But
when it came down to it, I couldn't get the story to work. I got to about
20,000 words – and realised I was horribly bored.
First
drafts are invariably awful, but they're not meant to be boring. I suspect the
problem was something to do with my protagonist. I was too focused on whether
readers would like her or not, and so I smoothed off all her edges until she
became a bland pseudo-heroine.
When I
realised what was happening, I tried to rescue the story but it was too late.
I'd lost interest, and couldn't get it back.
But
while I was agonising over all the time I'd wasted, and wondering what to do
about it, I stumbled across a magazine article about poisons. I find poisons
intrinsically interesting, but the best part of the article was the bit about
food tasters – mainly because I didn't realise they still existed. I didn't
know that the President of the United States often has a food taster,
especially when he travels abroad.
And I
had no idea that when George W Bush visited Thailand in 2003, his food tasters
were a small team of white mice.
How
could any writer walk past something like that?
The
idea of these white mice was like a magnet, gathering other ideas around it.
Because where you have food tasters, you immediately have the possibility of an
assassin. And where you have an assassin, you have greed and ambition, and
people who can best be described as rogues.
At that
point, I re-read the boring manuscript. And tucked away in a corner, where I'd
written them almost by accident, I found three characters who weren't at all
boring. They were Duckling, a girl who trusts no one, her devious grandfather
Lord Rump, and Pummel, a boy who trusts everyone. They were spiky and imperfect
and the very opposite of bland, so I grabbed them with both hands and started
to build a new story around them.
To my
relief, this one worked. So The Lost Brothers turned into The Rogues, and I
ended up in a completely different place from where I started. I still really
like the idea of the seventh son turning out to be a daughter, and maybe I'll
go back to it one day. But in the meantime, I'm enjoying this story too much to
regret it.
Lian Tanner is a children's author and playwright.
She has worked as a teacher in Australia and Papua New Guinea, a
tourist bus driver, a freelance journalist, a juggler, a community arts
worker, an editor and a professional actor. It took her a while to
realise that all of these jobs were really just preparation for being a
writer. Nowadays she lives by the beach in southern Tasmania, with a
small tabby cat and lots of friendly neighbourhood dogs. She has not yet
mastered the art of Concealment by the Imitation of Nothingness, but
she is quite good at Camouflage. Her middle grade novels include The Keepers Trilogy and The Hidden Series. You can visit her here: www.liantanner.com.au
We are tingling with excitement over her new series and can't wait to share our thoughts on The Rogues with you soon.
