The Hardest Part Is...

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN :  Stephen King reportedly once said: “The hardest part is just before you start.” Isn’t that wise?

Jeannette De Beauvoir is a wonderful friend of the Reds, and whoa, she knows all too well the struggles of new beginnings.  She calls it “tricky.”  But  that’s not the half of it, right?

And be sure you notice her list of setup necessities! I’m copying that right away, I have to admit.

One Step at A Time

By Jeannette De Beauvoir

Starting a new series is tricky. As I write, I’m meeting my new protagonist, getting to know her and the people who surround her, finding her voice and learning her strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, and background.

 

This doesn’t happen all at once. Sure, I’ve already given some thought to her life and personality. I’ve even done character pages outlining what I think she might be like. (Or, more accurately, what I’d like her to be like.)

 

But more often than not, it’s the character who chooses who she wants to be—not entirely unlike the rest of us! After all, we make most of our choices as we go along: everything from style to career to family to hobbies. We amass experiences that teach us and change us. We meet people who touch us—and change us. We study and read and learn—and that changes us.

 

None of it happens overnight. And while it’s an interesting mental exercise to posit how I think Abbie, my new protagonist, might react to the situations I place her in, it rarely works out that way. By the time we get to a particular plot point, she’s already said and done things I didn’t imagine she’d say or do, and has let me know in no uncertain terms that she’s the one making the choices.

 

 

The Everest Enigma is the first story in this new series.

I set it up the way I’d envisioned: a protagonist with access to wealth (so she doesn’t have to be chained to a nine-to-five job); a reason for her to leave her comfort zone (her brother’s intervention in recommending her for a journey to Nepal); a connection to a past mystery with repercussions in the present (honoring my decision to include other timelines). All was well. And then my lovely new protagonist let me know that, oh, by the way, she colors her hair. Blue.

 

Other things shifted. When I asked myself what the novel is really about, at its core, the answer was obsession: the obsession of climbers determined to make it to the top, the obsession of George Mallory to be the first to summit the world’s highest mountain, the obsession that grew in the murderer’s mind and heart that led to several deaths, even the admittedly benign obsessions of the Sherpa people to insist on respect for the goddess of the mountain.

But Abbie has had an extremely easy life; how will she figure that out? So I went back and rewrote part of her backstory, weaving in some organic understanding of obsessions: a father who travels the world solely to stargaze, a grandfather who financed forays into Cambodia, convinced there were missing American soldiers still imprisoned there.

 

And that in turn gave the story a texture, a richness, it hadn’t had before.

 

Of course I’ve made mistakes. Things I know I’ll regret when it comes time to write the next book, and the ones that will follow. I knew that from the start, having experienced it already in two other series, the unhappy realization that something I want to include simply doesn’t fit with this person, this place, this story.

 

During the first novel in my Provincetown series, my protagonist Sydney finds herself sparring with a man who’s an ICE agent. It wasn’t until I was halfway through the book that I realized she was attracted to him; I hadn’t planned on giving her a love interest at all. And… an ICE agent?

I tried several different ways of writing him out of the story, and she didn’t let me; every conversation seemed to lead back to this by-then mutual attraction. I finally gave in (and as quickly as possible transferred him into Homeland Security’s anti-human trafficking division, having belatedly researched how I could make him nicer for myself and my readers to bear with), and finally in the tenth book in the series allowed them to get married. Not my plan; Sydney’s.

 

So while there was part of me insisting that I must be clear about creating Abbie and giving her traits and thoughts and even mannerisms that will stand the test of time through multiple stories in the series, I know that, as in all relationships, discovering who she is will take time.

 

Martin Luther King said, “You don’t have to see the whole staircase: just take the first step.” That’s really my approach to this new series.

 

Abbie will show me the rest of the stairs.

HANK: Oh, I love that, Jeannette! And I will think of it every day. (I too, need a new idea. And, as you all know from last week’s post, I DO NOT have one right now…. AHHH.)

SO–tell us, Reds and readers, what was the last thing you started from scratch?

 

 Jeannette de Beauvoir is an award-winning author of historical and mystery fiction and a poet whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She has written three mystery series along with a number of standalone novels; her work “demonstrates a total mastery of the mystery/suspense genre” (Midwest Book Review). She lives and works in a seaside cottage on Cape Cod where she’s also a local theatre critic and hosts an arts-related program on WOMR, a Pacifica Radio affiliate. More at jeannettedebeauvoir.com