly be willing to sniff Gabriel’s neck when he comes out of the shower.

My house smells like the houses I write about. I like to cook their food, smell their soap, listen to their music. It’s my thing, the way I sink into the characters. And once I am living with the characters and drinking their drinks and smelling their aftershave and listening to them have conversations, I can write intuitively about them.

What do I mean? I plan out scenes generally, but the characters surprise me all the time. They just do what they’re going to do, and their story moves forward. If I have thought about them enough, their behavior makes sense. I can put these two guys, Gabriel and John, down into any situation and write a scene and their behavior would make sense. Without my planning what they will do or say, they’ll do their thing and be themselves, and the end of the scene will have moved the story forward.

I have to drive lots of miles in my current job and I think about the story while I’m driving. I think about the characters. I let them have conversations in my head. When I’m ready to write, they just take over and do what they’re going to do. I call this intuitive writing because it feels intuitive to me. But it only works when I do adequate character work before I start writing.

The prep work isn’t just done driving, of course. I pick out their clothes when I’m surfing online. I find books for them in the bookstore. I research till my eyes are falling out of my head. But the smells are really evocative. When I’m playing around with my essential oils and Q-tips in the kitchen my mind seems to light up like a Christmas tree! And so now I’m going to make them a couple of bars of soap.

I have ten pounds of coconut oil, plus palm oil and olive oil and mango butter for superfatting. The recipes are online and I have a bottle of sodium hydroxide. I am very close to finding Gabriel’s scent. I am going to have so much fun this weekend!

I saw a sunset last weekend that was the strangest color, and my characters thought so, too. Here’s the scene I wrote in my head while I was driving. It’s not in the book- that’s finished and in editing:

**
John studied the candy-colored sky, raspberry pink edging to smudgy purple dusk the color of a grape lollipop. The colors reminded him of Turkish Delight, a candy he’d been offered once in a Bedouin’s tent. The old man’s grandson had filled two teacups with mint tea so sweet John could smell the sugar over the dust and sun-warmed canvas. Then he offered the plate of Turkish Delight with a flourish and a bow. The boy had black liquid eyes, with lashes thick as caterpillars, and John felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He turned his head and watched the boy’s hand slide down his leg toward the bronze-colored dagger in the top of his boot.

Then Gabriel was there, quiet as smoke, his rifle cradled in his arms, and the boy froze. John set his tea cup down, refusing the old Bedouin’s hospitality. A hard line drawn in the sand, nearly as hard a line as the one drawn when you cut someone’s throat over a plateful of Turkish Delight. The old man had eyes like his grandson. John stood up, backed out of the tent, and Gabriel spread his arms, the rifle in one big hand. No one could mistake the gesture. It said, no one touches him. You come through me to get to him.

John stared down into the cold frame. The basil seedlings looked ready to come out into the big world, taste the cold night air. Gabriel walked across the yard, jeans and his favorite tee shirt that said, First, Kill All the Lawyers. He slung an arm around John’s shoulder. “Hey, boss. You up for a steak?”

“I could eat a steak.” He looked at the sky again. “It looks like Turkish Delight, doesn’t it?”

Gabriel’s arm tightened around him. “Yes, it does.”
**

I thought about this scene after I wrote it down and set it aside for a bit. Why did Gabriel spread his arms in the tent? That was dangerous. That was stupid, I mean, the kid had a knife. He could have thrown it. Did he really do it to say something about needing to protect John?

But Gabriel explained it to me. “He was a backstabber. He wasn’t the kind of assassin who would put a knife in your chest, not with you looking right at him. I was just letting him know I knew who he was.”

So now I’m going to have to change that paragraph, since now I get what he did a little better.

The story is called The General and the Horse-Lord, and it should be out from Dreamspinner around April. If the soap turns out, I’ll give away a few bars when the book comes out!