Petra afforded me the opportunity to try several new things. Primary among them, of course, was the pedal-to-the-metal writing process, about which I discoursed in my first installment. Here are a few other firsts:
Multiple POVs.
My first two novels, while considerably longer than Petra, were told entirely from the protagonist’s point of view. The logistics of Petra demanded a multiple POV approach. I needed at least two viewpoint characters. I ended up using four. I could conceivably have used at least one more. One of my minor characters, who started off as basically a guy with a gravelly voice, became more and more important to the story as it rolled along.
The redoubtable Elaine Isaak pointed out to me that four POVs is a lot for an 80K-word novel. She’s quite correct. I feared that Petra might balloon into a doorstop epic. It didn’t, thank goodness. I attribute this to the fact that it covers a very short span of time–only three days.
I’m not sure how successful some of these POVs were, at least at the beginning of the novel. But toward the end, I think I started getting the hang of using them to my advantage. For example, one scene featured two characters discussing a third, a person whose loyalty they were beginning to doubt. In a subsequent scene, I jumped into that person’s head, showing the reader just how right/wrong they had been about him. That was kinda cool, and factored into the third act.
Da Bad Guy.
One of my POV characters was my antagonist. This was a very interesting experience for me. I learned things about him I hadn’t even suspected when I started writing the novel. I also found, as I believe I’ve mentioned, that writing from his POV was amazingly easy. Not sure why, but there it is. If I had to guess, I would say it’s because of the type of guy he is–long-used to being in charge, utterly lacking in self doubt. A touch megalomaniacal. He’s a (forgive me) Decider.
Something else that just occurred to me: one theme I’m drawn to time and time again is the use and abuse of power. It’s very much in evidence with Petra, and my antagonist is its living embodiment. Maybe that’s why his parts of the novel went so smoothly.
Of course, one must be careful not to let things get too easy. One pitfall I became wary of was the temptation to throw in some mustache twirling on his part–especially important to avoid, given that he doesn’t have a mustache. On a couple of occasions, I had to resist having him engage in some gratuitous villainy to show, you know, that he’s a villain. He was already enough of a bastard. He didn’t need any of my help.
But damn, was he easy to write.
Flying Blind.
As I mentioned yesterday, and numerous times over the past several months, I started writing this novel while huge chunks of the second act were missing, and without any real idea how the story would end. This made me quite apprehensive, as I hadn’t had much success with that kind of situation in the past. And yet, every time I got to one of those blind spots, my muse bailed me out. She fed me the story on a need-to-know basis only. And you know, the plot seems to move along pretty well. The ending seems pretty well set up by stuff that was planted earlier, as if it had been planned from the very beginning. It wasn’t–at least, not by me. (Time and perspective may prove otherwise, I realize–a chance I’ll have to take.)
So why did it work out this time? I’m not sure, but I think it had to do with my characters. I’ve always believed that the whole “plot vs. character” debate is a false choice. The two are inextricably linked, two sides of the coin called Story. Plot flows from characterization; characters are shaped by plot. (The relationship strikes me as similar to the relationship between gravity and matter in General Relativity.)
Even though I knew little about what would happen next in the novel, I knew the characters well enough to ask them. And that, I think, made all the difference.
And that’s enough for tonight. For my final installment, I’ll hazard some guesses about what’s ahead for Petra.
