The Orphan and the Thief :: The Making Of, Part 1

Welcome to a series of posts, detailing how my third novel came to be. The book is set to be released Early 2014. Early Review copies are available. Sign up here or contact me: creative.legette (at) gmail.com.

The Orphan and the Thief has been my most challenging book yet. It very nearly broke me and I seriously considered never writing again. But as you can tell, I made it through and I’m really pleased with how the novel turned out. I just ended up taking a very long detour in the writing, as you’ll read below.

The Idea

We’ve all got our favorite board games from our childhood. You can probably name yours right now, without hesitation, even if you can’t bring back all the rules. Mine is a game called The aMAZEing Labyrinth.

This game was one of our (my sister, brother and myself) favorites. A few Christmases ago, we were playing it once again when I was struck by inspiration. An idea for a potions hunt sparked into life, simply inspired by the game’s marvelous artwork

The First (and painful) Draft

The big reason Orphan was so difficult to write was that I was trying to mesh two very different plot lines together into one cohesive novel. And they weren’t having any of that.

Plot A: A Potion’s Master and his assistant are uprooted from their work when the assistant’s mother is brutally murdered.

Plot B: A lonely orphan, who works in an apothecary, stumbles upon a discarded bit of paper with potion ingredients on it.

I loved the writing that stemmed from Plot A. It was fabulous stuff. The characters were glorious and the writing came as easily as eating a box of chocolates. Plot B wasn’t half bad either.

Brainstorming is always the most fun. I came up with so many exciting things: a talking beer mug named Ol’ Joe, a web-traveling spider called Agatha, a group of thieves dubbed the Ramblers, a potions book with a most fitting title: The Guide to all Things Potion by Edgar Bartholomew. Ogres and ballads and dragon hunting pirates! Proper, good stuff.

But it was when I tried to weave the murder plot into the potion hunting plot that I started getting into trouble. There was literally a chapter I could not get past. I’d re-read the manuscript from beginning up to that chapter, with the hope that I would have a brain wave while doing so. When no such wave hit by the point I reached chapter 10, I repeated the procedure.

I reached the point where I was facing a serious problem. The book wasn’t going to work they way it was. I had spent a good part of a year (perhaps the entire year) trying and failing to find the golden thread that would weave Plot A and Plot B into perfection.

There was only one solution. One of them had to go and this made me physically sick to my stomach. I had spent so much time and work on Plot A. I loved the characters. I loved the writing. And I knew that if I deleted it, the writing and most of the characters would never be seen. But if I wanted book 3 to become an actual book and not just a half-finished manuscript, Plot A had to be removed because I knew it was causing the problems.

I fought this. I removed half of it and tried to bend the remaining bits into something more malleable, but that was worse. Finally, I removed all of it and I’m incredibly proud of myself for having the courage to do so. The book is far, far better without Plot A.

Now that Plot B stood on its own, the writing became easier, but the story still needed major adjustments. With some reworking, it became the new starting line and I could finally get past that dratted chapter 10.

This photo is of my first official planning board. I filled it up rather fast—planning boards are never big enough. I apologize for the misspellings. If you zoom in, you’ll be able to see them more clearly. Most of the ideas on this board were deleted when I changed the plot, but some stuck: Ol’ Joe is there (but what he says isn’t), Melena Snead’s hometown was changed (she’s now always and only lived in the big city of Hickory), Phineas McDougall was the Potion Master who met the axe along with Plot A, but his assistant, Izzie Groot, survived to be included by the skin of her teeth. There was also a newspaper in the original drafts called The Rabbit. The owners of the paper were York and Sons. I ended up dropping The Rabbit, but keeping York and Sons, as I loved the sound of it. Instead of printers, they’re now private detectives.

Next up: Part 2.