Several days ago the Writer In Motion prompt went live and I talked about my reaction a little. That same day my treadmill broke, completely all-stopping my new exercise challenge, and a tiny rogue character started leering at me from afar.
There is an abstract beauty in the darkest corners of one’s mind. Our characters create a home there, they speak to us in ways that only we feel with the full breadth of our emotions, and often we sense the depth of their personalities even if we’re not sure how to ink that into the page yet.
This particular character is the only one who’s side-eyeing the prompt and making their presence known. But here’s where my panic cued a little. Earlier this year one of my novels was chosen as a RevPit winner, and for the last several months I’ve been working hard with the amazing Carly Hayward on how to translate the deeper story from my head onto the page. You can see some of the fruits of this labor in the RevPit Showcase, but I’m still brushing in more depth and adding the final revisions before I query this dark and gritty science fantasy tale.
Because I’m still hard at work with BLOODFLOWER, my goal for Writer In Motion was to create an all new story with a character even I didn’t know yet, but that’s simply not going to happen. One of the story’s secondary characters has made his presence known, and he won’t let go until I tell his story, or at least a very small part of it to show why he’s so important to this book series.
But I don’t know him.
One character describes him as “he doesn’t like anybody” and yet on-page this man has a gentle spirit and a deadly aim, and he’s every bit the gentleman. So what am I missing?
To be honest I’m not entirely sure. Like I said, I know his history better than he knows it himself. This is his first incarnation as a human (or humanish) in more than ten thousand years. The way he thinks and feels has a little bit of a unique heartbeat, and the most important thing in any of his lives is a woman he hasn’t met yet.
So as I digest this knowledge about our hero, and start to pick at some visuals for the story I want to write, I was left with one unanswered question:
What’s really lurking in the dark, and why?
This question has been burning inside me for years and I thought I knew the answer, but nothing ever felt fully accurate. Until the next story’s hero knocked on my door.
So as of today I haven’t yet written the story, but I have a vague idea of it. I’ve outlined part of a character arc using the Mythcreants Method, and I’ve written one line to try and find my hero’s inner voice:
I dreamed of her again, the woman who triggered a war we could not escape.
This line says so much about the series I’m working on, and yet it’s in first person—something I don’t write. But over the last year I’ve taken to writing in first person to get inside a character’s head before my brain naturally switches to third and carries the voice.
For now, I’ll keep leering at my outline and the pinterest board to figure out those obstacles our hero needs. He’s searching for something important that has no meaning to any other character. That’s what makes him the only hero who can tell this story, and I can’t wait for y’all to meet him.
