Arctic Light

Writing mystery/action on a pro level, after years of writing romance and training myself to think analytically about it, has been really interesting. Over the last 7(!!) years that I've been doing Zoe, I've read a lot about romance structure and feel like I have a pretty solid handle on how romance beats work, but I don't have nearly as much of a grounding in the theory, so to speak, of mystery, so it's been interesting coming up with a lot of it on my own and feeling out intuitively how it all works.

One of the things I've realized recently that I generally do when I'm plotting mystery or action/thriller - what makes it feel "complete" to me, in the way that romance needs certain beats to be complete - is something I've started calling the "third act twist" in my head, although actually, it doesn't necessarily happen in the third act; my books are not that tightly plotted. It can be anywhere from halfway to most of the way to the end.

What it is, though, is the point when the characters realize there's a second layer to the situation than what they knew about. The mystery isn't just "who did the crime"; in order for it to feel satisfying to me from a plotting perspective (though I don't always manage to do this; I don't think I did it in Dragon and Detective) there's a second level to it, where the characters find out that some aspect of what they thought was going on is just flat wrong, and this reorients their goals, points them at something new, and sets up the transition into a climax that is very different from what they thought the climax was going to be.

Critically, it's not just "you didn't know this" but also "your assumptions were wrong"; it's the rug-pull of thinking that they, and the reader, know approximately what's being set up, if not the exact details, and then finding out there's a second layer to it that's going to come into play in the climax and ends up setting up a different climax than the one the characters thought they were headed to. It's not revealing who the killer is, but rather, revealing that the victim isn't really dead, the entire crime is a cover for some other crime, the person they thought they were on the run from is actually an ally and there's a bigger bad out there, the person they've been trusting all along is about to betray them, etc.

I didn't do it in Dragon and Detective except perhaps in a very tangential way, and did it without realizing I was doing it in the subsequent Keeley books; then when I was plotting out another book this week, my plot was falling flat until I suddenly realized that I needed to add a second, hidden layer to the mystery, and then all of a sudden the whole thing clicked and came alive. It involves a certain level of reality-shifting - in order to get that satisfying "click" feeling, you need to find out that some early plot-driving assumption, on the part of both the reader and the characters, was wrong, and that sets the plot spinning off in a different direction than it looked like it was headed.

I don't think that you always need this to make the genre work, I'm sure there are plenty of perfectly excellent examples that don't have it, but by this point it's unconsciously become part of my Keeley plot formula.

Examples from my other Keeley books, with specific plot spoilers:

( Spoilers for the books published to date )

In general I think the main Third Act Twist variations I've been working with so far are: some aspect of the crime isn't what you thought it was, someone who was supposed to be a trustworthy ally isn't, or an antagonist who up to this point appeared to be the Big Bad switching sides and helping them against the real Big Bad.

For all I know there's an actual plotting-beat term for this, but Third Act Twist works fine for me; it describes what it does, and I know what I'm talking about.

Having figured this out is going to be immensely helpful for plotting this kind of book going forward, because I think when I get stuck on the big-picture plotting level, the solution is often just figuring out the second layer to the mystery and weaving it into the first.

It's also kind of interesting because this sort of sudden reversal of expectations/realization that Everything Was A Lie is exactly what you don't want in romance.

Just FYI, my latest book as Zoe, Dancer Dragon, is out on Amazon now.

--

There's something I've been thinking about lately, after some conversations with rachelmanija about ... well, it didn't even start out about writing at all; it was just that she was looking for books set in circuses and observing how few books with circuses in the title and/or on the cover are actually ABOUT CIRCUSES. And then we got to talking about it, and now I'm seeing examples everywhere of books (and movies, TV shows, etc) that promise to be about something interesting and then disappoint because they don't lean in. There's a circus on the cover, but only one chapter is set there, or the whole book is set there but it might as well be anywhere because they never really do circusy things.

It's intriguing to me how often books/movies do this, and how I've never actually seen this (as such) in any advice I've ever read -- lean into your premise, your setting, whatever's unique about your characters. Use it. I guess it's sort of a Chekhov's gun kind of thing (that everything in the book should serve an eventual purpose) but it's not exactly that. It's more like, if you're going to put ghosts in your book, why not use them to do uniquely ghosty things rather than just floating onstage for their one moment? If your protagonist is a con artist, she shouldn't solve problems like a normal law-abiding person would! I think a number of the works of fiction that have disappointed me have done it because, on some level, they were failing to do this. I can remember being annoyed, for example, with books that tell you about somewhere fascinating the characters might go, but never actually take you there.

