Wisdom's Kiss (82 page)

Roger and Hrothgar
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Dizzy
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Wilhelmina and Edwig
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Ben and Florian
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Modesty and Patience
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Escoffier
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Handsome
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Rüdiger
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Providence
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Pierre Stein
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Author Commentary on Trudy, or Fortitude of Bacio ... her mother Mina ... Count Rudolph of Piccolo ... Faith ... Humor
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In the summer of 2009 I began outlining a story involving a girl with imperfect clairvoyance, the elderly queen of Montagne, and (somehow) a hot-air balloon.

The first flash of inspiration—well, one of the first flashes—was a dream I'd had (always it is with me and the dreams), a fragment involving a girl looking down a road and sensing or "
seeing
" the approach of danger. To be honest, this fragment was set at night, on a flat (not mountain) road, surrounded by forest, and the approaching danger involved horsemen galloping with the whole billowing black cape thing that horsemen in those sorts of situations always seem to do. Obviously, that didn't make it into the final draft of
Wisdom's Kiss
because it's rare that great ideas are also good ideas. So instead the approaching menace turns out to be a vomit-splattered carriage, and we're all the better for it.
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I also knew from a very, very early point that this female character would have red hair. When I was growing up in suburban Connecticut, there was a girl—JMcD, I'll call her—who had hair like you would not believe. Just last year my sister said to me wistfully, apropos of nothing, "Do you remember JMcD's hair?" Remember? I was writing a book about it! (It didn't help that I myself as a kid had hair with the texture and appeal of wet kelp.) JMcD's hair wasn't just red; it was red like the embers of a dying fire, and wavy and curly and long. Imagine Emma Stone, but with hair to her waist. In ringlets.

I need a minute to compose myself.

Red hair made sense for other reasons. It gave the character a clear physical identifier, which is always useful. That's a writing tip, by the way: don't spell out the character's lip shape and jaw line and pant size and weight; all we need is something simple but visual: "kind of scrawny" will suffice. In fact, "kind of scrawny" is perfect. The rest we'll fill in as we each see fit. In my novel
Dairy Queen
I describe the heroine as tall. For some readers that means six foot one, but for others it's five foot six, and saying six foot one would leave those readers totally freaked. Try not to freak your readers out. In
Wisdom's Kiss,
Ben is stout, Tips has long eyelashes, Wilhelmina looks down her nose, Felis twirls his goatee, Dizzy is scrawny (in her own eyes) but lithe (in others'), and Trudy has amazing red hair. Given that I wanted to include a hot-air balloon, I also appreciated that red hair is highly visible from a distance, which might serve well in a rescue situation ... and it did!