Mary Sue, in the Drizzle, with a Twist, by Catriona

Plot, character, setting - how do they fit together in your work? Which do you find the most tricky (if any) and which do you have the most fun with? 

Fun? What is this "fun"? Okay, that's Current Catriona, 68K words into a first draft, with six more clear writing days needed and only two more clear writing days guaranteed before jet-lag, Bouchercon, and - poor me - summer holiday. Three if I write on the plane. Four if I give up exercise (I won't). Five if I don't write this blog.

Bouchercon has its compensations!

I'll get there. I always do.

And anyway, I'm lying. There is fun to be had and I have most of mine with the plot. Always when I'm on the first draft, I know there's a big twist coming that I'm gagging to write. It might well have been the pip of inspiration that got me started on the story in the first place. In other words, the thing that overcame the inertia and self-doubt. This twist might have been my precious hoarded secret for a year or two and finally I get to set it free. 

Also, near the end (where I am right now), there's the "everything comes together" bit. In my head, it's like a Cecil Beaton synchonised swimming display. It's when all the breadcrumbs I've dropped throughout the draft, hoping that everyone will see them but will think they're the pattern on the carpet, get scraped up and mixed together to make a big, delicious rissole of resolution. 

Seriously, Bouchercon is not a burden

Wooft. Completely lost control of that metaphor halfway through.

So that's the fun. Plot starts off the process, causes untold tension and doesn't pay out until the bitter end. 

Setting comes very early on too. I need somewhere for this story to happen. It's going to be Scotland (unless the book in question is a Last Ditch comedy in which case it's going to be Cuento, CA) and then it depends.

If I'm writing Dandy Gilver, I scout about for somewhere I haven't sent her before geographically, and then the plot I've got in my head suggests whether she'll be in a hotel, hospital, convent, village, ballroom, department store, circus . . . the moment in Book 5 when I realised no one could stop me playing at shops and I could call it work? Pretty good day.

In fact, this Bouchercon might be quite a treat

If I'm writing a standalone, however, I don't know what to tell you. Scotland is beautiful. There are untold miles of grandeur and gorgeousness, but my stories recently have tended to take place in the other bits. Bus shelters, nail bars, junkyards, towerblocks, brickworks . . . even when I am in the countryside it tends to be the bleaker moors and uplands, with terrible roads and aggressive sheep. Why? That brings me to the final factor we're considering this week.

Character. This is the bit of writing a novel I feel least in control of. Once I know I want to write a story about X and it would work if it took place in Y, I have to be patient and wait to meet Z, to find out whose story this is. Because my standalone protagonists are usually women in trouble of some sort, I think I keep them away from idyllic settings, or at least from lives of cushioned comfort. That's where the bus shelters come in.

This Z was Finnie Doyle

There's always some of me in the protagonist (see title of blog), but she's never been a youngest child, in a long marriage, with an academic background, so she's not me biographically. She's always a she, too. when there's a "he" - two out of three voice characters in next year's standalone are men, for instance - I find that I write them in third person, whereas a woman protagonist might well be in first. 

Further than that, it's hard to predict. It definitely feels as if my protagonist is someone I encounter rather than someone I create. Except for the peculiar fact that I get to name her. And that name is crucially important. Which makes no sense at all! We get our names when we're screaming little bundles of brand-new humanity and the people we know in real life can have names we'd never give a character, can't they? Nevertheless, fictional names have to work. Finding them is something I have endless trouble with. In fact, finding characters is probably the aspect of writing I struggle with most. 

The struggle is messy and uses a lot of Post-Its

 

My method for overcoming the problems is to keep writing to the end of the first draft without worrying about it, trusting that I'll know this woman, these people, by the end and then I can go back and take out all the early stuff that doesn't ring true anymore. 

Writing is re-writing. 

Cx