(Insert obligatory disclaimer that it also depends on what an individual finds interesting; some people will be there for the detailed descriptions of dressmaking and some really wish you'd skip the dresses and get straight to the murder, etc.)

But honestly, even if it's not something the reader is actually into, I think that writing it so that it fills the page makes it interesting. I could not have cared less about either sailing or the Napoleonic Wars, but Patrick O'Brian's books are wall-to-wall both of those things, and they actually make me care about page after page of nautical terminology and blow-by-blow descriptions of battles, because he cares. You can practically feel the creaking of the deck under your feet.

... And you know, like anything else, not everything interesting has to appear on the page; maybe being stuck somewhere the protagonist finds dull is the plot. But I mean, even there, the reader shouldn't be bored, reading it; the dullness of the setting should fill the page until it becomes fascinating, like the vivid grayness of Dorothy's Kansas. The issue is when, as a reader, you find yourself thinking, "Why did you even tell me about that interesting thing if you weren't going to show it?"

To be fair, Dancer Dragon probably could lean in a lot more than it does. If readers are reading it for detailed descriptions of ballroom dancing they're probably going to be disappointed. On the other hand, there's definitely dancing in it; it's just really more of a thing the plot wraps around than the main plot. There's also the problem that what I know about ballroom dancing could fill a very small thimble with room left over.

I got some negative reviews on the first book in the series, Bearista, because it didn't have enough coffee shop in it! I mean, you wouldn't think coffee shops are something that people reading a romance novel would really care about, but they actually did; the premise promised a big dude working in a coffee shop, but we actually only got a couple chapters of that before Plot Happened and he ended up exiting stage right pursued by bears (literally). In retrospect I think the book those readers wanted to read would have been a fascinating book, and maybe I should write that book eventually.

Anyway, I don't really have a point here so much as ... I don't think this should be treated as any kind of a hard-and-fast rule, but it's another tool in the toolkit for editing and tightening a flabby plot. If your story feels flat, maybe you need to lean into the premise a bit more.

I'm still browsing posts on the Magicians finale, but I've had one open in a tab for awhile: this post by seperis. And the reason is because of this:

But there's also this: any hack on earth can write tragedy. Devastating your audience is the easiest thing in the world.

You know what's hard? Blowing their minds with sheer joy. Shock them by giving them what they didn't even know they could want. I think I can count the times on one hand where a show managed that. To get it, you have to work for it.

I just kind of feel like something clicked into place for me, reading that. As a writer, I want to do that; I want to do it so badly. It's true, I think: it's so much harder to surprise!delight your audience than shocking people with a sudden tragedy as so many books, shows, and movies do. Some of the most burned-into-my-brain moments from various things I've loved have been the times it managed to do that to me. The Ben January books did it on several different occasions. I actually squealed out loud with joy at two different points during the Iron Fist season 2 (accidentally turned out to be the series) finale, in both cases because I really didn't expect to get what I wanted and the show delivered it to me EXACTLY. And certain things that Agent Carter did, as a show, that will make me love it forever. And Stranger Things. And others, of course -- more books than TV, I think.

I have always had a profound love for things that convinced me they were going not-my-way and then went exactly my way.

I think it's much rarer in part because it's a much more personal thing than surprising people with tragedy. It's so indelibly tied up with what a reader/viewer actually wants. A shockingly beautiful twist for one person might not work at all for another. So I'm not even entirely sure you can set out to do this. You might just end up doing it by accident.

But it's such a moment of transcendental joy when it happens.

#writergoals

This is a terrible subject line, but I can't think of a better one that describes this concept.

sheron and I had a conversation about this awhile back, and I meant to write it up into a post, then forgot about it for awhile, but I was thinking about that conversation tonight and figured I'd go ahead and do that before I forget it all completely.

We were talking about how satisfying it is when serial-type fiction (TV shows, books, movies in a series) have the characters referring to each other or thinking about each other when the other one is not actually involved in the current storyline, or is elsewhere. Like, it's satisfying and happymaking all out of proportion to the actual amount of screentime it gets. Just a few offhand references can make it feel like the other character is present when they're actually not - it gives a tremendous amount of relationship continuity and emotional "weight", I guess, to the relationship, by suggesting that the characters think about each other even when they're not present.

