Developing an Idea: Woman on Painted Bridge

Stories are not a single idea, as I've said on this blog before. Stories are a combination of ideas working together to produce a satisfying narrative. The work I am currently querying, Woman on Painted Bridge, is a good illustration of how I develop an idea.

First, the pitch:

When the pandemic finally trickles to a halt, Titania Greenwood, has to get away from her San Francisco art gallery. After buying a dilapidated manor house in the UK, she discovers a hidden cellar full of paintings by a previously unknown 19th-century artist. Hoping their sale would pay her debts, she ships to her gallery, only to discover that the paintings are magical gateways into a painted world. Entering the world in the shape of Anne, one of the artist’s models, she meets Avery Goddard, the oddly mercurial artist who has been dead a hundred years. 

At first, Titania only hopes to learn enough about Avery’s magical creations to sell his collection to the highest bidder, but she feels herself falling in love with him. However, there is an obstacle: the beautiful Erin Hawthorne, a young chambermaid in Avery’s employ that she suspects of having an affair with her master. Bisexual Titania discovers she is also attracted to Erin, but also jealous that Avery would be interested in her; and her feelings are further complicated by the impending auction that will cost her any future chance of seeing either of the two of them again.

Titania finally learns why Avery is so strangely unpredictable: the two of them have been experiencing the same events in a different order due to the strange rules of the timeless painted world, and a glimpse into the future shows Titania that she is destined to sell the collection against her better judgment. Regretfully she turns down Erin and expresses her love for Avery, knowing they can never be together after the auction. However, Avery reveals that he and Erin are the same person, and together they conceive a method to sell the original collection but still see one another in a painted world they create together.

Now, how did we get here?

First, let's start with the banal. Why did I choose to write a romance?

When I came to the end of National Novel Writing Month in 2018, I had finished Seer of the Sands and I wanted to start querying it. I wasn't optimistic I would get an offer, because it was everything agents say they don't want from a debut author: a Western-based high fantasy that's over the recommended word count. As a debut, it's not worth a publisher's risk. Furthermore, all the advice online suggested that I shouldn't attempt to write Book 2 of the series until I had a buyer for Book 1. So I turned to my handy list of novel ideas — I keep a journal of them — to decide which project would be best.

Immediately, I thought of Woman on Painted Bridge. I had had a vague idea for a romance novel about a magic painting, but as I was in the middle of Seer I couldn't do much more than make a note of it, or write a single page at maximum, to capture the basics. It ticked all the boxes: it was a standalone novel with no built-in series, it was relatively short by comparison to Seer, and I liked the idea and the genre.

The idea was pretty basic at the time: a woman falls in love with the self-portrait of an artist who died a hundred years ago. I knew there would be some kind of love triangle — an "other woman," if you please, visible in the background of the painting — to add complications. I knew the main character would work in the field of art, but I didn't know if she'd be a museum curator or a docent, or an art gallery owner, or a painter, or an artist's model. She'd be in the art world somewhere. And I didn't know much about the mysterious painter at all.

I had the basics. Now I had to develop them.

First: what role would the female MC have? That was easy: I didn't know anything about being a museum curator, but I knew about retail and commissioned sales. Besides, making Titania the owner of the gallery gave her higher stakes — she has a financial interest to sell the painting. If the magic portrait had been hanging on the wall in a museum, it's not going anywhere, unless it's a limited-time showing or something. Still, that's low stakes. Selling the picture would deny her future access to it.

Second: who was the "other woman" in the picture? From the start I figured it would be a young woman in the village. Perhaps the artist could see her from the window and longed after her, so painted her into the background of various works. Or, I thought, the other woman was Titania. Maybe Titania spends so much time wandering around the village looking for the "other woman" that the artist sees her and longs after her ... but no, that wouldn't work, I thought. If there is no other woman, we never get to meet her; we never get the tension of seeing what kind of person she is, or what she wants, or whether she loves the artist in return. With a plot twist like that, I could outsmart myself into having no dramatic tension at all.

I clung to the idea for a while during development. Maybe Titania could meet ... someone else. A girl from the village, but not the girl. So who would that be? I didn't know.

Then I thought: could the girl actually be the artist? We don't know much about the mysterious painter, after all; we only have an alleged self-portrait to go by. If this artist died a long time ago — I still didn't know exactly when, but more than a hundred years — then we might not have reliable records. Just a painting. Maybe the artist had used his (or her) own features as the model for various portraits. as Leonardo da Vinci may have done with the Mona Lisa.

