Daughter of Mystery: the first of two major reveals in POV-let B25

[hrj]

Barbara has finally learned her parents' names. She's spent the last couple years with a driving need to discover her identity for herself, not to wait until the information is handed to her when the terms of the Baron's will are met. And now that she's succeeded ...

"All these years -- all the searching and wondering -- and now she felt nothing. Barbara Arpik -- it was a stranger's name. Not hers. She wanted to weep with frustration. It was supposed to have mattered. She was supposed to feel that she had come home at last. This was supposed to be her triumphant return: a free woman with a name of her own. And ... nothing."

(Sorry, you don't get let in on the second major reveal until you read the book.)

Comments

[gmdreia.livejournal.com]

Do you tend to write stream of consciousness... You don't know how things will reveal until they're on paper?

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Not quite. I always visualize ahead. I run what I call my "mind movies" working through the next immediate scene I'm working on, including much of the actual dialog. Then when I'm writing I try to capture the essential story from the mind-movies. Sometimes it has more detail, sometimes less. It's like any editing process. In the larger scheme of things, one of the "experimental" aspects of the current novel is that I'm deliberately trying to avoid knowing too many details about exactly what happens later in the story. Not so much because the details that evolve as I go along are more interesting (and more "right" for what has been already created), but for the more practical reason that if I come up with too many details in advance I can't hold them all in my head. Either I've lost them by the time I get to that point or I end up writing completely out of order and end up with "good parts syndrome" where I've written little islands of vividness surrounded by a sea of connective tissue.

If you follow my "writing" tag I've done a lot of talking about the ways in which I'm trying to work differently for this project. (As compared to previous projects. I've completed first drafts of two or three novels previously but IMHO they aren't a tenth as good as the current one. I don't know whether it's directly because of the change in process or simply because I had to get the starter novels out of my system before settling in.)