Last week I wrote about choosing names for my characters. What happened in naming
the characters surprised and delighted me. As I named them, they became real, like writing in invisible ink and then holding the paper over a candle. Giving names, I entered the characters’ lives in a way I hadn’t when I was simply outlining a plot and calling them “son of landlord” or “daughter of lace maker.”

Having chosen the characters’ names for meaning and cultural import, they took on flesh: I could see their eyes, the shape of their heads, their hands and hair. Their names blossomed with history, and each character began to fit his/her name in a natural way. With names, they became part of an extended family, of a group of friends, and they began to move in the society I created in the first two books of the series.

The naming done, I’m now working on actual scenes for the book. Sometime ago, I
wrote a film script by writing each scene on a 5 X 7 cards. I decided to try the same process for this new mystery.

This approach doesn’t work as smoothly as it does with a film, because a book grows a
different way. Still, I persist with the 5 X 7 card idea because I am discovering that this process breaks open the plot in a way the outline can’t. Writing scenes illuminates strengths and weaknesses in the storyline, and it ignites new ideas, new twists to the plot, relationships that I hadn’t considered.

Writing scenes, the new characters and the characters from the first two books in the
series move among each other, and this forces me to ask questions. How do these people know each other? Are they friends? Acquaintances? Antipathetic toward one another? Co-workers? How long have they known each other?

Writing scenes also compels me to ask questions about plot: Can Arrammundu be in the piazza bar talking with a friend at this time? Or must he be on the trails that run through the forest below town? How did Leah know that Diego was at home that afternoon? Angelica is talking to her son, can she, in this intensely emotional scene, avoid the truth of what happened, and still answer his questions?

As I try to answer these questions for myself, some of my scene cards become unwieldy. This is a signal to me that I need to expand, that I’m actually writing a whole chapter or two, or more…, not just a single scene. Or, if I find problems with the storyline, perhaps I need to go back to earlier cards to check, or think forward to what’s coming.

Scenes make me see people interacting: talking together, exchanging information,
gossiping….. Writing scenes I can observe these characters, get to know their inner thoughts and emotions; I can see how they behave.

Writing scenes, I am also led to another step in writing the novel: strong sense of place,
weather, time of day. Now that the characters are interacting, I need to give the reader the piazza itself, the bar, the forest trails, the heavy rains of spring, the granary, the smell of cattle, the morning light over a field of winter wheat, the musty smell of Etruscan tombs … I need to give them rural Tuscany.