I had another decent session of in-class writing last week while my lovely students were doing their weekly test – but I had such a small class that there was no need to write on the prowl, I sat down and wrote and wrote instead. The most exciting thing is that what I was writing was an extension of my outline for my second novel. Although I actually wrote an initial outline about a month ago, a few of my ideas had already changed by the time I’d written the full first chapter, so I thought I’d start again – and the interesting thing about doing it in class was I didn’t have any other notes in front of me, just what I could remember in my head about the characters and the first chapter.
The first chapter that I wrote is set in the present, when all three characters know each other well, and my plan was (and still is) to go back into the past and follow each character’s life for a year or two before the first chapter actually takes place. That’ll show how they ended up in Bratislava, what they’re doing there now and how they all met up.
Outlining these storylines for each of the three characters has proven relatively straightforward. The tricky bit for each character came when their story needs to move forward past the first chapter. I really felt that I both couldn’t and shouldn’t plan that. I know the characters well, but I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen to them towards the end of the story – in fact, I have almost no idea. I know what I want to talk about and the kinds of ideas I want readers to go away with, but I really don’t know what the characters will actually do.
In great contrast to my first novel, this is the first time I’ve really understood what other writers say about the characters telling you what to do – they’re independent creatures, somehow, living their own lives and they will tell you what they do in their lives when they’re good and ready! I ended up discontinuing the plot planning for each of the characters around the point where it goes into the future (that is, after the first chapter), and I’m just going to wait and see what they end up doing. I have to trust them! And that’s quite exciting.
