1 November 2005

Endless Blue: Building a Novel—Conception
by Wen Spencer
www.wenspencer.com

The 2003 John Campbell Award Winner, Wen Spencer spent twenty years living in Pittsburgh, so its only natural that she sets her stories there. Currently she's living outside of Boston with her husband and son. She's a fan of Japanese anime and manga, and it flavors her writing. Tinker won the 2003 Sapphire Award and was nominated for the Romantic Times Review Choice Award for Best Fantasy.

(This article is the first of an ongoing discussion of the process of writing a novel, from start to finish, including the editorial phase).

When I finished Tainted Trail, Roc asked for three chapters and an outline for the next two books in the Ukiah Oregon series. I have found that when I'm being insanely creative, my brain seems to go into overdrive. I had a cool dream about a group of people on a boat, and when I woke up, my brain pushed the surreal imagery into a story.

In the dream, I was a crewmember on a boat that comes across an alien spaceship in a vast ocean. We investigated a half-submerged ship that had been there so long a coral reef had grown up around it. There was a huge moray eel-creature lurking in the waters. As we dealt with being out of our element, we realized that the monster was actually a crewmember from the ship.

Facing tight deadlines, I could only spare a few hours to play with it. I wrote down the dream in detail. I called a friend to talk about the basic science for the world. I wrote Paige's first scene. Titling it Sargasso, I saved it all in a file dated December, 3, 2001. I stuck the file into my Novel Ideas and Tidbits folder and forced myself to start Bitter Waters.

Fast-forward three years. I finished writing all the novels I was contracted for and needed to figure out what to do next. I trotted the contents of my Novel Ideas folder past my agent, Donald Maass, and we talked about the strengths and weaknesses of all of the ideas. Maass has written an excellent book called Writing a Breakout Novel. In it, he talks about common elements that big-selling novels have. While several of my novel ideas would result in fun reads, they didn't necessarily have the elements to kick them into the breakout level. Sargasso, renamed to Endless Blue, had the potential, but it was just a world and a general idea—lacking characters and solid plot line. For a big novel, I wanted to do multiple point of view (POV) with characters who have large personal stakes and a world in peril.

What's the difference between a big book and a small book you may ask? Well, I'm still grappling with that one but here's my take. Death is a very small stake for a character when it's only his life at risk. The stakes becomes bigger the more what is at risk is removed from the character: a loved one, country, the universe. Death becomes an obstacle; if the character dies he can't save the thing more important than his own life. Also, with a single POV, it's very unlikely that the writer kill a major character, so the reader disbelieves the character is really at risk. Multiple POV allows you to trot out death as a risk in a more believable fashion. The first stab at a plot line was very limited in the terms of world stakes; the crew of the ship struggled only to survive against a very intelligent monster. I want to increase the risk factor—give the story a bigger feel. My original idea might make a good chapter in a bigger story.

Unfortunately, I like to tell stories that start with the moment of change when someone or something enters the character's life and makes it different. With Ukiah, it was the day that the Pack first found him. With Tinker, it was the day Windwolf came over the fence of her salvage yard. Out in the middle of the ocean, I had no stranger to introduce and found it impossible to step away from the monster story.

October 5, 2004 I had another dream; I was at a SF convention and was taken hostage by terrorists. Part way through the dream, it flipped around so I was an anti-terrorist fighter who had mistaken one of the hostages as a terrorist. When I woke up, I wrote the dream out. It was a paranormal romance, my brain told me, where the anti-terrorist was a weretiger and the fleeing hostage was a psychic. I wrote one scene and made some notes.

November 1, 2004, I got a call saying, We want your next project proposal. I knew that I wanted Endless Blue to be my next project, but I had nothing! I realized that I tend to start with characters and then build story around them. It occurred to me that I could shift the two characters from the terrorist dream into Endless Blue. The weretiger would be the stranger—the moment of change—and the romance between him and the psychic would be the drive of the story that explores the world. I wanted it to be SF, so the terms got changed to bioengineered metamorph and esper. I named the characters Turk and Paige.

Since I wanted big stakes, I decided that the plot would be that a spaceship comes to Paige's world and not only her world is affected, but the universe beyond her world is also changed. Originally Turk and Paige were both natives, but as I wrote his first scene, I realized that my two main POVs were stranded on a boat together.

Generally I try to keep two POV characters separated, so each has a clear story of their own. When they're together, who gets the POV is determined by which storyline the scene satisfies. For example if John's story line is about becoming King, and Mary's storyline is about learning how to use her wizard powers, when there is a scene about wizard politics with both Mary and John in it, typically, Mary gets POV, because it's her story. The easiest way to keep it clear in everyone's mind which story belongs to whom is by physically putting distance between the two characters.

But with both of my main characters stuck on the boat together, the storylines quickly got muddled as to who got what scene. I planned an event to separate them ASAP, and then decided that another way to clarify which POV ruled was by making one of them a native and then the other person from the spaceship. That way, one could see the world with new eyes, and yet the other could know all the hidden secrets. Since I had Turk being the trigger character, the moment of change character, he was the new person and Paige was the old—so obviously Paige had to be the native and Turk from the spaceship.

