Traveller's Tales

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the novel-writing gig, it’s patience. Things move at their own pace; the world is dynamic and by and large does not revolve around me, much as I’d like it to. As a result, I’ve learned that the stuff that’s really, really important to me will, from time to time, collect some dust, and that there’s often nothing I can do about it.

That sounds defeatist, but it’s not. In fact, it’s freeing; acknowledging and accepting that certain things are beyond your control allows you to take the energy you’d otherwise waste railing against immovable objects and spend it on things you can actually affect. And sure, some things demand impressive amounts of effort in order to advance them forward. But it’s important to learn the difference between ‘difficult’ and ‘out of my hands.’ If it’s #1, fight! But if it’s #2, at some point you’re just going to have to let it go anyway… so let it go and use that extra energy productively.

The sequel, in this case, has been the target of my extra energy. Keeping tradition with Knight, Lord tracks a small core group of characters through the story but regularly pops into the stories of many of the secondary characters. Since a lot of my secondary characters from Knight are… well… no longer available, there’s a bunch of new faces, and one of them in particular has been a tricky one to get to know. If you’ve read the first book, you’ll recognize this tricky new character as Grand Duke Talish Kalegor — you haven’t actually seen him yet, but you’ve felt his presence since the first time you got into Kur D’Shan’s head.

Most of my friends know that when I find a new character I go through an interview process with them — I set up a fairly standard historic bio so I know what they look like, what their voice sounds like and where they came from, and then I write a scene where I’m interviewing them, asking difficult questions of them. Usually I do this until they surprise me — and yes, that’s crazy talk, see the ‘I really am psychotic’ post below — but this guy’s different. He just doesn’t crack. He’s completely self-assured, utterly confident, completely responsible, and thoroughly unflappable. When I hit him with a question that should evoke an emotional response, he stops to gather his composure before answering. When I smack him with a difficult critique he acknowledges the flaw. In short, he’s even better at this than I am, and I wrote the longest interview I ever have searching for a surprise that never came.

And once I realized that this, his ability to beat me at my own game, was the surprise I was looking for, he came together for me, and his first chapter is nearly done. I’m pleased to report that I like him quite a bit, which is good because he’s obviously in an adversarial role and I hate having antagonists that are too easy to hate. Originally I was thinking of someone like William Atherton for this role, but now that I’ve figured him out it’s definitely more of an Ian Holm sort of thing.

Back to the sequel, and as for news about Knight… be patient.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 19th, 2005 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Musings, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.