Wow- that’s a wordy title for a post. What I mean is, I am often asked how did you think of that or how did you imagine that person?
Like 80 year-old Polish survivor, Grammalie Rose from Ashes, Ashes. Or the anonymous fledgling serial killer in Blood Will Out for instance.
Hmm. I don’t know.
I’ve been thinking about it because I just finished a new manuscript, and I did it in 4 months. 6 months to write a book is fast for me.
This one almost came whole-cloth; like what Stephen King talks about in his On Writing where he says that the story already exists and it is our job as writers to uncover it- an archaeologist carefully exhuming fossils with a small brush and a tiny pick. This would be my first experience with that and I’m not absolutely sure if the story was already there (a perfect complete dinosaur!) or if I still had to glue it together from the scattered bones (there were no pieces left over, thank goodness.) What I do know is that I knew my characters so well that they told me what was going on.
I listened and they told me.
How amazing!
The manuscript is in multi-person POV- 5 to be exact. 4 of them are 3rd person and one is first person and she was a total surprise to me. At least I have been a 17-year old girl (as opposed to an 80-year old elder scavenger, or a serial killer) but it was a long time ago.
Her voice though. Wowza! Where the heck did that come from? So clear, so true, it rang in my head. And her personality, her motivation? She felt like a whole person to me immediately, like Athena springing from Zeus’s forehead–mad as hell with plenty to say.
They all felt like that. The ones who let me put words in their mouths and thoughts in their brains.
I have to admit that I was intimidated by the thought of trying a bunch of POV’s and getting inside each of my main characters and making sure that the voice was individual enough that the reader would be able to tell who was running the show in each chapter without some lame device like putting a name tag at the top of the page.
Turns out I loved it. It felt freeing to inhabit a person so thoroughly that I thought like them, acted like them. Skin-walking in humans? That sounds like something my serial killer would say.
(to be continued)