Sunday 25th April 2021

One of the things I like to do when I find a story I like, is to investigate the author and their process.  I say story rather than book as in this case it was Shadow and Bone.

I have friends saying the book isn’t as good as the series and that kinda annoys me as I do hate that ragging that can happen from authors on other works.  By all means say that the plot isn’t as tight, or the characters not as developed, but there can be this tendancy to write things off wholesale, rather than to pick apart and see what made them successful.

Anyway, I watched a few interviews with Leigh Bardugo and she said a few things that stuck with me.  The first was that her process was much like mine.  She’s an outliner, but she said that the characters come to her as she writes.  She has a vague notion of them as she outlines but it’s not until she’s in that first draft that they come alive.

That pleases me as I feel the characters in The Accursed have yet to really pop off the page.  It’s a factor I can’t really scientifically qualify other than to say, it’s the moment they seem more alive than just dialogue on the page.

But it was something else the author said that I really agreed with, and perhaps answers what this popping off the page is.  She said there has to be an air of ‘fun’.  It’s that moment when you are in a book, the characters are doing something and you think “well this is going to be an adventure” and settle in for the ride.

She’s against the grimdark but I think even in the grimmest of stories there are moments of lightness.  I love using humor to lighten a passage and that can often come in the form of the fun of the characters and their interactions with each other.

With the Accursed there’s chance for all the characters to really have ‘fun’ with each other.  I know all their origins, even if I haven’t got to the flashbacks yet, and so I can really start punching them up as I proceed with the draft.  I might need go back and rewrite some bits when I’m done, but that’s all part of the process.  Wolfgang is probably the most developed.

I do reckon I can really have a lot of fun with these characters, and the show has inspired me to make sure that even if they can’t work as a team during their adventures, that they’re a team that’s a lot of fun to read.

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