At that point I realized I was going to have to decide how Titania and Avery were meeting. Was it purely time travel? Or was there some other world beyond the frame? Could you take high-tech items with you, or were there limits? If you go to the past, do you appear out of thin air, or do you assume the form of someone already extant? What about paradoxes? If Titania appeared in the past and Avery painted her, wouldn't that mean there's an old portrait of Titania somewhere?

Instinctively I wanted to eliminate the possibility of bringing back anachronistic technology. It wouldn't do. For one thing, if Avery painted a 19th-century portrait of Titania on her iPhone, or even mentioned any of her modern ideas or knowledge of future history, that would have wide-reaching repercussions. Sure, you could tell a story like that, but that wasn't what I was going for.

I concluded that Avery's creation would have to involve some separate secondary world, one which would limit Titania's contact with real historical events; and the process of visiting that would would translate any anachronistic objects (like her iPhone) to something of the local equivalent. On further consideration, I decided that visiting this world would require one to inhabit a predetermined vessel. The visitor would assume the form and attire of the person in the portrait. I thought this would be a good way to eliminate more paradoxes of the hey-isn't-that-Titania-in-the-painting variety. It would also allow for disguises and identity mix-ups, which I thought might be fun.

So I had a shape. Now it was time to re-evaluate, and I saw some problems.

If Titania were visiting in some other assumed shape, how could she be sure Avery was in love with her and not with her image? I'd have to fix that — Avery would paint a picture of her real self, somehow, and that portrait wouldn't turn up right away. It would be hidden away. Also, I realized, Avery could be both the rugged self-portrait and the "other woman," and I could strike one character from the story. Titania could meet Avery and Erin, and not realize they were the same person.

In order to pull that off, I'd have to keep them (and the reader) off balance, so nobody guessed the secret too quickly. That's when I invented the idea of the out-of-order time loop. Titania's first time meeting Avery would not be Avery's first time meeting her. That would disguise the "beginning" of their relationship and make Avery seem much more commanding and knowledgeable. He would know her first, before she ever met him. And there could be no question of anything but a happy ending, which meant Titania would have to accept Avery as well as Erin as one whole person.

After that, I built the characters in Titania's life.

December was easy. I didn't want to follow the stereotype of the Sassy Girlfriend Who Supports the Heroine. It was predictable. I invented December with the express purpose of a business-only relationship. This would give December a pure, unsullied perspective on the sale of Avery Goddard's work. December's opinion is not contaminated by her opinion of Titania's relationships.

I then made a list of Titania's exes. As an attractive and bisexual single woman over forty, she will have had prior relationships, and they hadn't worked out. I wanted to know who, when, and why.

Creating Titania herself took more time. I was well into the first draft before I had a handle on who she was, and I went back and revised her personality. If Avery was withholding his own identity, Titania should have a parallel story. There should be something about her — her specific ethnicity — that she played social games with. Some fundamental act of ... not dishonesty, exactly, but concealment.

So that's how I developed the basic concept of Woman on Painted Bridge. I started with a few ideas and followed through on the consequences to see which paths made for good stories.

When It All Comes Together

I've already mentioned that I favor an analysis of setup and payoff, rather than the shallow fad of trope recognition. Let's look at one way that dramatic tension favors multiple threads of setup and payoff.

• Governor Tarkin wants to use the Death Star to destroy the Rebellion.
• Luke Skywalker wants to join the Rebellion in the fight against the Empire.
• Princess Leia wants to deliver the plans into the hands of the Rebellion to stop the Death Star.
• Han Solo wants to earn a reward so he can pay off his debts.

At the climax of the film, three of these threads are unresolved, and one (Han's) is seemingly resolved, though not to the audience's satisfaction. Han Solo got his reward money, but we can tell that Luke would have preferred Han to be less mercenary, to stay and join in the fight.

A fifth thread is introduced:

• Darth Vader wants to defend the Death Star against the Rebel attack.

Then the climax of the film happens, and in about ten seconds of screen time, all five of these dramatic threads are resolved with the destruction of the Death Star. Tarkin is killed before achieving his goal; Vader's reason for defending the Death Star is taken away. Luke finally fulfills his objective to join the fight against the Empire. Leia's arc is resolved the moment the battle station is destroyed. Han's arc is improved upon when he finally returns to save the day, because he

It's a pretty textbook climax to a story: the near-perfect 

• Han Solo never returns; Luke blows up the Death Star anyway.
• Han Solo returns, but Luke is killed; Han blows up the Death Star.
• Luke is too late; Tarkin blows up Yavin IV and destroys the Rebellion.
• Tarkin blows up Yavin IV and 

It could have ended a lot of different ways, is what I'm getting at. All of the narrative threads could have come together in a myriad of different outcomes. I contend that it's the multitude of resolutions 

Let's look at another one.

