Novel Lessons 4: Stalking the Beast
After delivering a draft of The Bones of the Old Ones and while waiting upon editorial comments I wrote my second Pathfinder novel, Stalking the Beast. And while it proved much simpler in composition than writing Bones, it presented its own issues.
By the time I sat down to write it I was beginning to understand that every novel has its own challenges. Stalking the Beast was a sequel novel to The Plague of Shadows, which was in some ways a search for identity by its protagonist, Elyana. By the end, Elyana was comfortable with herself and her past. I wasn’t entirely sure how to create a new struggle for someone who had found a way to get her sh*t together, so I decided to focus my efforts on her loyal half-orc friend, Drelm. Except that he was such a simple character I knew he couldn’t carry the narrative on his own.
Inspiration hit when I developed the third viewpoint character, Lisette, a gunslinger hired to kill Drelm. Her chapters were the easiest to write in the entire book, despite me knowing her the least. It was the oddest thing. Previous experience had shown me that knowing a character well was a great way into their head, but I learned that being INTERESTED in the character was real fuel as well. Lisette’s complicated life and motivations were so much more fun to write that they were vastly more simple to explore, so much so that I barely had to revise any of the chapters from her point of view at all.