At first the spaceship was from an evil empire, its captain was a sadistic bastard and Turk was an enemy spy. For a twist of irony, I used all Pilgrim names for the crew and named the ship after the one that the Pilgrims took from Holland to England. It dawned on me, though, that in creating a larger stake by changing the outside universe, that the story arc was going to be the spaceship arriving and then successfully leaving. The win had to be that the captain of the spaceship succeeds in getting his ship home—which meant he had to be a good guy. I decided to give him a POV and the first scene of the book—thus establishing that his was the main story arc. At that point, I changed his name from a Pilgrim name to Russian, cleaning the slate of my previous conception of the captain and his ship. Mikhail was born.

Now at some point in the past, I had a Doh moment in that the strongest conflicts are those you can't escape, in other words, your family. Thus Turk went from a native, to a spy, to Mikhail's little brother.

All this frantic plotting and tweaking took place the first two weeks in November 2004. After bouncing the result off my agent, I wrote a ten-page synopsis, and fifty pages of story. December 1st, one month after the what next call, I sent it off to my agent to deal with and promptly forgot it—because I had Wolf Who Rules to finish. On May 25, 2005, Baen made an offer on the book that I accepted. That meant, of course, that I had to turn in a very rough outline into a novel. I started with the characters. Paige is a descendant of a battleship, the Georgetown, which crashed into the Sargasso. Her hometown is called Georgetown Landing. When the story starts, she's acting for a translator on an ocean-going ship. She is an adapted or bioengineered person with certain mental abilities, which allows her to communicate with aliens. The banks of gene material are color-coded—she's a blue. I don't have a strong handle on her yet. What I need to find is her inner conflict/goal/fear. It should be in direct opposition to Mikhail for the strongest story, but I'm having trouble creating a believable backstory that would explain her mindset since the Georgetown was part of the same government that sends Mikhail to find it.

This means Mikhail spends part of the book being Paige's villain. I need to him to win and hold the reader's sympathy, yet make him believable in his good guy/bad guy roles. In his first scene I indicate he's brilliant, creative, loyal, moral, but I give him an emotional instability. In a scene I wrote to explore his relationship with Turk, I realize Mikhail's big problem is that he thinks too much and over-analyzes things and ends up very depressed over things he can't control. This has made it fairly easy to find Mikhail's conflicts.

I make Turk a red in honor of Final Fantasy VII, a game that ate my life one summer. My weretiger reborn, his conflicts stem from being raised by Mikhail's emotionally distant parents who see him as an indentured servant, not a son. His anger masks self-esteem issues. I'm having a slight problem establishing his goal.

As I try to balance the internal and external conflicts, I realize that I need to do more world building. The characters need to be caught up in conflicts beyond their control and on sides that sets them at odds with one another. This triggers the phone calls to do brainstorming. I talked to June first to discuss relationships.

The most interesting interpersonal relationships are formed by conflicts arising from true moral differences, not simply a misunderstanding. One writing book recommends if you have a hero who is a firefighter, then the heroine should be an arsonist. A good romance is between two people that are perfect for one another, but have some huge section of their life/ego in direct opposition to the other. Orson Scott Card's MICE formula is a version of this. He talks about conflict coming from a variety of ways, one of which is Milieu. In this circumstance, characters represent the larger world, which is at conflict. For example, if you have a feminist woman from LA and a man from the Near East who is an orthodox Muslim, their beliefs represent the conflict of the larger world.

I'm searching for two people at far enough ends of the moral compass that just talking won't necessarily solve their conflict. They have to be willing to change/sacrifice to allow the couple to be together. This of course requires creating the world that formed the characters.

I'm also looking for a win. The three characters come together, are at conflict, and then through their interaction find a way that they can compromise so all can win. Because they represent their worlds, the end solution has to be carried out across the universe. A difficult task, as Mikhail is just a starship captain from an immoral capitalist intergalactic government. I'm struggling to find a way that whatever compromise they set up in Paige's world, Mikhail is able to then enforce in his universe.

June and I talked about Dune. Paul gains control of the Freman, and with them all spice production, and thus is able to force his will on the universe. At the end, Paul represents the Freman, and the emperor represents the forces arrayed against the Freman. When the emperor is forced to marry his daughter to Paul, the milieu conflict is resolved. Since Mikhail's universe doesn't have an emperor, I won't be able to pull off a same kind of ending. We agreed that Herbert built a solid enough book that after defeating all the emperor's troops and taking the city, if Paul had issued a statement of this is how its going to be that the reader probably have believed it. I need to build a solid this is how it's going to be ending without trotting in the emperor. The very nature of going off to obscure corner of the universe to find a lost battleship makes such intervention very unlikely. In other words, Mikhail needs a gatekeeper position similar to Paul's. Once I find that role, Paige must stand in the way of him gaining control. In this balance, Turk needs his own goals and conflicts.

Later, I talked to Ann. Where June is relationship, Ann is plot. She reminded me that in the first chapter I have an obscure message from Georgetown being picked up by the military and Mikhail assigned the job of finding the battleship. I never addressed why the message went out. Ann pointed out that I could set up a reason would be part of the gatekeeper stuff.

So far, it's working well. I had they just don't talk as the reason why Turk and Paige didn't take certain logical actions. I tried they're both trying to hide what they are to make it more logical. Now, with Paige on the other side of the conflict, they can talk and talk... but still not reach a compromise, which is why they don't take THOSE actions.

That's where I stand at this moment: 18,000 out of 100,000 words written, a good idea where I want to get to, but still only a vague notion how to get there.