Just for a change I’m talking characters. My motivation is pretty good right now!
I’m finishing off book four at the moment, provisionally called “Iceland Cold” after using that as a placeholder for a Canva concept. Sadly the cover is a bust, it’s been vetoed by my wife who’s also a director in our publishing company and who has a better eye for what will sell than me.
Book four was a bit of a struggle until I realised it was a lot less complex than it seemed.
Initially I was having a heck of a time getting an idea of how everyone involved linked together, they all did different things in a particular milieu and just seemed to bounce together at random points with no reason to engage. They’re strangers in the night who happen to end up in the same place at the same time and who then get in each other’s way without really intending it.
I was trying to come up with a common theme for this – something they were all pursuing but then it occurred to me – why?
Why does it matter whether something happens because everyone’s on the same page? That’s not how life works. Most of the time life’s just about people effectively colliding whilst pursuing goals that aren’t even necessarily contradictory – if they sat down and discussed it.
It’s the curse of people that people don’t do that. They react. So team A B and C do their thing and when they meet up there’s a question mark over how they will react. They’ve got motivations and they’ve got suspicions and they’ve got prejudices. That produces action, and I think that comes across as a lot more natural than ‘we’re all looking for a Mcguffin.’
So instead we have one team using a trade ship as cover to conduct an operative swap. We have another team investigating a people trading ring. We have a third investigating why the base where this is all happening has gone silent, and within the teams we have people with different sub-motivations. One who wants to keep certain things quiet, another who wants to get out of a hole they’ve dug themselves, another who is just plain bad at his job and wants that hidden.
One of the benefits of writing via ‘pantsing’ is that it allows these sorts of interactions to develop naturally once you have an idea of what the characters are trying to achieve The Americans are now friends with the Union, does that mean they’re not going to sabotage the Union team’s track when given the change? Nope. They’ll do that. They have an important job to do even if they quite like the Union Agents.
The Union Agents going to try and help the American ones when they get into trouble with the baddies? Yep, it doesn’t impact on their mission so they’ll give it a go. On the other hand one of the baddies starts expositing things which no one is supposed to know bar the Union senior agent. That’s a shame for all involved.
Trick is to then go back and make sure what you started writing now makes sense in the context of how the story developed.
Hence why I spend so much time editing for continuity… I understand it’s good for characters to have the same name throughout a story and sometimes even for three characters not to have the same name.
My wife claims it is confusing.
Ice Age in Scarlet 