Strangeattractor asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

What helps with figuring out how to tell a type of story that isn't told often? For example, when you were working on the Sharing Knife books and realized you had set up demographic and long-term problems that your characters would tackle in books 3 and 4, what helped you come to grips with how to do it? How did you bridge the gap between wanting to write a story with an unusual shape and actually doing it?

Lois McMaster Bujold The short answer is whining, lots of whining, but more seriously, there is a certain inherent orneriness in picking unusual plot shapes or protagonists, a kind of low mutter of "I'll show them!" After the initial set-up, I do have to write my way into my books scene by scene, and let the story itself show me where it's going and how it's going to get there. I don't know how much suspense this creates for the readers, but it certainly creates suspense for me.

So there isn't exactly a gap to bridge. There is wanting, and there is doing. There really isn't an in-between state that isn't just more wanting. (Or whining.) "Planning" for me is diffuse, broken into small bites and spread throughout the whole of the doing.

In other words, at the working face I am never writing a novel. I am writing, at most, a scene (and then another, etc.) Or half a scene, or a paragraph, or whatever functional unit I can actually hold in my brain at one time.

But, certainly, there seems not much point in writing a story just like everyone else's, because they've already done that. I could just read theirs, for a lot less trouble. (Which is not quite the same thing as taking a trope or idea that delights me from the genre cornucopia off to a corner to play with my way. I certainly do that.)

Ta, L.

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