In the writing world one sometimes hears about "Outliners" versus "Pantsers." Most writers are a combination of both. For me, although I am by inclination an Outliner -- my notes files is close to novel length by itself, and that's before you add maps and charts -- when pen hits paper is when I discover all the questions I really should have asked earlier.
Like yesterday's realization. I dreamed up a bit to properly close the character arc of the undercover Art Squad guy, but realized I had no place to write that down so I could find it again. So I started a page just for character and other arcs and the moment I did that, I realized I didn't have nearly enough to understand the evolution of several other key characters.
Take the guy with the stupid accent. I know how that arc resolves but how did he come to be chasing Penny across Europe in the first place? If you look at his arc as it stands, the only thing he should be trying to do is hand her a check.
And, yes, I'm still struggling with the characterization of the lead. There's a certain default when it comes to genre heroines in first person. Sarcastic, shy in crowds, wears jeans, lives alone, studies krav-maga...you can easily make a list of common attributes. I keep finding myself falling into that comfortable default that is, I think, less that of a male writer trying to first-person as female (as female authors write to the same template) than it is a writer trying to be put on the skin of a hero with physical skills and a quip ready on the tongue (instead of ocurring, at is does to most of us, after the door has closed.)
(There's a somewhat less common but still familiar template for third-person heroines in adventure fiction. It starts with great hair, moves down to crop top, and usually involves a large measure of what TVTropes calls "waif-fu." Also, oddly enough, gender of the writer is immaterial.)
Right at the moment I'm working on another crazy conversation. See, I created this French couple for a walk-on bit, but then I needed them for something else, and now they've grabbed an entire chapter for themselves. And their first stop was to go eat. So now I'm trying to deal with Greek food (unfamiliar to my protagonist and, dammit, largely unfamiliar to me -- traveling on a budget and having other things on my mind, okay?) Through the lens of a pair of French tourists. So way foodie.
The only thing that is worse is if Graham has to talk about coin collecting. That's a rabbit hole I just don't want to fall into.
I also have windows open for the Athenian Agora, for the Straka and Monastiraki districts (shopping, mostly), and for the flight to Frankfurt from airline schedules to pictures of the Check-In area to flight tracker data. Fortunately I can screen-capture a bunch of this stuff, and you can actually paste images directly from a viewer into the Scrivener window so all that research is lumped into the saved document.
And, yeah, I'm thinking again about the basic concepts. This isn't the novel I set out to write. I'm not entirely sure it is a novel I want to write. In any case I did some scribbling last night and I'm narrowing down what an Adventure Archaeologist story is.
On the physical side, it is a Jungle Adventure. Hear me out. Unlike a thriller the physical environment is not so much fast cars and big cities and high-tech machines. It tends to be natural surroundings, wild, remote areas (and the tech tends to be stone and remarkably durable wood and rope). There's usually a "man vs nature" thing going on. Wild animals, too.
On the, erm, "intellectual" side there's always a puzzle. The hero usually has to remember some trivia about ancient times, often has to translate something, but may only have to pattern-match. (The main place this breaks from real archaeology and history is the answer the hero gets is confirmed correct when they discover the lost city or pull the big lever. Instead of writing it up and submitting in a journal and hoping tomorrow's dig doesn't prove you wrong because science is always probationary).
There's also more often than not a mythology layer. Some part of the ancient experience which relates to the puzzle is in the form of a story, and there will be mythic resonances if not story parallels if not outright transubstantiations that occur (if I could use that as a descriptive term).
So right now the story has neither. It is a tourist trip through Greece, Germany and Italy (well, parts of each) and a fairly thin story of antiquities looting that is really more of a simple mystery than anything else. Yes, she does chase down some history through a more-or-less archaeological lens, but that is more to understand the motivations of some of the people involved in the smuggling and in the end doesn't really matter.
Contrast this to a word-picture I drew up when I first started the planning file:
We weren't on top of the airplane. The pilot was dead, the engine was smoking, a man was attacking me with a 16th-century broadsword that I was barely parrying with the remains of a parachute I didn't know how to use anyhow, but we weren't on top of the plane. That would just be silly.I think I could arrive there within another book or two. I'm not sure I should. But this doesn't really help with figuring out what the book I'm actually writing needs and, more importantly, how to accomplish it.
So all I can really do is preserve my notes for the Monastiraki and Plaka scenes so I can come back to them, get back on that plane, and arrive at the actual PLOT as quickly as I can. And hope that it looks better from there than it does from here.
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