First Acts, Chapters, Pages, and Lines

At this point in my growth as a writer I’m a plot-oriented “plantser,” combining some planning with some discovery writing. At the moment I’m working on improving my planning skills, preparing for a rewrite of my 2018 NaNoWriMo science fiction mystery novelette, expanding it into a full novel. I’ve read advice that mysteries require more planning than some other genres. So I’m working on those skills, and this year I’m primarily working on developing more interesting characters. I’ve researched how to develop engaging characters, including developing character arcs based on the character’s negative core belief (“Lie” the character tells themselves). Based on advice that it can take time to build up reader interest in a character, I looked into how to write bridging conflicts to maintain reader interest while developing the main plot. Now it’s time to start rewriting the first chapter, and I didn’t like my first attempt of a few weeks ago, so I did even more research. Here are the results.

Character Wounds and Lies

While I was researching my post on “writing engaging characters” I happened to skim my old post on “articulating your character’s greatest desire” and found a mention of K.M. Weiland’s post about the character’s “lie” as something critical to a character arc. I’m not entirely convinced that character-above-all is the only approach, but my specific learning objective in the current novel is to explore character development. I decided that as I was working out my speculative fiction mystery’s main character, I needed to understand better what “lie” meant in the context of character definitions – and fell down a rabbit hole of several dozens of posts about the subject and the related one of “wounds” or “ghosts” behind the “lies.” Here’s what I found.

Writing Engaging Characters

Since mid-March I’ve been doing a lot of planning for rewriting my 2018 NaNoWriMo speculative fiction mystery novelette; my previous research suggested that mysteries required more planning than other kinds of story. I had hoped to start writing for the April 2020 Camp NaNoWriMo, but there was still a huge amount of planning to do. About two and a half weeks in, I got frustrated about not writing and drafted the first scene – the start of a bridging conflict – meant to introduce the characters and setting before getting to the first plot point (the murder). I finished a draft, about 1,000 words, and realized I hadn’t done enough of what such conflicts are supposed to do: make the main character engaging. So like a good little scholar I did a bunch of research on how to do that.

What is a Bridging Conflict?

For NaNoWriMo 2018 I wrote a murder mystery set on a starliner. With all the freewriting and deleted words stripped away, it turned out to be a little over 22k words, a novelette by SFWA standards. Its main contribution to my development as a writer was that it contained a complete albeit sketchy plot – my first NaNo project I could consider finished in some reasonable sense. For this month’s Camp NaNoWriMo I intended to start turning it into a full novel, but I didn’t have enough prep time to do all the planning my research on writing mysteries showed was necessary. So I’ve been slogging through more research, world-building, plot outlining, figuring out what the various antagonists are doing – all of which is reasonably fun, but over the weekend I got frustrated with not having actually started the story. So I drafted the first chapter.

The story just didn’t work.

More on writing mysteries

My 2018 NaNoWriMo novel was a murder mystery set on a starliner. In April 2019 I was contemplating revising it, so I wrote a summary of some Internet research about writing mysteries, mostly from Writing Excuses. I wound up going a different direction, but now I am coming back to that novel. So I’ve read a wider variety of internet sources, listed at the end of this post, and have synthesized what I learned into a summary of my own. I strongly advise that you read the original sources, too.