Different strokes…

Every book a writer writes is a different experience, but some of them are more different than others.

Writing The Dark Lord’s Daughter has been a very different experience for me.

Normally – if one can say such a thing about writing – I am a task-oriented, linear, plodding planner type writer. That is, I usually have a plan (though I almost never stick firmly to it). I sit down more or less daily and work on the current scene until I run out of steam; when that gets finished, I go on to the next bit, in the order it’s going to be in the story (meaning that I don’t jump around writing scenes out of order, not even if I’m writing something with flashbacks or a non-linear structure. I write it in the order I expect it to be read in).

The Dark Lord’s Daughter didn’t work that way at all. It started off with far less of a plan than I usually have. I had a situation, but very little background. I had two characters (at least one was the protagonist!) and a whole lot of stick-figure possibilities. I had a plot, in the sense that “the protagonist is faced with a problem that looks as if it will be too big for them to solve, but they manage to do so anyway” is a plot, but it was more an expectation of how the story would go than an actual road map for getting there (or even a clear idea of where “there” was).

By the time I was four chapter in, things looked as if they were settling down. More characters showed up, and then some more, and things started to move in what looked like a reasonable direction.

And then … it got complicated.

I had plenty of ideas for incidents; the problem was, they were mostly independent of each other, and I didn’t have any idea what order they ought to happen in. Some of them were compelling enough that I had to write them, even though they were pretty clearly not “the next thing that happens.” 

So then I had a pile of unconnected scenes that didn’t have any obvious order they had to go in, but which would be affected by whichever ones came first. I kept shifting them around. The Dark Council meeting started as the mid-book turning point; then it got split in half, with part of it in mid-book and the rest as the end; then it moved to the first event after Kayla’s arrival at the castle; then it vanished altogether, with much of the content turning into part of Kayla’s introduction to the castle. Finally, it resurfaced as an informal consultation right before the final sequence of events, with some of the protocol moved to the wrap-up.

Most other things went through a similar series of shifts. The argument with the aunt about proper Dark Lady dresses moved from the middle to close to the end to back to the early-middle. It was the sort of process that Scrivener is designed for, where a massive amount of material keeps shifting forward and back and around and inside out in bits and pieces.

On top of that, life handed me a series of external crises and periodic critical distractions, which technically had nothing whatever to do with writing except insofar as they prevented me from settling in to a daily grind. When I did get writing time, it was generally in set amounts of an hour today, half an hour tomorrow, or forty-five minutes on Saturday.

The result of all this was that, instead of being a planner-linear-task-plodder sort of writer, I wrote this one as, in essence, a pantser-nonlinear-timed-burst sort of writer. I’ve done each of those things at least once in the past, but never all at the same time.

It’s not a process that came easily to me, on any level. I am, however, pleased to have some parts of it added to my toolbox (though I will be even more pleased if I don’t have to write an entire book this way ever again). At the least, I expect that what I’ve learned from writing this will be very useful next time I need to think about moving scenes around.

It’s also given me a lot of sympathy for those writers who have this as their normal process. I am so glad that the next bit of the journey is one that is, for me, familiar and relatively straightforward: editorial revisions, copy-edit, proofreading galleys. (I do hope I haven’t jinxed myself by saying that.)

And yes, that means the first submission draft is done and in.