As I work on my latest novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine, I find myself\u00a0thinking about the tough chapters. The chapters that neither I nor my character want to write.<\/p>\n
Now some will say every chapter in a novel is a tough chapter, and that is true. Sometimes the blank page stares back at us, and simply wants to stay blank. But I am talking about something altogether different.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, there is a higher level of resistance, both from me and from my characters, about what happens next.\u00a0 Sometimes, someone\u00a0my character\u00a0loves\u00a0dies.\u00a0With\u00a0Alais in THE QUEEN’S PAWN,\u00a0 in the first chapter, she is sent away from her beloved father, never to see him again. These chapters are emotionally harrowing, both for me and for the character.\u00a0 But these chapters get written, and re-written, and they make the book better.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Eleanor and I have been working not just with a\u00a0tough chapter, but with entire tough sections. We are getting the writing done, of course. She is\u00a0Eleanor of Aquitaine, after all, so\u00a0ultimately nothing stops her from doing what needs to be done. And\u00a0I am stubborn and as cussed as a mule, so I do not abandon\u00a0the work\u00a0either. We slog along together,\u00a0Eleanor telling me her\u00a0story, and me writing it down.\u00a0 We constantly find the love in these chapters, so that the reader will be drawn in. But Eleanor had a bad first marriage, and most of TO BE QUEEN deals with that marriage.<\/p>\n
As we work, pushing on in spite of the difficulty, I find that Eleanor did love Louis once. Or at least, she had affection for him. And these years are not just the years of a bad marriage, they are the years in which she built her spy network, when she went on Crusade, when she became a mother for the first time, and learned both the joys and the price of power.<\/p>\n
So\u00a0I move through the tough parts, and get them down on paper, writing and re-writing as\u00a0I go. It turns out that underneath the tough part lies gold .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I work on my latest novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine, I find myself\u00a0thinking about the tough chapters. The chapters that neither I nor my character want to write. Now some will say every chapter in a novel is a tough chapter, and that is true. Sometimes the blank page stares back at us, and …<\/p>\n