plot.development

four hours of highway driving into the Sierras and several more of pure dreamy silence led to a breakthrough. now I know how it has to happen, and who is to be redeemed.

the scrivener corkboard (writing tools)

I have the outline to my book now available to me at the touch of a key, on Scrivener's corkboard feature. The screen background looks like a corkboard, and there are index cards created for each chapter, which have the chapter heading and space for you to write summaries or whatever you feel you need for a quick visual outline of the larger narrative. I only seem to require the corkboard when my story expands. In this case, I'm playing with about 100,000 words, or about 50 chapters averaging 2,000 words. When I'm working out of the body of the narrative, on Scrivener, I have the chapters descending down a left column, and clicking on any chapter will take me directly to it. When the cursor is brought to the super heading 'Book#3' under which lies the cabinet of sub-chapters, the entire narrative will appear and you can scroll through it as a streaming passage. Often I find myself cutting and pasting and creating new chapters and recreating old chapters. And all you do is drag and drop a chapter in the cabinet to place it in a completely different location in the narrative, so I love the facility the ease of relocation, it almost inspires creativity or open-endedness in the editing process. Yesterday I filled in the corkboard summaries that were missing (new and recreated chapters), and found myself adding notes to the simple plot outlines, including notes about the feel of the narrative from one chapter to the next (ie humor, dark, heavy on action, descriptive, light-hearted) so that I can keep tabs on ups and downs and graduate the voice of the story into a consistent diversity of mood or feelingstates. I also embellished the summaries with  theme-related developments and character quirks or relationships I am hoping to keep tabs on. I hope this helps give you an idea of what Scrivener offers you to enhance the writing and editing process. Thanks.

killing off central characters -- but what if they die first?

My stories always go in directions i did not expect or plan sometimes, and i get to decide if that's where they were supposed to go or not. This is the excitement and burden of writing off a minimal outline. I have a friend who is a writer who was saying that his friend who is also a writer had a central character who stepped out of car in the middle of the book and got run over on the freeway. His character just offed himself without his permission! The author apparently was really upset he lost his protagonist, but he went on with the story because he believed that's what had to happen. Now isn't that bizarre? It floored me! I mean, I don't see how i could have Ame (my star in 'Grand Theft Life' and 'Maze') just fall in a hole one day, against my wishes, and force me to write the story around her? that seems ludicrous! but its funny to think about anyway.  -K

WIP - developing tension

Nobody wants to read a book of fiction that lacks tension. My immediate efforts as I prepare my latest in my Urban Fantasy series - MAZE (Book #2) - involve setting up central and peripheral tensions. I want to have both internal and external conflicts mapped out (outlined), and then freewriting can help determine what happens when the characters actually come up against one another. Sometimes you have relationship stuff (eros) and sometimes you have survival stuff (thanatos), I see Eros as the love or sex drive, whereby characters are wanting to merge with other characters. Thanatos is the death drive, whereby characters are wanting to eliminate anyone who threatens their survival. My central character, Ame, is falling in love in Book 2. She is also learning to hunt down humans, not to kill them, because they have something she wants and knows how to extract. Her internal conflict, in basic terms, involves her relationship with herself. In psychology this is called 'ego-dystonic' (as opposed to ego-syntonic): parts of yourself you are not comfortable with. Ame is learning to hunt to survive, and has been taught by her native people, the 'Delux' (Latin for 'of light'), how to master this art. It can be violent and can result in human death, but not always. Ame was adopted and raised by humans, so she is about to experience an identity crisis of sorts (which will carry on far beyond Book #2). She does not want to see harm come to humans, but at the same time there is a thirst and an appetite for destruction in her with which she must contend.