One challenge with maintaining a large cast of interrelated characters while writing a series over the course of more than a decade is remembering the details of their past relationships and interactions. I was forcibly reminded of this point a few weeks ago while revising Song of the Steadfast, the next novel in my Songs of Steppe & Forest series. The novel, already delayed by all the family and work events surrounding last year’s retirement, has been something of a struggle from the beginning, the result of a hero and heroine who are too nice for their own good and who therefore require prodding to develop a few edges that can make their story interesting to readers.
As a result, it’s taken longer than usual even to get in the mood for revising, never mind find the time. But this week’s discussion has a different focus. As I was working on a simple scene where the hero, Yuri, and the heroine, Anna, reconnect after nine months apart, I suddenly remembered that another character, Nikolai, whom I’d described as Anna’s neighbor when she was small, was in fact her great-uncle (who lived next door). That sent me down a rabbit hole as I tried to figure out exactly how that would change her feelings about him and, by extension, about life. To make it even more of an “oops,” Yuri and Anna are referring back to an incident from after they were separated two books ago, raising the possibility that I had introduced a glitch in an already published novel.
Fortunately, when I investigated the earlier book, that last had not happened. In fact, the whole previous reference was not quite as I had remembered it, and the failure to mention the family relationship worked well in that particular context. Still, the whole thing held up a mirror to a writing problem that I’ve encountered before but not really considered in depth: how to manage the details of my own creations. When I write a novel, I become wholly engaged in the details of those characters’ lives in that moment. When I move on to the next, the previous characters fade into the background while the next set moves front and center.
Since I began working on The Golden Lynx in 2008, I have made that transition eleven times. So it wasn’t surprising that when I reached the end of Legends of the Five Directions, I had to go back to the first two novels and ensure they were in line with where the series ended up. But some of those decisions still affect my current characters, and that’s when it becomes difficult to recall the relationships and interactions among fictional people who have long since passed into the recesses of my imagination.
Maybe I’ll just have to reread my own series from the beginning, if I ever find the time …
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