A Study In Parallel

I am currently writing three books. Actually, I am writing about twenty, but at the moment only three of them have a decent measure of my attention, so I will tell you about those.

The one I started most recently is called Speak to Me, and as the NaNoWriMo project of this November, its word count is hovering slightly above 50,000. It likely will be for a while. Shortly after I passed this year’s finish line, despite my intentions of pressing on to the actual end of that story, I resumed work on the one from last year instead. I’ve blogged about this novel before: it is called Foreign State of Mind and is the sequel to Boys and Girls.

Sequel isn’t the right word for it, though, because the first book contains events that happen much later in the character’s timeline than those in the second one. Rather, it’s a story in parallel–at some points, the same story as Boys and Girls, but told from a different perspective; and at others, a completely separate story. I embarked on this project because I believed it would broaden my view of all the characters, and give me a chance to keep writing about them even though I didn’t know what was supposed to happen to them after the events of the first book.

I suppose that’s about where Orson Scott Card’s mind must have been when he decided to write Ender’s Shadow. And who could blame him? If I had written a book as cherished and influential as Ender’s Game, with characters in it as dynamic and complex, and a story as epic and engaging, I think I’d want to keep probing into it as deeply as I could for as long as anyone would let me. Although Boys and Girls probably won’t turn out to be as successful as all that, to me it’s worth some deeper probing.

In this regard, I took a lesson from Orson Scott Card. I hadn’t realized how helpful my reading of Ender’s Shadow could be to my literary endeavors, until I was about seventy-five percent of the way through it. At this point, I was well into the portion of the story which is told in detail in Ender’s Game, so I had to ask myself why I was so captivated by it. I had already read about all these events. I had watched the movie twice and listened to the soundtrack (it was composed by Steve Jablonsky and is absolutely phenomenal, in case you’re wondering) about a hundred times, effectively replaying each scene in my head just as often. I knew this story as well as I knew my own–and yet, reading the one told in parallel, I was in total suspense. Why?

Because there was one thing missing from my knowledge: the thoughts of a certain character named Bean. He is present for a great portion of the original book, basically becoming Ender’s right-hand man by the end of it, yet the readers never find out very much about him. Where did he grow up? What does he think of Battle School? How does he feel about being commanded by Ender?

By answering these questions, Ender’s Shadow kept me hooked on a story I already knew. I couldn’t wait to reach the part of the book where someone makes a serious mistake in Command School and Ender loses his cool with the crew, because while I had already read his thoughts about that fateful day, I had yet to learn of Bean’s.
Once I reasoned this out, I realized there was something very wrong with the pair of books I was writing. The parts that contained fresh, new events could plausibly keep a reader interested; but once I veered back to the things I had already described once in Boys and Girls, there would be nothing missing from that book which they would seek in this one. So I had to make it so that something was missing.
This is no big secret, so I won’t regret revealing it here, for it surfaces within the first few pages of Boys and Girls: its protagonist, Casten, is hopelessly in love with Tallerie, who takes center stage in Foreign State of Mind. Just as we know from watching or reading Ender’s Game how Ender feels about Bean, Casten’s feelings are readily understood in the first of my two books. But in order to emulate Card’s masterful withholding of information which makes Bean so fascinating, I have to save Tallerie’s feelings for the book which centers around her.
Therein lies my mistake: Boys and Girls is written in first-person POV, with some of the writing done by Tallerie. In order to keep her thoughts below the surface, I concluded that these portions of the book would have to be removed. By shutting off her narrative voice on one side of the story, I hope to make it more readable on the other.

Thank you, Orson Scott Card, for these invaluable lessons on writing in parallel.