Behind the Scenes: Chapter 14

A lot of interesting thought and action went into creating this chapter, so I decided I should post some of it here for you all to enjoy. It may not occur to you, but I do my best to get their universe right down to the tiny details. For example, the songs Asha and Elene dance to in this chapter? They exist. As do all the flute pieces Asha plays in other chapters.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The real reason why this chapter took so long is that I found myself having difficulty actually doing this to Asha. She used to be my least favorite narrator of the three, but as she has grown into herself I have found myself more and more enamoured with her. She's the most interesting, engaging, and challenging voice to write, for one. For another, I find her ability to forgive and accept almost inspiring. The Asha in my notes is bitter at this point in the novel, but the character she has become refuses to be so. And the weird thing is? It works well.

Some of you may think it is sad that I had a problem doing that to a character. "They're not real," after all. But I spend a great deal of time with them, and I know more about them than will likely ever make it into the book. And, I firmly believe that characters are an aspect of the writer or people the writer is closely associated with. This means that setting her up to be almost raped put me, and my best friends, in that position as well. When you think about it from that perspective, it makes a great deal more sense.

But there was more to it than that. I had to create an entirely new setting for this chapter, which takes more time than you would think. Not only that, but I had to familiarize myself with an entirely new narrative voice. It doesn't matter that Elene took over for less than a single page--that was some of the slowest and intense writing of the chapter. Then, there was deciding how I was going to describe what Asha was going through. Would she understand? How quickly would her control crumble? How do I show her being seeded while still maintaining enough clarity to keep the reader aware of what is going on? Finally, I had to decide how to handle Asha's frequent loss of consciousness. When people faint, they usually don't think "And then I fainted." (This is both an excellent perk of first-person and a terrible downside.)

Okay. In order of appearance, the three songs I used to write the dancing section. The first two are traditional bellydance pieces that would be most like what Asha had learned to (and that I, coincidentally, learned to myself). The third is an Egyptian pop piece that I decided would be most like true Midbaran music--traditional roots heavily twisted and twined with electronics. Yes, all of these songs are just chilling in my music library; why do you ask?







Hope this was interesting!