Hi crew.
Last year I wrote about my inspiration on the first book in The Leader Files series DELTA and how it came to me. It was a fragment of a story plot around the protagonist character. Exploring his experiences of a variation of a quazi dream-sleepwalking series of events that plagued him. I said it was a fragment of a story plot and indicated that what I was experiencing was the Snowflake Method of storytelling. A central idea that you then build on in all directions until you have a perfectly formed but unique whole.
GAMMA was different, very different. As I had already completed DELTA and was in the long process of editing, the story kept churning inside my imagination. The characters, the possibilities, the types of crisis to challenge the characters and story kept me awake at night. I knew before long that this stand-alone novel was much more than that. Boom, GAMMA started pouring out. Not Snowflake like this time. Instead, I built the puzzle of this book by focusing on the characters more. I rejuggled who the main characters are and why they are important to the story. So, the style I adopted for GAMMA was a Character-driven writing focus. This quickly gave me some rich characters of some 180,000 words.
GAMMA then became a bigger project than I initially expected. I expanded the series to five and very soon, seven. This was not an alarming development, instead it had a calming effect. I knew that all the possibilities and directions did not have to be squeezed into only an additional 100,000 words.
I now explored a Plot-driven writing focus, and boom. The Phil Leader world exploded. If you can imagine the world DELTA alludes to [going beyond the three-dimensional], then you will understand the excitement of opportunities this elicited. Within this development, I also tried hard to understand the world that I had built and wanted to understand the thought processes of people in power, if such a person like Phil Leader did exist. This produced many crisis and decision points for the characters. As I had already worked out compelling character profiles and arcs, I just had to slice and dice them, thread their weave into the plot.
Is my approach traditional? I have absolutely no idea. I just followed The Leader Files story as it poured out of my imagination. I still have some characters and plot scenes that are not part of the seven manuscripts.
I use seven loosely for now…