In 

• Sauron wants to destroy the West.
• Gollum wants to recover the Ring.
• Aragorn (and Gandalf, Gimli, Legolas et al) wants to buy time for Frodo.
• Frodo wants to destroy the Ring.

At the moment of the destruction of the One Ring, all four of these threads are hanging. Then, with one single action — Gollum seizing the ring and falling over the cliff into the Cracks of Doom — all of the narrative conflict is resolved. Sauron's power is diminished and depleted by the Ring's destruction; Gollum recovers the Ring 

This makes for a satisfying climax to the story, because all of the major threads are resolved; in the novelization, we have a few minor elements to wrap up, such as the Scouring of the Shire, but for the most part we are past the downhill slope, shooting past the tip of the ramp, and ready to land. Nevertheless, all of the threads come together in a neat little bow in a very short space of time.

Notice in that summary that Frodo did nothing. He had no hand in the resolution of his own plot arc. He 

This, I feel, is why Frodo feels like such an empty, unfulfilled character at the end. Tolkien allowed Frodo's very mission to be stolen from him, and correctly painted him afterward as unhappy and incomplete. Yes, Frodo was susceptible to the temptations of the One Ring, so in some sense he is like an addict who needs his fix; but in another very important way, Frodo (the inheritor of the Red Book of Westmarch, Bilbo's story of the Ring) knows he is a failed character in an otherwise successful story.

Diversity in Fantasy

There is a recent trend toward inclusion and diversity in literature. In theater and film*, this can mean anything from minority- or women-led projects such as 

I welcome the idea that Idris Elba could be cast as James Bond. I think it's a bit ridiculous that Black actors struggle to find roles in Hollywood that don't cast them as thugs, criminals, or gangsters from the hood, a movie targeted with laserlike focus on Black audiences who would presumably sympathize with that experience (at least in the mercenary minds of the executives who greenlight such films).

When you start to develop social groups, you also have to consider how the inclusion of some members influences the inclusion of others. Our small group of foodie friends contain one woman who is 60+ years old; when we have larger gatherings, she often brings others of her acquaintance of a similar age. Likewise, if the social group contains someone who is gay, he'll likely have a companion; or if there's a woman who is Jewish, she may have married a Jewish man. The important thing is to be realistic and broadly diverse, because that's the reality we share.

**This is controversial. Playwright 

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Elves and Orcs: reinventing old tropes

I've already said how much I dislike tropes — not specific tropes, just the recent fad of playing Tropespotting as a substitute for literary analysis. Today I'm going to talk about reinventing them.

Since Tolkien, orcs have been given short shrift. In most depictions, orcs are cruel, barbarous, and irredeemably evil — a cannon-fodder race that the heroes can thoughtlessly slaughter in order to appear Manly and/or Powerful. Orcs are basically stuffed target dummies that the brave knights can mow down without having to dwell on the uncomfortable realization that they're mass murderers who kill dozens of sentient beings before breakfast. After all, it is common propaganda in warfare to be told to think of one's enemies as subhuman animals, unworthy of moral consideration, bereft of human rights, immune to all forms of humane treatment. Orcs are merely a personification of wartime propaganda, the enemy every reader can hate.

Tolkien did a great deal of work behind the scenes, as it were, building a society for his elves. After all, somebody had to write those moon-runes and craft the starlight-reflecting riddle on the Gate of Moria and build Rivendell and design all those boats at the Grey Havens and forge the Three Rings of Elvenkind and and write all the silly songs that they sing in the forest. You don't get those things from a race consisting of archer-warriors.

This explains why Gerene has such insecurities. The pressure to conform in elf culture, the burden of parental expectations, is incredibly high. Her mother decided what she would be, before Gerene was even born.

Oswell: character profile in Seer of the Sands

Fantasy stories love their wizards: Belgarath, Allanon, Dallben, Dumbledore. You might expand your list to include Prospero, Morgan LeFay, Merlin, and even Yoda. They seem to know everything and do anything that the plot demands of them, including die and come back to life (I got my eye on you, Gandalf).

