I think I made a major step forward in my development as a writer this weekend. I’m starting to ask how I can be more mean to my characters. I just had to disguise it as, “how can I up the stakes here?”
My latest novel is progressing nicely, but it occurred to me that the side-quest I sent of my characters off to accomplish wasn’t really anything exciting. Yes, it’s important to the resolution, but…well, it’s boring. Once I reached that conclusion this weekend I asked myself what I could do to spice things up. It didn’t take long before I devised some nastiness for that character. And that one change ratchets up the tension for the whole cast.
As I’ve discussed previously, my planning vs. “pantsing” pendulum is still swinging. I’ve tried writing without an outline and I found my books were too simplistic. I tried writing a detailed outline, and I found it too restrictive and boring. My pendulum swung back the other direction, and I’m finding I’m missing obvious options for ratcheting up the tension. So the next experiment is to just not plan too far ahead, but spend more time thinking of the immediate plotline and what could make things more interesting.
My daughter caught me chuckling evilly to myself as I decided that poor Antahn is about to get in over his head. The coddled nobleman and his two cooper guides are about to find a squad of soldiers in the way of their objective with time running out. I don’t know how they’re going to get out of this one yet, but it’ll be fun to find out.
Evil chuckles are the best…..
Bwahahaha! I don’t mind putting my characters through the ringer as long as I know they get a happy ending. Well, most of them.
It’s not that I don’t put characters through rough stuff. I just tend to get blinders on, focusing on the main character and the main plotline and forget that the side characters should also be encountering opposition. Evil crucibles for everyone!
As a player in Thom’s D&D campaign, I can vouch for his bastardly credentials.