Another Organic Writer!

Tess Gerritsen discusses how she writes. I feel her pain. Strings of Discord started while I was camping in Grand Teton National Park the summer of 2002. It was sunset, and we were driving from Grand Teton to Yellowstone (they're connected by a little stretch of land). I just happened to glance to the right as we passed a meadow bordered on three sides by evergreens with a bunch of aspens clustered at the far edge of the meadow. The sun hit the trees just perfectly to cast the strangest shadows on the meadow and those aspens. I knew there was a story there. I could see in my mind a pale figure staring at me from across the meadow, beckoning me to follow her as she disappeared into those odd shadows. That was all I had for a couple months. Then we went on our honeymoon to various gorgeous national parks in Utah and Arizona, and a few other things shook out: I saw a woman with dark hair huddling in some of the vegetation that sprang up along a river on a road near Moab; that same figure struggled to climb the rocks opposite the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway while another figure looked down on her, waiting; a map of another world showed up in my mind and was quickly sketched on hotel stationary; and a quirky ghost named Elaynor rolled her eyes at a young man and said, "There's no heaven or hell, so just give up already." I teased a few more things out over the course of the next two and a half years, the basic beginnings of a plot.

Today, I have a sense of where things are going: Airen and Rayn have to get to Crae, which will be difficult; then they have to learn how to wield magic, which will be difficult in other ways; and then they have to stop the bad guys, which will be so difficult that they may not succeed, or if they do, they won't stop the bad guys permanently. I've got a few niggles about scenes that are telling me they belong at certain points in this book, and I've got a few characters who are telling me they're important, and that they've got something to do in the book(s), but they haven't told me what yet. One of those characters just revealed her past to me. I build a vague story around this and start writing, adjusting the plan as necessary as the characters and scenes start to make themselves known and flesh out. I've gotten better at anticipating the process, but that doesn't mean I can outline a plot or anything. Rather, my draft is better at providing a basic skeleton of what's going to happen, and as things are revealed, I can just go back and put in the necessary details, shed the vague internal and external dialog, and do some foreshadowing. Makes for a frustrating first draft to read as, by necessity, I tend to write obscure references all over the place. This is in part because I don't like to spend pages explaining everything at the beggining, but feed details to the reader as I go. But the bigger reason those details are obscure is because I don't know more about them myself.

Tess talks about how this method of writing is rather frustrating and prone to make one's hair gray. It can be that, sure. I bet it's even more difficult to write that way when you have a deadline to meet and the details just aren't coming fast enough. But for me, an aspiring writer with only self-imposed goals and deadlines, it's a ton of fun. I love to discover who these people are, what they're doing, and why as I write. And more often than not, I'll choose what seems to be a random name or location or situation as I start putting together the story, and find out later that it wasn't random, that it has a specific purpose. Those moments are so rewarding--and sometimes a bit creepy because I remember just pulling a name or something out of nowhere, I remember just tossing random letters together to get a name that sounded different, and later I'll realize that name has purpose and seemingly always has.

My muse does a lot more with my subconscious than she let's on. It's a love/hate thing, I guess.