By TellTale
March 6th, 2010
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Congratulations to Armenia who won Shiloh’s book!
by Shiloh Walker
So what is a writer to do when the bad guy doesn’t want to be the bad guy? That’s the dilemma I had to face when I was writing the first of the Rafferty brother books, FRAGILE.
You see, there was only supposed to be the one book. Luke’s book. Quinn wasn’t going to get a book, because in Luke’s book, Quinn was supposed to be the bad guy. You know… the bad guy, the guy who doesn’t get the girl, the happy ever after. He suffers, we smile. All is good.
My problem started about a third of the way through the book…Luke’s book, yes. Quinn? He was suffering, all right. This shouldn’t have been a problem. It was going as planned—he was the bad guy. He wasn’t going to be the happy-go-lucky sort.
But I was kind of suffering, too. Because he also wasn’t the bastard I needed him to be to make him the bad guy. Plus, his twin… the hero of the book, Luke, he wasn’t too keen on how I was painting his brother as the bad guy. And the more I tried to make Quinn the bad guy, the harder it was to write the story.
Fine, I tell them. Have it your way, but the story isn’t going to work out—there isn’t anybody else who can be the bad guy, and we need a bad guy. It’s a suspense, remember?
Yeah, yeah. Well, it turns out… I didn’t know what I was talking about.
Quinn couldn’t have been the bad guy, because it turns out he had this core of strength I wasn’t prepared for. Yeah, so he was a little bit crazy there for a while, but a lot of us dance on that thin edge every now and then. He brushed a little closer than some of us, but then he had a darker time than many people. He pulled himself back, got himself together, and both Quinn and Luke turned out to be right. Quinn wasn’t bad guy material.
But that didn’t mean I was planning on giving him a book.
I wasn’t. I just…wasn’t. Even though I was told people would ask for his book. And uh… yes, that did happen. It wasn’t anything I had planned.
And then I had to start making the plans, because the questions about Quinn started coming almost as soon as I finished Quinn’s book.
I can do this, I figure. I mean, I figured out how to undo the mess I’d made out of the first book, right? And I conveniently forgot the headaches I had over that book before I finally stopped fighting them, before I stopped fighting the story.
So here I am, mapping out this plan for Quinn’s story. He’s what I’d call a tarnished knight and what he needs more than anything else is somebody he can save…makes sense. He’s somewhat damaged already because the one woman he’d actually had feelings for died and he wasn’t able to save her—if I put somebody in his life for him to save, maybe that can get him on the road to healing. Right?
Makes sense.
So I create this heroine. She’ got a quiet inner strength, but she’s not a fighter. She’s his complete opposite. She’s soft, she’s gentle…and now that I think about it? He would have terrified her. Anyway. I had this perfect plan. And a third of the way through the story?
It died on me. Can’t figure out the problem. Banging my head. Then I take a good hard look at the heroine and have one of my soon to be famous HEAD —> DESK moments. She is the problem. It’s not that she’s a bad heroine. She’s actually a pretty good one—she’s got room to grow, room to become a strong heroine. I may yet use her in a book.
But she was all wrong for Quinn and because I was trying to make her work? The book was stalling.
So there I am, deleting half of what I had written—and at this point, some work had already gone into the blurb…and the fact that I had gone and dumped most of the story? Well, the blurb no longer worked. They had to start from scratch… kind of like I was doing. And the story was due in…oh, three months, I think?
Oddly enough, once I dumped the story and started working on this new one? It started moving. I don’t even remember exactly where the idea for this new heroine came from. She was just sort of… there.
She was stronger—she had some weaknesses, some vulnerabilities, but she was also a fighter. She might find herself hip-deep in trouble, but she’d also be perfectly capable of getting herself out.
And more—she wouldn’t run from Quinn. He has a lot of darkness inside him and some of that is going to haunt him for a while. What he needed was somebody who wouldn’t just understand that darkness—but somebody who could walk with him through the darkness. She can do that. The heroine I’d originally given him? No. No way. She might try, but that kind of darkness…she isn’t ready to face that kind of darkness.
This story ended up taking on a lot of twists, a lot of turns, but once I’d figured out who needed to be in the story—and who didn’t—it was amazingly easy to get it written, and I swear, I can almost see the brothers smirking at me, too. Laughing at me. After all, I had to nerve to try to control the story in both books.
Quinn’s story is Broken—it’s one of the few stories I didn’t have to beat my head against the wall while trying to think up a title. He’s broken in the beginning of the story, damaged in so many ways. His heroine Sara has damage of her own and getting these two souls together took some doing. But it was worth it. If you’d like to read an excerpt, you can find one here. It’s now available in stores.
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Leave a comment by Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 6:00 a.m. CST to win a copy of Broken. Book will be shipped with Amazon Prime to United States addresses only.
