Progress Day 10

Yesterday I watched over 4 hours of documentaries about Chinese political history from 1949 - 2011, Mao Zedong, his policies and what they meant for the people of China. By the end the names all swam together and the dates meant very little. However, having ruminated and slept on it I now have a sense of my antagonist and why he was driven to seek revenge. And in true Shakespearian style he goes on to commit murders to hide the initial ones. Now all I have to do now is write it.

But it's not quite as easy as that. I may have a plot and characters but one decision I haven't made yet is about narrative - who is going to tell the story and how are they going to tell it. Viewpoint is another - whose story is it? I have three strong characters - the police officer, the murderer and the outsider who helps solve the crime. At the moment my instincts tell me to write my scenes from each of their viewpoints till I get further into the novel and see where they take me, then I can decide what I want the reader to see and feel. It's not a satisfactory way of working for lots of people but I find that if I nail something down too quickly or too soon, then I have difficulty changing things later. It's much easier for me to initially be freer with the narrative and then when I have a light bulb moment I can settle on something.

Another decision still to make is about starting point. Do I begin with the discovery of the murders and then use flashbacks? do I chronologically move through the events? or do I start in the middle and fan out? My decision on that will depend on which approach creates the most tension and drama. At the moment starting with the discovery of the bodies seems the best approach, but as each murder was committed at different times over a 4-year period, information to the protagonists and the reader relies heavily on forensic evidence. I'm not a forensic scientist and don't just want to write a police procedural novel, so I have to stylistically and structurally find ways of allowing the reader to see what I want them to without giving anything away till the last chapter.

These are the decisions I'll need to make but at the moment I'm still finding my way through all the information and background material I've been assembling. I can move forward with scenes to tell a lot more about my characters and to further the plot but I have to let them settle, sleep on them a few times, discuss ideas with colleagues, experiment and so on until it feels right. Then the real writing begins. And when that happens, it's amazing.