Came close to giving up on a Sunday’s writing this morning as I trudged through a scene with all the suspense of limp cabbage, while characters wandered in and characters wandered out and I, the writer, did a lot of staring at and describing of the tiles. True, they’re interesting tiles and highly communicative of my world’s history and society, but the POV character didn’t have the knowledge to interpret them. It finally dawned on me that I was telling the whole chapter from entirely the wrong point of view: it was the other character who already knew the information I needed to convey and was going to make the choices that at that point were going to advance the plot (ie, cause trouble). I was going to shift into her viewpoint for a second chapter, but now I’m going to rewrite the first from hers as well, and in the meantime I accumulated 3 700 words of a visit to a village in a bottle, which will be the set for a murderous climax, a rather more balanced and charming archnemesis to Creon than I’d originally envisioned, her children, whom I didn’t expect, and the answer as to why Creon and company get shot down. Why can’t I just send groups of characters in quests off to the ends of the earth without having to have them INTERLOCK so tightly it has me practically doing calculus to figure out who has to know and say what, when. But then when I read groups of characters going in opposite directions I tend to only get interested in one group and start skipping chapters. But then I’m also the kind of reader who will take a peek at the end of a book if I get to like someone and the body count is going higher, or the author is showing signs of a predisposition to doing particularly crushing and nasty things. In short, I cheat.

I have been thinking of Tolkien these past few days – as I make notes which reveal that the novel is not going to go the way I thought it should, but is going to go the way Creon has decided it will go. I remember Tolkein in one of his letters saying something to the effect that Boromir’s brother had shown up, and was a very interesting character, but if he went on much longer most of him was going to have to be removed to the appendix. Maybe he did have that poisoned arrow in mind for Faramir right from the start, but I have a feeling that he found himself in a position where he had a plot well on its way and suddenly found himself with a character coming on stage who could have sent it all askew, just by his presence and personality. I’m very fond of Faramir, and always thought that arrow was a dirty trick, but it may have been authorial need!