There's a place for wizards like that, but it seems to me that this characterization is just a little bit ... lazy. Formulaic. Pre-packaged. In some ways unsatisfying. The trouble is that the wizard is

I wanted to do it differently. I wanted to have the wizard who

To begin with, I had to come up with a form of magic that at least I understood (even if I didn't plan to share the rationale immediately). In my world, magic works roughly like this:

1. Wizardry is unique to the caster; there are no magic words, no mystical gestures, and no special powders or arcane runes that work for every magic-user. Each wizard must design his or her own.
2. Wizards have an easier time focusing their magic when they enchant physical objects, usually some solid, finely decorated item with engraved pictures or filigreed letters that explain what the object does. Spontaneous magic, such as casting a 3rd-level D&D
3. Wizards tend to specialize in a limited number of areas, often just one. Once a wizard becomes known for a certain type of magic, it's very difficult to branch out into other fields. One wizard might specialize in water, another in weather, another in emotion or illusion or healing, and so on.
4. Magic takes effort, usually slightly more effort than doing the thing by hand.
5. Confidence is everything. When a wizard's spell fails him, it can fail so catastrophically that he can never cast spells ever again.

Now that you know that much about the magic in my world — it isn't necessary to know the

Oswell is a young and inexperienced wizard who breaks many of the rules above. He has plenty of raw power and he

These failures — catastrophes, really — have made Oswell who he is today. If he were the heroic type of wizard, he might have gracefully learned from his mistakes and discovered the true depths of his power and control. If he had been the villainous type of wizard, he might have cackled in glee at the pain and suffering of others, or shrugged off the fatalities caused by his own errors as research, or as necessary steps on the path to enlightenment.

Oswell isn't either of these types. He's just an ordinary person who thinks highly of himself, because he can do magic and others can't. When his magic leads him into catastrophe, he simply lies about it and runs away. Far away. And changes his name.

In other words, he conceals his many failures and moves on. He reinvents himself.

This happens to Oswell a lot, too. He's created — and fled from — a number of different aliases over his young life. He's been a caravan guard named Fargas Horsewrinkle, a traveling fortune-teller named Erasmus Ravenhound, and a hedge wizard named Lukanis the Adequate; he's been a tinker, a graverobber, and a highwayman; and when the story begins, he's calling himself Shenan Butterfrock ... dragon expert.

He's just the thing Kasmina needs in order to defeat the dragon Brickwing. At least, he'll say that to anybody who will listen.

Making a System of Magic

Most fantasy worlds have some kind of magic. The Southlands, the land of 

1. An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportionate to how well the reader understands said magic.
2. The limitations of a magic system are more interesting than its powers. What the magic 
3. Expand on what you have already before adding something new.

These rules are all well and good, for a certain kind of storytelling. However, I must take issue with them.

First, I don't think a system such as this is appropriate for all stories. It really depends upon the 

What about the other readers? What happened to magic that feels ... well, 

The second problem I have with the codification of rules is that we already 

In my opinion, there simply isn't any need to invent another set of rules which are functionally identical to the setup-payoff exchange. It's redundant. Restated as rules of dramatic tension, Sanderson's laws of magic would look like this:

1. To do a dramatic reveal and solve conflicts with X, first set up possibility X.
2. To preserve dramatic tension in the rest of your novel, set up the things that can't be solved with X.
3. Don't set up new things if you don't need them.

Rules 1 and 3 are essentially restatement of Chekhov's Gun. Rule 2 is a reminder that introducing unfamiliar elements to the reader requires a little bit of work to establish dramatic tension. Taken together, they're no different than the rules of standard drama.

Don't get me wrong: I don't think Sanderson's rules are 

I want a system of magic that can begin as a wondrous mystery, but then which can evolve into a known quantity, and then into an existential threat once its secrets are known. You can't get that if you're tied to the idea that everything must be understood by the reader throughout.

Gerene: character profile in The Seer of the Sands

Kasmina studies at the monastery of Theothol under the tutelage of monks and scholars that belong to The Order of Heaven's Vault. The Order's purpose is theological academia; they strive to piece together a true picture of the gods by unraveling all of the competing legends that evolved over the centuries. Kasmina has always been told she was a demigoddess, but she never knew her father; she isn't sure if he was truly a god, or what kind of god he might have been. Was he Redhammer, adept of the forge, as worshiped in the Westhold? Could he have been Lukan the Sage, angel of sorcery and the unseen from the Eastern Reach? Had her father been Avloth, the elven god of earthquakes? Or was he some undiscovered god of the ancient Arkenians, lost to modern eyes when that empire fell?