We were kicking around the idea that this is actually one reason why fans sometimes come away shipping something completely different than the narrative actually wanted them to ship, or feeling like certain pairings just "have no chemistry". And it's really easy to do by accident if you're largely focused on the plot, I think, because some character relationships are more tightly plot-connected than others, so you have to keep referring back to them in the characters' thoughts and having that relationship come up in the narrative - whereas some of the side relationships don't necessarily have that, so if the writers don't make the effort to keep them in mind, they just sort of ... vanish except when the other person is onscreen.

And it doesn't even have to be much! Like, Sheron used the example of Steve/Sharon in Civil War - I don't dislike that pairing, but I agree with her that it would've given that relationship a lot more weight if we'd had a few instances of the two of them thinking about or referencing each other when they're not in the same scene together - like Steve stopping to consider the effect that him going on the run might have on Sharon, or a brief scene with her getting a text message letting her know he's okay at the end. It can be absolutely miniscule - just 10 seconds or 20 seconds here or there. The thing is that not having it in there might be part of why so many people came away feeling cold towards that relationship - because it gives the subconscious impression that they're just not that important in each other's lives.

It's not even necessarily romantic - I mean, it doesn't have to be. If someone is important to you, platonically or otherwise, you tend to do that kind of thing ALL THE TIME in real life. You think about your friend; you see things that remind you of your friend; you think "oh, so & so would like this" or you're reminded of an in-joke or something you once did together. In fiction, a little goes a long way, so it doesn't take much to give the impression that the characters' relationship extends beyond their actual scenes together onscreen. If you have 2 hours of a movie, then you really only need a couple of instances of that sort of thing to cement the idea that the two characters are important in each other's lives.

And if you DO get that with some relationships (even if it's literally just because they are both important in the plot and you have to keep having the two of them reference what the other one is up to) and you DON'T get that with others, it's going to leave a subconscious impression that some of the relationships are more important in the characters' lives than others, even if there are actually legit plot reasons why some of them have to be referenced more often. It STILL gives that impression (and might actually be a giveaway that the writers haven't necessarily thought through some of the characters' roles in the story to the point where they ought to have).

The OTHER thing we talked about in the same conversation, which also ties into the above, is how much the characters appear to care about the effect that their actions have on specific people around them, things like: will this make Character X view me differently? Will this hurt Character X? And this is another place where you can end up running headlong into unintentional consequences with the characters' relative importance in the narrative, or even the relative fraught-ness of the relationships. For example: if your character spends a lot of time thinking about their rival (getting stronger! trying to beat them!) but they're happy and secure in their relationship with their love interest so they rarely have to think or worry about it, you're going to end up giving the overall impression that their connection to their rival is actually more emotionally charged than the romantic one! (See also: one possible reason why people so often ship enemies/rivals/uneasy-allies over best friends, e.g. Harry/Draco vs. Harry/Ron, or Derek/Stiles vs. Scott/Stiles.

I kinda hate bringing up too many specific examples because I know some people are going to disagree - we're all watching different shows, etc - but since Sheron and I are both in Agent Carter fandom, we talked fairly extensively about Peggy & Angie vs. Peggy & the guys at the SSR. I'll just go ahead and put this under a cut because it's getting long and is also kind of spoilery for AC.

( The rest of it - some season 1 & 2 spoilers for Agent Carter )

That being said, there's also a certain confirmation bias with this kind of thing. I think you tend to notice those offhand mentions more when you're already invested in the relationship. And especially if you are invested, it's like a lovely little Easter egg, and it makes the relationships feel so much deeper and the world so much richer. (I love how Hambly does this in the Ben January books, for example. Ben thinks about his friends a lot when they're not around. The overall impression is that he's a guy who really gets attached to people, and it makes the other characters feel present even in books in which they don't appear.) I think if you never have characters do this, they come across cold - which might be what you're going for, but might not be. And if you only have them do it with certain other characters, it's going to seem like they spend more time thinking about those characters than anybody else, even if it's literally because it's a murder mystery and they're wondering if the other character committed the murder, but it'll STILL come across that way a little bit if it's not balanced by other instances of thinking/worrying about other people in their lives.

I never considered this at all before having that conversation with Sheron, and now I think about it a lot, in my own writing as well.

tl;dr - enhance your characters' relationships by have your characters think about the other one when they're not onstage!

