Marriage Made in Hell

My current novel in progress, Festival Madness, has the Burning Man Festival as the locale for the entire middle of the book. Two years ago, we went to Burning Man (my second trip) and I scoped out weather, craziness, Reno, and all the details, large and small which will take the reader to the festival. Even with photos and notes, I wanted to get that part of the book written before the immediacy of the Man had vanished, so I started writing the book smack in the middle.

I had the plot down in a vague sort of way, with characters, locations, motivations, all that good stuff, and I knew how Festival Madness would begin, so why not start in the middle? I wrote and wrote and the plot took some unusual twists and turns and surprised the hell out of me as it usually does, and finally I got the characters out of the desert and out of Reno (one murderee less, of course) and en route back to Boston.

My main worry was that the "Man" part would be so compelling that the rest of the book would be dull. So I concocted adultery and FBI raids and another murder to make the sure beginning had its own excitement. All year I've been writing like crazy to marry up the beginning and the middle, knowing there would be some retrofitting involved. Much of writing is craft, and tasks like adding more plot points and making sure that A is implied before B actually happens is not magical, just the nuts and bolts that hold the novel together. So this was expected and do-able.

What I found when I began the great joining was that the main character, who had been bogged down in job, marriage, and problems in the beginning, was in many ways a different person at the Festival, freer, crazier, more willing to take chances.

Now anyone who has been at Burning Man will probably agree, yes, this happens, those are some of the reasons we go to the man, to shed our old skins, so to speak. My concern as a novelist is to make this transformation believable. Characters do change, or course, that is what the reader wants to see, but the character needs a consistent "voice" throughout and I am seeing a few problems here, that art, not craft will have to overcome.

But the good news is that we have almost 60,000 words and an exciting conclusion planned during which the character solves the crimes, helps her friends and maybe ditches her husband. I may leave that open-ended. Will they/won't they is one is the ongoing questions.

Every novel is different and each presents its own challenges. I have learned about sail boats, white water rafting, bass fishing and all sorts of unlikely stuff in the process of creating exciting scenes for the read and also the author. Private aircraft is the obsession of the moment.

In the New York Times, this morning, John Updike talks about his research for his new novel about a terrorist. Even the master still has to drive around, interview folks and make sure the details are right.

Onward,

Grapeshot