Writing Characters with Minds of Their Own

Last Sunday, I finished the first revision of Song of the Silk Weaver. As I noted in a recent post, I love first revisions. They’re mostly about kicking the tires on that mad initial draft, filling in the many missing bits (I had entire chapters that could be summarized as “Kiraz goes back to the steppe and stays there for a while”), and exploring the characters. What that means in practice, though, is that when—as happens to me more often than not—I find myself writing a character who absolutely refuses to cooperate with my initial plans, I spend half of the first revision trying to realign the plot with the person I now know that character to be.

In Silk Weaver, that character is Marco Delfino. The job I assigned to him in the rough notes that pass for an outline in my way of writing consisted of romancing the heroine, then moving on and leaving her to deal with the consequences. Not good behavior, I know, but the idea was to write something other than the romance that each one of the previous books in the series turned out to be. I might note in passing that something similar happened with Grusha; Song of the Shaman, too, was supposed to be a journey of self-discovery with romance in the background at best, but, well, Mansur …

In this case, the idea was for my heroine—Kiraz, who had just escaped a dismal marriage—to get the daughter she craved but to set up a supportive female community to help her raise that child. Hence the expectation that Marco would take himself out of the picture. And because he was supposed to wave his feathered hat and stride off into the sunset, I saw no problem with him having a different background, religion, and temperament from Kiraz. Being a citizen of Venice, he even speaks a different language, although he’s fluent in Tatar due to having spent most of his youth on the shores of the Black Sea.

All of a sudden, though, in the last third of the novel, Marco developed a conscience. How exactly that manifests itself, you’ll have to find out by reading the book. But the result has had me tearing out my hair for the last two months trying to figure out how, now that he’s refused to wander off as planned, I can make his relationship with my heroine both emotionally credible and historically plausible. Even now, I’m not completely sure that I’ve resolved all the issues (I was still rewriting entire scenes earlier this week), and I certainly have a ton of repetition to weed out, but I guess that’s what draft 3 is for. So long as Marco doesn’t pull another fast one on me, that is …

Image of young merchant in Renaissance clothing AI generated by theartofphoto; licensed via Adobe Stock, no. 986637812.