Disco Disco
Writing discovery, and characters doing the work themselves.
Before we begin, I want to remind you all that I now write the occasional review for the award-winning magazine Shoreline of Infinity. My latest is of The Escher Man by T.R. Napper and can be read here,
Next week I’ll do a wrap post going over my hots and nots of this year and I’m about to hit my goal of 50 books read in 2024. Cory Doctorrow pipped into 49, and now the only question is which one will be the big five-oh out of my reading pile?
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian
Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
Dreadnought by Jack Cambell
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
Comment below which you think it will be. I have my own suspicions which one will make it.
Anyway, on with the show.
I’m about 10% of the way through my debut novel Fatal Space now, and I went backwards recently when I realised, I needed some sort of prologue chapter. Now usually I don’t write prologues, but I kept on referencing a battle that, as I kept writing, I recognised had a profound effect on a lot of the main characters.
It takes place in orbit of a planet called Areonis and until now I’d been referencing it in an Alamo kind of way with people mentioning it as some decisive, defining moment but not much else. So, I went back and wrote a chapter taking place from the one of the characters POV of the battle itself.
The character is about sixteen at the time of the battle and is a new recruit to the Freedom Navy of rebel heroes Gustave Singh and Ariel McCabe, so the perspective is very limited and more contextualises rather than explains things. That’s not what I want to talk about today though. What I want to talk about is real-time discovery while writing.
A couple of years ago, before I started writing properly, I gently scoffed at the idea of the characters or the plot running away with itself as you write. How could something you create from the darkest depths of your brain take on a life of itself and how could the plot and details of the character not be something you have total control over?
Then I started to write and slowly, little things crept out of the page. Details inserted themselves into sentences. Once I recognised this, I opened my mind to the possibility of it being true and it started to flow more freely. Usually this would manifest with me setting a rhythm and the words flowing from wherever they could. This is best shown in my short story Atomik Rock (out on submission) which begins with a surrealist, underground dance inspired narrative.
With Fatal Space I want to share two points that really surprised me.
The first was during the first POV chapter of Eveline, the elderly, retired marine. The fact that Eveline is a main character was itself a surprise to me. She was the owner of the bar The Bonny Hoss in a small town in which our ish hero Donn visits and tells a story. The only problem was I loved writing her and her regular customer Jack, that I wanted to keep her around.
The big Suprise though happened when Eveline and Jack went out for a picnic and shooting session, kindling some rebellious thoughts and unresolved traumas. Jack – a poet Laurette whose residency doesn’t exist anymore - was talking about their pasts when he pulled out a psilocybin laced cigarette.
I didn’t know he had that. I didn’t know he partook in that. I knew he smoked rollups; I knew he drank alcohol; I knew he was an old poet. I didn’t know about the laced cig. I certainly didn’t know that both he and Eveline had a laid-back attitude to it but here they were, passing it around. This was not a conscious decision. I’m not a fan of drugs personally, and my characters have a habit of not drinking due to various issues (though Hank from Joy-Land drinks cheap apple juice to pretend he’s drinking whiskey).
The second surprising moment was during the prologue chapter. It’s a space battle of rebels’ vs government and the government commander was an Admiral, unnamed except for a rebel moniker. The Annihilator.
I figured that rebel propaganda would be working to turn whoever it was into some sort of bogeyman and there having been a surfeit of butchers would turn to something vaguely alliterative (us creative writing grads have to work somewhere in the future). The problem was I wasn’t really a fan of this and planned to go back and change it in editing. Donn even comments on the clunky nature of it (really me expressing in-character my unhappiness for it).
Then the battle occurred, and I won’t spoil anything but qat the end, as Donn is looking out a shuttle window at the carnage, a thought came through. It wasn’t mine, that is to say it was mine, but Donn seemed to be speaking through me. In that moment he realised why the nickname would now work. The admiral had become the Annihilator of Areonis.
I might still go back and change it after a while and with hindsight but that one realisation made the narrative better and it was a realisation that didn’t come from me, but from Donn O’Brien, deckhand of the Freedom Navy Flagship Caladbolg.