Evolution of Ideas - Bitter Heat
I was going through some notes and ran across my initial sketches for Bitter Heat. I thought it would be fun to show how ideas evolve over time. Writing a book is like trying to put together a 1000 piece puzzle. An idea isn't a book, it's just a puzzle piece and it's your job to not only make up the final picture, but also hand cut each piece. You can start in the middle or the edges, but somehow, somewhere the ideas need to connect to form a book.
This is the first jot I have of the initial idea for Bitter Heat
Translation for my horrific handwriting:
I've been in Panguitch for two days and the past two mornings in that time between wakefulness and sleep I've been having this dream about a super aggressive ex-husband. He's taunting and confrontational and she gives it right back to him.
Maybe they have a very hostile divorce. She keeps in touch with his mother and visits her. She lives on an island? She is with the mother when she has a stroke/heart attack? Accompanies her to hospital and tries to get away before he arrives without luck. The mom and someone else guilts her into staying?
That was the initial premise. And from there you build.
Translation for my horrific handwriting:
They met in college. She falls head over heels for him. He's smart, driven, intense.
She grew up with a father who was absent, driven. She grew up with no foundation--raised by jealous step-mothers. Her mom died in a car accident. Drunk driving. It was highly publicized.
Your ideas constantly change. You try a piece and connect a few others before you realize the story is going in a direction you don't like. You break off those pieces and start fitting new ones. I spend a lot of time writing in notebooks, tossing out idea after idea. Once I like my sketch, I go to the keyboard and try it out. If it doesn't work, back to the notebook.
I don't even remember this idea, but apparently Jasmine was going to be a screenwriter.
Translation for my horrific handwriting:
She has two sisters. The older two are just like her father. They can be cold and detached but they do care for her. They're bossy and dictatorial and intense. They all married well, enhancing their families wealth.
She's a screenwriter and after her divorce, wrote a drama that has since gone onto broadway. She's always been more artistically inclined. She didn't earn anyone's approval until she got her first movie deal.
"You weren't built for the business world. You would have been eaten alive by people like me and your sisters. It's wasn't in your blood. You didn't have the balls for it. You've always been too emotional."
(A version of this discussion still exists in Bitter Heat)
I think instead of sisters, Jasmine originally had a selfish, immature older brother that ran Hennessy and Co into the ground. I have a version of her and Roth arguing over him in the first chapter, in the hospital hallway. I'm glad I went with Colette and Ariana because we also got Rami and Lyle. Her spoiled brother wasn't that interesting anyway.
Initial cabin idea. She was dating a director?? What! LOL. That wouldn't have gone well.
He draws her back to ICU where they tell him to come back tomorrow. He drives her home in his mother's truck.
The mom has an A-frame house. Her bedroom is upstairs and there's a guest bedroom beneath.
She's horrified to be stranded with him. They go at it--accusing each other of things. She went under a pen name until she felt comfortable enough to come out. She's dating the director who is making her play. He's eccentric like Jeff Goldblum.
She stares at the snow falling. They get snowed in for three days. She doesn't even last one day. He fucks her rough--on her knees, the way she likes it. He treats her the way no one else would. He never cared who she was in bed. There, they were equals and there was no doubt he wanted her.
LMAO. I would have had fun writing the eccentric love interest. I write in fragments like this--setting, tone, mindset. I'm constantly bouncing from one thing to the next, mentally setting train tracks, trying to see what's ahead so I can avoid obstacles and dead ends. Notebooks are a great way to hammer out your ideas so you don't waste so much time on the screen. I inevitably go too deep into something that isn't going to work and don't want to scrap because I spent so much time on it, but eventually I'll start on the new idea, realize it feels better and move forward with that and totally forget about the bad idea.
This is pretty much what a journal entry looks for me in the midst of a draft.
Translation for my horrific handwriting:
Ahh! Let's finish this already!
Ok, so I decided to make this a duet instead of one huge book. I'm at 70k words and they haven't even gotten married yet.
I've had such a hard time getting a pulse on the characters for this book. Jasmine is a mix of hard and soft and right now Roth is so closed off that it's just difficult in general to get a read on him, especially since he's holding back so much.
Even though you're writing the characters, it doesn't mean you know everything about them. Like I wrote here, Roth's motivations were a mystery to me as well. And because I didn't know what was going to happen at the end of Bitter Heat, I thought it was going to be a duet, but once I started book two, I realized it was going to be a trilogy. I'm always amazed at how authors are able to stick to standalones or they know right off the bat how many books are needed to tell a story. I don't know how long the story will be until the end. The characters decide how big their story is, not me.
This is what it looks like when I'm trying to write a book blurb. Sad, isn't it? LOL. You can see at the top that his name is Jackson Roth and below, Jackson Cain. Even after the first draft, you may still be shifting around names to see what you like best. Nothing is final until you send out the first wave of ARC's and even then, you may still make some adjustments.
People were asking what inspired Roth, so I thought it would be interesting to show these sketches, which shows the evolution of ideas for a book. I write in digital notebooks and the notebook for Bitter Heat has 155 pages of notes, ideas, journal entries, revisions, and so on. I have no idea how other authors write books, but this is my method. Notebook, keyboard, daydream, repeat. I'm constantly refining ideas until I feel it's right and then I move onto the next piece of the puzzle. Ideas are constantly being sifted through a strainer. You take the good parts and leave out the rest. Eventually, these pieces make up the framework of a book and sometimes, a series with a great cast. :)