Discuss?

I was thinking about writing today, my own original-novel writing process to be specific, and it occurred to me there's something I do that I've never heard of anyone else doing, which may be unusual enough to talk about: I write the blurb first.

I'm not really an outliner, as such; what passes for an outline is basically just some scribbled notes on upcoming scenes and basically where I want the book to go. Effectively the blurb is my outline. I've been doing it since I sold a couple of books to Dreamspinner, at which point I discovered that they ask you to write your own blurb. I wasn't that great at it, but it soon occurred to me that if I wrote the blurb and then used that as, effectively, my outline, it might work really well. And it does.

This isn't necessarily going to be the final version of the blurb or even the one that's used (especially not if you trad publish). But the thing about a book blurb is that, in 2-4 paragraphs, it nails down all the major aspects of the book: who the main character(s) are, what the main conflict is, where it's set and what's interesting about it. And it does it in the most compelling, "hook-ish" possible way. It doesn't describe all the twists and turns along the way, or the ending, but the thing about writing the blurb first is that it gives me a "best parts" version of the characters and plot to focus on. And if the blurb doesn't sound compelling -- if it's hard to put my finger on the conflict, if I struggle to describe one or both characters using a few snappy adjectives, if I'm not sure if I would read the book I'm describing ... then it's back to the drawing board 'til I get a version I'm happy with.

Basically I want a blurb that would make ME want to read the book. Looking at a few dozen blurbs on Amazon in the genre I'm writing in can often be helpful at figuring out what kinds of blurbs draw me in -- which ones describe the plot setup in ways I find compelling, what kind of character dynamics are a draw for me if reduced to their component elements, etc.

I don't always do it at the exact beginning, but if I don't, I usually wish I had. Actually, one of the books I'm working on right now -- Metal Dragon -- is up to about 20K with only a few random fragments of blurb, and I've gotten lost in mid-book flounder. Writing a blurb for it is going to be one of my getting-back-on-track activities, because I think it might help me pinpoint any basic trouble spots in my plot and character setup.

I suspect it might work a lot less well for something that's less formulaic than the romances I'm currently writing. That being said, though, a lot of writing books advise that you should be able to write a one-sentence "pitch" of your plot, and I think of this as kind of the same thing.

Heh, so, neenaroo on Tumblr asked me if I have any tips for writing wilderness survival stories, and I completely overran the ask box and basically wrote a NOVEL about it (apparently I do!).

This is also posted on Tumblr.

I feel a little weird giving advice because I'm not really an expert on any part of this, including the writing part; I'm just a person who really loves stranding characters in the wilderness and having horrible things happen to them. :D On the other hand, I've written quite a few of these by now, so I guess I've sort of got a system.

Stories which are referenced below:
Running on Empty (SGA) (website link)
The Killing Frost (SGA) (website link)
Survivor (White Collar)
Black Water Rising (MCU)
Wing and a Prayer (MCU)

( Writing wilderness survival stories - long! )

So, a summary, in bullet points:

• Research
• Think about what your character plausibly knows and would have with them
• Do some kind of equipment inventory near the beginning so both the reader and your characters know what they have with them
• Keep making things slowly but steadily worse to increase tension (they lose stuff, they get hurt, more enemies arrive, the weather worsens, etc)
• Space out important events (make a list of possibilities if necessary) and save some of the worst stuff for last
• Throw curve balls at the characters every time a status quo starts to be established (rainstorm! lion! rocks fall, everyone dies!)
• Give them new stuff or new people whenever things start getting repetitive and/or you accidentally write them into a "but they could not possibly survive this" corner, but make them earn it and/or give it a major downside to make things more interesting.

And remember rules are made to be broken, and not all stories will have or need all of the above. :D

1. At some point, someone told me that Facebook doesn't show you when you have messages from non-friends, it just sticks them in a folder somewhere. I finally went looking for that folder, and I discovered someone trying to contact me about a freelance opportunity A YEAR AGO. Needless to say, it is no longer an opportunity, and I feel a bit like an idiot about it (though she was quite nice when I emailed her, and said they'd keep me in mind for the future). Anyway, thanks for the professional support, Facebook. Just go on being awesome.

