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March 5th, 2008
PLOTTING MURDER
Someone on the CrimeThruTime
mailing list asked:
| "When you get an idea for a Frevisse or a Joliffe novel, do the characters and circumstances of the murder occur to you first, or not? And even if not, do you need to decide what those are going to be before you start writing? Or do you actually begin the novel not knowing yourself who's eventually going to get murdered, how and why?" |
An excellent question that I could not resist
answering.
As to whether the characters or the circumstances come first, it's different with every book. Sometimes, as with
The
Reeve's Tale, I thought it was time to do a story centered on ordinary people in a village situation. So I went through my various notes from research that I keep for possible plot ideas and gathered various possibilities
for relationships and what might go wrong in a medieval village. The characters and plot came from those.
On the other hand, for The
Apostate's Tale I wanted to see what would happen if an apostate nun returned to the nunnery, so in that case the characters were the starting
point.
Once I'm past the starting point with any book,
however, the working out of the plot and characters becomes such a tight interweave there's no
way to say that one predominates over the other. I do know who is going to get murdered and why before I start writing. I don't start writing until I have the plot and the relationships among the characters worked out and written down.
But -- and this is a very large BUT -- I've learned to leave the last third or so of the outline very general when I write it out, because in the actual writing of the story, as the characters begin to flesh out and develop as individuals, things happen that I didn't expect or foresee in the mere plotting of the story. I intensely enjoy the basic working out
of the plotline and characters' relationships, but the real fun (and the real work)
begins when I start to write the story and begin to find out who these people really
are. They change from characters in an outline to individuals in their own particular world. By the time I'm two-thirds of the way through the story, people have taken on dimensions I
could never foresee, and because of that the story loses details I had planned and gains ones I hadn't expected. So although the story ends where I originally intended, the course of action to get there is often widely different from my initial conception, simply because of how characters have developed in the course of the writing and changed the dynamics of the story.
- Margaret
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March 7th, 2008
APOSTATE'S TALE - SAMPLE
CHAPTERS
The
Apostate's Tale has been out for over two months and I'm
only just now getting around to having sample
chapters made available on the website.
I'd blame my webmaster, but the truth is things have simply
been extraordinarily busy. Add one looming deadline, two new
projects, and a dash of personal crises and the entire month of
February seems to disappear entirely!
- Margaret
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