The Plan! Wait. What?

(doh! premature posting!  This is FRIDAY's blog)

So y'all know how I like to make a plan, yeh? But you've probably also heard that I am plan-FOLLOWING challenged? But I'm definitely not a PANTSER (down with pants!) Whatever the case, I may meander and lollygag through my books, but I ALWAYS know where I'm going. I have a PLAN! *BUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*

But there are things I apparently was not CLEAR on...

Did you know as READERS you don't have ESP? You are not capable of reading my mind... This is BAFFLING to me. But Leigh read LEGACY recently and there was a consistent theme (aside from my lack of tags on my dialog). “Where is this going? What is the goal?”

Say what? The goal is SURVIVAL! And I have a PLAN! But apparently I haven't been clear enough... I guess readers don't just... you know... TRUST US.  We need to give them a promise of what's coming...

And so I've had to do some THINKING about how this works.

In my mysteries, this is EASY. I write mysteries with amateur sleuths, so right from the time of the murder/body finding event, I need to give the sleuth a STAKE to be a sleuth instead of turning it totally over to the authorities... Typically this is in the form of the cops barking up the wrong tree (or at least a tree the sleuth wants them to leave alone) so there is a POINT at which the sleuth says of implies, “if they are going after [best friend, love interest, relative] I'm going to have to solve this myself.”



But what about suspense? It's not so cut and dried... There is something to SOLVE but as written, the protags have no clue what this IS yet...

I haven't quite figured it out. In my first chapter, my character wants OUT OF HERE! And she accomplishes that. End of book, right? Yeah, erm... one chapter book... But really, in the moment, that is all SHE KNOWS, so how the heck to I tell the READER where the story is heading?

This is my problem... I am pretty GOOD at dropping a piece here and a piece there to build up to a PLOT EVENT, but the more subtle layer of foreshadowing... direction? (hell, I don't even know what I am foreshadowing)... the thing agents have been telling us “I want an idea where this story is going to go”... Sheesh! How did I MISS that this advice was talking to me!?

I think the solution is to layer pieces about where she will end up that SHE doesn't get, but that the reader begins to think 'ah—I bet that is where her journey is going'. Tricky, but I imagine it's possible...

My other protags are a little easier. Their first chapter is the murder of their father—and he has been preparing them to hide—he KNOWS something is wrong before the bad guys come to get him. Heck—they start to search the house after the murder, so there is a clue IN THE HOUSE, yeh? But I STILL need to put this all into more concrete terms.

What I'm Learning about Learning

You know, there was a time I would never admit to not knowing what I was doing... But this writing business is very humbling. Every time I think I master something, some other thing crops up that I learn I am apparently clueless on. So I think maybe it is just time to give in to it... there will ALWAYS be more to learn.

I will just have to find the right teachers... I'm sure there is SOMEBODY who can whip me into shape...