2. I found myself tonight trying to figure out if it would have been possible to lock a door from the inside without a key in 1930. This is surprisingly difficult to google for! What do you call those keyless door locks, anyway, the kind where you push a button or press in the knob? I ended up reading a bunch of pages on the history of doorknobs, and finally googling for "push button door lock" got me to a page in which I learned that Schlage patented one in 1924 (apparently the first) and started selling them widely. I still don't think they would be widespread enough to be available in a low-rent office building in 1930, though, which is what I need for this scene. Maybe if the doors were recently upgraded, perhaps due to a rash of burglaries or something ...? (Of course, I could also just tweak that scene a bit, so I don't need it ...)

3. I'm still reading Diana Wynne Jones, with essays from Reflections: On the Magic of Writing interspersed between her books. I realized something else I absolutely love about her books is the way that ... I'm trying to think exactly how to phrase this ... her characters' thoughts and feelings on other characters do not necessarily reflect the author's feelings about that character. Does that make sense? I was noticing this particularly in the Dalemark books, since they're in omniscient third, which means you get everyone's opinions on everyone else, and even among a cast of mostly-very-sympathetic characters, there's still a tremendous amount of variety in how everyone feels about everybody else. Then I ran across one of her essays where she's talking about having the same character, or facets of the same character, pop up in different books, and one she mentioned is that Tacroy in The Lives of Christopher Chant and Torquil in Archer's Goon are facets of the same character. Now that she's said that, I can see it (in a way, Torquil is a sort of a "through a glass darkly" Tacroy, or vice versa), but it would never have occurred to me before -- and this is what's interesting to me about that from a writerly perspective -- because the way that the narrator reacts to the two characters is radically different. Christopher likes Tacroy immediately, so we get his sympathetic view of him, whereas Howard hates Torquil, for reasons that are entirely obvious in the book. It's just really interesting to me, because yeah, authors tend to have the same characters pop up in different books, which is something she's discussing in the essay, but I think it's rarer for very similar characters to turn up in different books but play radically different roles, which seems to be what's happening here.

And it made an impression on me because it is remarkably hard to do. This is one of the things that chases me off a lot of mediocre fanfic, because instead of the characters acting towards each other as they do in canon, you get everyone behaving as the author wishes they would behave (i.e. everyone hates X because the author hates X, even if they get along just fine in canon, or X and Y get over their differences even if they really shouldn't be able to). Obviously it isn't always that extreme or obvious, and I've been guilty of it myself, I'm sure. I think it's more insidious and harder to recognize in original fiction, since there's no baseline to go back to. In particular, there's a tendency for the writer to just end up with everyone getting along (the writer likes all the characters, so why wouldn't they like each other?!) or else everyone ganging up on the one who represents the Wrong Viewpoint. This is something I really need to keep in mind in something like Kismet, say, where there are a bunch of characters who have dramatically opposed viewpoints, and they really need to look very different when seen through each other's eyes.

Hey, reader-type people, I have a question for you! In thinking about how to promote my books, I've been thinking about where I actually get book information from: personal blogs, author's twitter, ads, Amazon recommendations, "just saw the book on a shelf", etc. Last night I sat down and made an actual list for all the recent books I've read, but I'm just one person. More data is better!

So, if you think back to the last book or two that you read, or that you bought (either one), and tell me where you found out about that book, that would be very useful! Actually, the more of your recent books you can remember that information for, the more helpful it'd be -- but I know that's difficult, because I can't even remember what I was reading more than a few books ago. And, if it's a book you picked up because you always read that series/author (which came up for me a number of times), can you remember why you started reading them in the first place?

FWIW, my recent "why did I pick up this book?" reading list looks like this:

- I know the author
- book got a glowing recommendation on a non-review (i.e. general interest) blog I read, and sounded interesting
- downloaded this one as a free Kindle promotion, after hearing people on my flist talk about the TV series based on it
- I know the author, again (different author)
- latest book in a series I've been reading for awhile (can't remember when or why I started reading it; all I remember now is that I got the early books from the library)
- local author I started following on Twitter because I'm trying to follow more local authors; he talked about his newest book a bunch on his Twitter & eventually I got interested enough to pick it up
- latest in a series I'm following; started reading because a friend recommended

And that's the point where I started forgetting what I'd actually been reading recently, though I may wander around the house a little later staring at my bookshelves.

