Just like everything else involved in writing different authors have different ways of planning the plot of their stories. Mine generally take shape in the first draft phase. There is very little that is solid about this, however. I have found that unless you are writing about something that has already occurred, as in historical fiction, then plot development can be very fluid. In respect of my more speculative books such as Eugenica, Mesozoic, and The Queen of the Mountain Kingdom, I really did not have much conception of the respective plots beyond a rough idea of a beginning and an end. In every case these ideas changed along the way.

With my seventh novel I kind of had an idea of the ending. I think that I know when, where, and how it reaches its conclusion. The interesting part is getting there. One of the things that I had learnt from my previous attempts to begin this story was that it had to start in a very immediate fashion. Now this is fine for the book itself. In fact, now that I have written the opening section in the second draft format, I really like the excitement, impetus, and energy that it contains. However, the start of the book is not the start of the story. If anything, the start of the book is pretty close to the end of the story!

The reader will probably never appreciate this fact from the novel itself. I have no intention to write long winded sections of dialogue. The pace of the book is going to be fast. It is a thriller. There is going to be plenty of action. It is also going to contain some philosophical speculation. I am going to propose some ideas about the world we live in, the kind of world we might aspire to live in, and why we always seem to fall short of our aspirations. I have a good idea of the main themes of the book, but I need to work on how to develop them. Pace, theme, tension, action, dialogue, and character all need to be woven together to make an enjoyable and credible story. This where the plot comes in.

In the beginning there is the word, as written in the first draft. I have a main character that I have called the Philosopher. He is the start and impetus of the story although within the book he will largely be in the background. The Philosopher meets a man I have called the Monk. They discover that they share a similar dream, to create a version of human civilisation that is free from all the ills that beset even the best examples of the early 20^th century. I do not believe that such people are unique except that these two act upon their shared aspiration. The Monk goes out into the world to discover a suitable location, one that is far from any other human settlement, difficult to reach and difficult to discover. The Philosopher also goes out into the world, but his mission is to discover the people who would be best suited to build and populate such a community.

By the time the book opens the Monk is dead, but he has been successful. The Philosopher accompanied his friend back to Mongolia so that he could die in his homeland. From there he made his way back to England, passing through Soviet Russia, and inadvertently attracting the attention of the British intelligence community who had an obsession with the soviets at the time. The Philosopher fails to appreciate the consequences of his actions, which is what leads to the spectacular opening of the book.

Writing this down as a short series of descriptions of events I was reminded of an idea I had had. It was inspired by James Bond movies and pulp fiction stories, the adventures of Doc Savage for instance, and involved the storming of a villain’s mountain lair. I thought that it would be fun to include such an event, a homage to influences from my youth, if I could write it in such a way as to make it credible and relevant to the story. And then came Mephistopheles! I do not mean the demon himself, well, only figuratively, I mean a new character. It was a new theme, one of atonement. I am still surprised how quickly this character developed in my imagination. I also liked the idea of how he could subvert the reader’s expectation. Yes, he is a villain in a glorious comic-book style, complete with horns, a fortress, and a private army, but he is also a lie. In a flash of inspiration, I realised that Mephistopheles could provide both reason and impetus for the plot to develop in the way that I wanted it to. To illustrate this let me tell you how the plot stood at this point:

• Two men found an alternative community hidden from the rest of the world
• Although trying to be circumspect they inevitably attract the interest of various world governments who are both curious and unsettled by their project.
• A group of government agents, spies and assassins, pursue the Philosopher.
• A man seeking atonement attempts to deflect and/or distract those same governments and their agents by appearing to offer a more credible and urgent threat to world peace in the 1930’s.
• A blank to be filled!
• The secret community is discovered, and its fate has to be decided

That is the formative section of the story. This is what I will be writing about in the second draft. The ‘blank to be filled’ section is those parts of the plot that I need to develop. I will do this in two ways, first; by writing the second draft and developing the ideas it gives rise to, and second; by entering ideas into the workbook on the plot page to see how I can bring various events into play to advance the story. Personally, I do not feel the need to have everything worked out before I start the writing process. I much prefer to let inspiration guide me. I already have a good idea of what happens after Mephistopheles and how to keep building the tension but that is for another blog post.