So I was reading entries on some website or other a while ago, writing advice, you know – all these detailed posts about developing the world and the characters. The advice concerned making out these detailed character sketches – not just notes about hair color and love interests and pets, but all this stuff about past and present conflicts and insecurities and on and on. Hmm, I said. Should I be doing that?

And then, about the same time, I happened across a blog post someplace else, and the writer was describing these super-detailed outlines he uses, so detailed that the outline winds up about half the length of the finished book. Then (I guess) the writer just has to fill description and dialogue and maybe write those transition scenes where you get a character from point A to point B.

It didn’t cross my mind for even a second that I ought to be doing that.

How do I develop my characters? By writing the first chapter of a book. How do I develop the setting? Same answer: by writing the first chapter. And how do I figure out the plot of the book? By seeing how the characters interact with one another and with the setting and waiting for a central scene (or two or more, if I’m lucky) to write itself in my head. Getting the actual plot to line itself up so I can get to that scene and then have someplace to go afterward – that’s the hard part!

I knew almost nothing at all about the Griffin Mage trilogy when I started it: I knew I had a shy young girl as a main character, and that’s it. No idea of the plot except I wanted griffins, very little idea of the setting. Then on the first page, as soon as the griffins appeared in the sky, I found out that the griffins were going to be linked with fire. I hadn’t had that in mind at all, I was just trying to write evocative description, and then all of a sudden there was the most important fact about griffins: they were creatures of fire. And so humans instantly became creatures of earth, and poof! There was this potential source of conflict, appearing almost accidentally from a nearly random bit of description.

I’d already had a role in mind for Kes: healer and herb-woman. So if she was going to meet the griffins, obviously it would be because some of the griffins had been injured. But how? By whom? Why? The plot began to take shape around the answers to those questions.

Another main character stepped on stage: Bertaud, a friend and advisor of the king. Male, a bit older than Kes . . . ah, here comes the romance sub-plot! Well, not necessarily. Especially because I often prefer to keep romance in the background and also sometimes like to tilt the romance off in an unexpected direction. Anyway, what interested me was the griffins – so I wanted to explore the relationship between Kes and the griffins, and between Bertaud and the griffins, not necessarily between Kes and Bertaud. I had no idea at this point whether there would be any romance sub-plot at all, or if so, who would be involved.

But Kes was a healer deliberately sought out by the griffins because they needed her skills. What would lead Bertaud to the griffins? What relationship would he have with them? When he first met Kairaithin, the griffin mage, I began to find answers to those questions. Here’s Bertaud’s reaction to the desert and to Kairaithin on first meeting both:

Bertaud tried to focus his mind. But a hot wind blew through his mind, shredding his thoughts. The wind seemed to contain words: it seemed to speak a language he might, if he strained hard enough, eventually comprehend. At the moment it only confused his wits and his nerve. He tried to work out whether this was something the griffin mage was doing purposefully or merely a strange effect of the desert, and could not decide. . . .

“Kairaithin,” said the griffin, with that ferocious hard humor that was nothing like the humor of a man. “If you like. Sipiike Kairaithin. Anasakuse, to those who presume themselves my intimates. Shall we be enemies, man?”

And that’s a difficult question for any number of reasons, and more difficult for Bertaud than for anyone else. Almost as soon as I wrote this scene showing the first meeting between Bertaud and Kairaithin, I knew exactly what conflict would become central for Bertaud and exactly what scenes I was working toward – not the climactic scene, but scenes absolutely central to the characters and the plot. Everything else in the story suddenly fell into place.

Then the whole trick was working backward as well as forward to integrate everything I’d figured out about the characters and the world into the story, just as though I’d known all about those things from the start.

For me, that’s the way a story develops: with almost no plan in the beginning. The plan, the plot, the themes – all those big things develop out of the characters and the world. Only later do all the elements get smoothed out and integrated into a (I hope!) seamless whole.

Later I had to beat a plot by brute force out of Book 2: Land of Burning Sands. But I will say, by the time Book 3 came around? By that time, I knew where I was going right from the start. But even then, though I knew there would indeed be a developing romance in Book 3, I still didn’t know at the beginning who was going to fall in love with whom. In fact, I changed my mind about that about 400 pages in and had to go back and tweak ten thousand details . . . but there you go. Detailed outlines may be great for other writers, but (at least at first) finding out about the characters and the world is almost as much a discovery process for me as for the reader!