Thursday, July 13, 2006
Brainstorming -- Live!
I'm not out of my pout yet. But I've been working away at Possession.
For a frightening glance into one author's mind, read on, if you dare. This is pretty much EXACTLY what it's like when I notebook. When I realized I was blogging as if I were scribbling in my notebook, I reordered the paragraphs in the order I thought of them, instead of in a logical grouping. Scary. I know.The problem right now is that I have no plot. Nothing really bad happens, there are no characters to kill off, unless I kill my heroine or one of the 2 heros. I killed off a minor sorcerer but he was like one of Captain Kirk's love interests: doomed to death. He died of a broken neck. I'm thinking of bringing him back as a zombie. No, not really. Maybe I just need to kill him in some better, more interesting way. Which helps me not at all. Or maybe he needs to do more than just stand around in his scene.I guess my heroine needs to move out of hero #2's place and move into her own, and then the bad guy comes after her. Sigh.OK. I have it. The bad guy has switched bodies with the minor sorcerer, at the moment his name is Santiago, and Hero #1 needs to kill the bad guy, only it's not really him, and the bad guy aka Santiago escapes with them realizing too late what's happened.Now, when the bad guy shows up at the heroine's house, it's as sexy Santiago, and his one goal is to get her under his power and he succeeds. That's pretty bad, right?The problem is it's more dramatic if they don't know at all that Santiago is really the bad guy. The heroine needs to discover this. This means I need to adjust an earlier chapter so that the events that happen when they think the bad guy has escaped still happen.After that, I have no idea. Gee, now I don't even need to notebook. This book so far has been like that. I write a chapter with no idea whatever what will happen after, aside from some sort of vague notion of a big fight at the end. But I only have 22K words right now, so it's too soon for that. But at least I'm interested in having Santiago appear at my heroine's place. So, I now have one resurrected dead evil sorcerer's apprentice swapped with my villain.
There you have it. Carolyn's patented brainstorming method. Clear as mud right?
