Mysterious Muse

Posted by Merry in Merry's Blog

Dec
10

As of last night, Chapter Five of Prayer of the Handmaiden is finished!

(Yes, yes, I realize that my earlier determination to participate in Nanowrimo didn’t pan out so well… I think I’m just going to have to settle for writing when I can squeeze the time in.) But, at least that’s one more chapter down, and I think I can safely say I’m about a quarter of the way or so through the book at this point.

Once again, my characters and the Ithyria world have surprised me. See, this is why I should stop stressing so much over trying to plan out every little detail, and just WRITE. Most of the chapter went precisely as I expected it to. It’s actually a pretty sexy chapter, and it was coming along just the way I’d imagined, and I reached the end, and in the last few paragraphs all of a sudden Kade popped something in there that was just… well, not at all what I had been thinking. One sentence alone managed to shift my entire perspective on so many things about this book, where it was going, where the tensions were going to be, what Kade’s relationship with the Goddess was going to be like. It opened a lot of doors. And, if I’m going to be entirely honest, it even made me just a wee bit uncomfortable… I wasn’t expecting it at all.

Anyway, I don’t want to go into too much detail for fear of giving spoilers, but let’s just say that I will never cease to be amazed at how strange the writing process is. When authors talk about how their characters “tell them stories” or take on a life of their own as a story develops… they’re not just being poetic. I’m sure there are lots of writers out there who do plot everything out carefully, make a plot and then an outline and then a scene breakdown and then flesh the scenes out and voila — a novel — and I try to be that kind of writer, I honestly do, because it seems so practical and neat and scientific. But the truth is most of the time I just feel like a medium, channeling a story only half from my imagination, and the other half from whatever dimension the characters came from. It’s hard to feel like I can take credit, fully, for the stories when it honestly doesn’t feel like they come from me at all. :P

(No, this doesn’t mean I believe there’s some alternate dimension out there in which my characters actually exist. It’s just that I’m mystified as to where all this inspiration comes from half the time, because it’s not in my head at all, and then all of a sudden it’s just THERE, like someone handed it to me and said “write this…”)

I’m going to be relying heavily on that mysterious muse in the next few chapters, anyway, because while I know where the story’s going to ultimately end up, the next few chapters are the transitional ones and I’m still pretty murky on how they’re going to play out, exactly…