There is exactly ONE time I can think of in my whole reading history that I bought a book directly based on an ad -- it was Frances Hardinge's first book, and the ad was just too impossibly intriguing for me not to want to read it. ("Imagine a world where all books are banned!") Usually it seems like the vast majority of my book reading has a lot to do with word of mouth -- people I know lending me books or recommending books to me, people on my various social media talking about books, people I know who write books talking about their books (and one thing making this list really impressed upon me is that the more someone talks about their stuff, the more likely I am to buy it ... which is directly counter-intuitive to me because I actively try not to spam people with this stuff, but, er, at least for me, it seems like I not only don't mind at all when people talk about their various projects -- it's interesting! -- but the more they talk about it, the more likely I am to be eventually intrigued enough to buy it). There's also a fair amount of "looking at the nearby books on the shelf" that goes on when I'm in a bookstore or library; I distinctly remember that I started reading the Vorkosigan books because I'd been spending a lot of time in the book section of the campus bookstore sneakily reading sections of books because I was too poor to buy them, and after I'd snuck in on about four different occasions to read the next couple chapters of "Mirror Dance", I finally had to admit that I really needed to buy that book.

So what about you? Do you remember specifically where you heard about the last couple of books you read or bought, and what made you interested enough to read it?

Here's an esoteric historical question for you: what did WWII-era soldiers in the field do with the packaging from c-rations and other trash of that nature? My intuitive feeling is that they'd just drop it wherever they happened to be, because a) carrying useless weight is highly impractical when you're tired and underfed and people are trying to kill you, and b) our modern-day cultural value regarding "littering is bad" had yet to take hold, and wasn't really something most people thought about, so just chucking a can into the bushes was a perfectly valid way of dealing with it, if you didn't have an immediate use for it.

(For that matter, my general experience has been that there's still sort of an urban/rural divide about it, with a lot of rural/semi-rural people not really thinking too much about dealing with trash in the old-fashioned "just drop it wherever" style. We're always having to clean up after hunters and picnickers in the gravel pit. Read a book not too long ago on Montana ranching that describes how one ranch where the writer worked as a ranch hand would just bulldoze the bodies of dead cows off a handy nearby cliff. Out of sight, out of mind!)

It's a strangely difficult detail to find via googling, though.

I had a writing epiphany today. frith_in_thorns says I should share with the class. :D

Basically, it's this:

For the last couple of months, I've been writing a murder mystery -- a steampunk romance murder mystery set in 1930, to be precise. A couple of weeks ago, some 50K into the thing, I got supremely stuck, so stuck that all of my usual unsticking techniques have not been working at all.

By this point I've written 5 novels in addition to a number of novel-length fanfics, which means I actually have a skill set for unsticking big plots! Believe me, no one is more shocked by this than I am! Usually it's a matter of going back to the beginning and carefully re-outlining everything I've written so far, looking for weak spots and potential points of divergence along the way. Sometimes I write plot points on index cards or post-its and lay them all out on a table. Sometimes I re-enact scenes with toys. When worst comes to worst, I just MAKE A DECISION ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT and go with that -- in my head, I call it the "dancing ninja conga line" because if you imagine a line of dancing ninjas conga-ing through your scene, anything has got to be an improvement over that.

But none of that was working on this one. Even making arbitrary decisions about the next plot point wasn't helping, because I'd just grind to a halt immediately on the next plot point.

But today I figured it out.

Basically, in nearly every sort of fiction, the main characters are the ones that drive the plot. Every important thing that happens, happens to them, and they have at least some agency in it.

In a murder mystery, though, that's exactly reversed. The detective-protagonists do have their own emotional/personal lives going on (ideally) in which they are principal actors, but the main driving force of the plot are actually the killers/victims/suspects.

Which means you have to outline the book from the point of view of the non-primary characters.

And once I realized that, things started falling into place beautifully, because that's why I've been having so much trouble figuring out what happens to my detectives at each stage of the plot; I'm viewing the whole world through their eyes, when actually, their actions and motivations are not the ones driving the big picture.

I think, looking back on it, that this is actually a recurring problem in a lot of my fiction -- original fiction much more so than fanfic, because in fanfic the minor characters are already pretty well known, but in original fiction it's easy to let the background collapse into two dimensions. And now I'm wondering how many of my other troublesome plots could be resolved by doing what I'm currently doing: outlining the movements and motivations of ALL of the characters, not just the ones at the center of the action.

Well, I wanted to write a murder mystery to learn to plot. Today I have learned something, for sure.