In The Flow of Time – May 14, 2025
A funny thing happened at writers’ critique. I’m cranking away on the plot for Part 2 of this story about Marie Laveaux. The process has its ups and downs, and in fact to a degree I’m struggling. It is what it is, creation is not painless. Meanwhile…
Part 1 has a brilliant antagonist, a white racist plantation owner named René. I have a problem. I’ve known this since starting on Part 2, but it just sits awaiting the attention it deserves. Weeks ago I made the note… “NARRATIVE PROBLEM: what do we do with René? He is an intense and excellent antagonist.” The problem is that he just goes away, there’s no resolution. Don’t Walk Away René.
Last night my writer friends reviewed a chapter from early in Part 1. In chat, and just being silly, some offered suggestions for his fate. “René is such a stinker: can you arrange to have him scalded to death in a boiler explosion? On a steamboat…”
My first thought was… if my fellow authors are that deeply involved in his fate, I’ve done my job well. René is a great “love to hate him” character. He’s not a stereotype. He’s real, complex, and nasty. My second thought was… WTF do I do with him? They have no idea what happens downstream. I do, and he’s a dangling participle.
I was brainstorming with Jessi last night on this problem. Either he has to be in Part 2, or I need to do something to him in Part 1. René is a historical character. So I know where he lived, birth and death, whom he married, etc. With minor exceptions I try to keep the story historically accurate on such things. He dies in 1846, half way through Part II. The antagonist shouldn’t disappear halfway through the story.
What I had in mind for Part 2 was a different antagonist, an American named Smith. He’s modeled after a real Mr. Smith who was a conniving con man in New Orleans. I could dump Smith, break my rule, have René live to the end of the tale? Nah, Smith is gonna be brilliant. He is a sociopathic narcissist.
Part 1 has a great story arc with René’s pursuit of a free woman who was once slave in his family: Robinette. There’s pirates and smuggling, intrigue, legal battles, escape, capture, escape… It is good, if I say so myself. But once the good guys finagle Robinette’s final escape to Mexico, nothing happens. That’s not realistic. The characters start telling me the story.
René is obsessed, and he would be livid at being foiled. This isn’t in the story. He would absolutely come after the people who enabled the escape. He can’t reach Robinette, but he can reach Marie and her conspirators. And he would. That’s the kind of bastard he is. René has to come after Marie – I don’t know how but he must. There needs to be one more round of attack and defend, bad guy after good guy, and ramped up because this time he goes after the protagonist herself. She must outsmart him.
I have no idea what the circumstances will be, or how she’ll do that. Time to plot. But in the end, when she defeats René, perhaps I’ll blow him up in a steamboat boiler explosion. 🙂 He will be maimed to live the rest of his days, in the words of The Princess Bride, not to the death, but “to the pain.” So he can die in 1846 like he did for real.
I don’t need to change the ending of Part 1, it’s already solid and good and hopeful and a wonderful segue into Part 2. Part 1 may become a book in and of itself, the story of a young woman of color coming of age in ante-bellum New Orleans. “Shackled by the chains of hate, she will not be crushed.”
An offhand joke during critique is gonna make me rewrite the back third of the novel.
(The art: This is how I see Marie Laveaux, except she has blue eyes. This is a mural on a doorway on Rue Calvaire in Paris. I was instantly sure. The artist is Valérian Lenud, aka Valé. https://valerianlenud.com/about/ )
