Patti O'Shea's Blog

Each character has their own voice, their own way of talking and thinking in various situations. For me, a lot of the writing at the beginning of the book has to do with finding those characters’ voices. The thing that makes it so difficult is that it’s situational.

The original chapter one in my Work In Progress (WIP) was in my heroine’s Point of View (POV) and I had her voice. But this chapter took place when her world was almost completely ordinary.

In the original version of chapter two, the hero’s voice was the one I struggled to find. I’d written the prologue in his POV, but that had been maybe a year and a half and two (or three) other heroes ago and I didn’t have it when I got to his scene. Then, after much cutting and rewriting, I had him! And there was much rejoicing.

All was not well in Patti-land, though. I knew there was something wrong with what I had written in the book. I just couldn’t figure out what. I added another scene to the front of chapter two, but that still didn’t fix it. And then one of my writing buddies said that after the prologue, chapter one was just flat. There was nothing in the chapter that did anything for the story until the very end. She suggested I start with the scene in my hero’s POV instead.

And she was right. I did what I always tell beginning writers not to do–I wrote a whole chapter explaining the story to the reader. Blah, blah, blah. While the interaction between the heroine and her friends was interesting (and helpful) for me, it had no place in the book. I cut it with barely a whimper.

This required a great deal of rewriting of the hero’s first scene which was now the opening of the story. It took a few fits and starts–okay, it took a lot of fits and starts. I have more versions of chapter one for this book than I’ve ever written for any chapter in any book ever–but I did eventually persevere. And then an interesting problem cropped up with chapter two. I lost my heroine’s voice.

I knew why. The situation had changed. Events that I saw happening at the end of the original chapter one have now already happened and that changes her actions and behavior. Plus I’m opening with her in a scene that’s high stress for her anyway and really unusual.

I’ve been struggling and cutting and restarting this chapter over and over, too. But today I think I finally found her voice. I think I finally have keepable pages in this chapter. I think. I hope.

The past few days, my characters have been showing me scenes from the future. Scenes that take place after the Work In Progress (WIP). I usually get scenes after I finish a book of my hero and heroine together and happy a while after the actual written end of their story, but this is the first time I’ve seen a whole bunch of them at once in a get-together type atmosphere.

The interactions have been interesting. Ryne’s pretty much forgiven Creed at this point although there’s a reserve there that wasn’t before the things he did. Deke says that Creed can’t expect her to trust him 100% again and their friendship will never go back totally to the way it was before his actions.

I also learned that Ryne, Logan, and Kel–who are all about the same age–worked together guarding the Gineal library when they were fresh out of troubleshooter training, but while they were friendly with each other, they didn’t really hang out together or anything.

Logan is the hero in Edge of Dawn, the book that will be coming out in 2009 and Kel is Logan’s brother.

Creed let something slip to Ryne–I’m not sure what–and it was enough for her to dig out and read the untranslated version of the Twilight Time Prophecy. She’s started to put pieces together and is leaning toward the same conclusion Creed reached: It’s coming.

The other interesting thing is to watch Ryne reach out and develop a friendship with two of the heroines from later books–Shona and the heroine from the WIP.

It’s not all about Ryne, though. I’m also getting a lot of information from Tris, Logan and Kel’s sister. She’s four years younger than them and she’s Sin’s heroine. Sin isn’t factoring at all in these visions of the future, so this is obviously taking place after the WIP and before Tris’ book.

Of course, the information she’s giving me has nothing to do with her story and everything to do with her brothers and the characters from earlier books that she’s met now. I’m not getting much that’s personal about her either. Although, I guess the argument could be made that her impressions of other people does give me insight into who she is.

I do know that Tris has wanted to keep up from her brothers from the time she was a toddler and be part of their “group.” The thing is that Logan and Kel are not only 4 years older than she is, they’re twins and she simply can’t have the kind of relationship with them that they have with each other. But she’s still trying to “prove” to them that she’s worthy and majorly bummed because now that both Logan and Kel are in love, she’s even more of an “outsider” than she was before.

Okay, I take it back about not getting personal info about Tris. That was some pretty important insight into her personality and it’ll definitely impact her relationship with Sin when they meet. Yeah, plays nicely into the big scenario for their story. I like it when things I don’t even know are happening fall into place.

I’ve loved getting these future scenes, BTW. My only lament is that they’re really not helping me with the WIP. Maybe they will later in the story, but not with where I’m at right now.