#ThrowbackThursday: What Might Have Been

 

When Cass checked, she saw Tenny gazing at him with tender fondness, and her chest warmed with the knowledge that things had turned out just as they were always meant to. 

Writing is just as much about knowing what not to say as it is knowing what to say. If I've done my job well, and the characters are distinct and "real" feeling, then logical choices present themselves with little fanfare. In the thick of writing a novel, dialogue feels natural; I know exactly what a character wouldn't say in a given situation. 

But before the writing starts, there's always options. Choices to be made about the course of a character's future. What I publish is always what felt right to me; what clicked seamlessly into place and made the most sense. But in the early stages, I often toy with other possibilities. 

I know I've mentioned before that when I wrote Prodigal Son, I originally flirted with the idea of Cass ending up with Reese. But of course, once I introduced Tenny, that plan changed. Toly saved her from a kidnapping in The Wild Charge, and though I never seriously considered pairing them up, there was a spark of possibility there - enough of one that I knew it wouldn't feel out of left field if, a few years later, the two of them wound up together. 

Cass kept skirting the edges of my imagination while I worked on Long Way Down and Nothing More. Her journey, her situation, was more like Ava's than any other leading lady's I'd worked with since Fearless, and I wanted to give her a chance to take the spotlight. But who should I pair her with?

That's the wrong question. It's not so much picking and choosing romances, as letting the inevitable unfold. All my early ideas felt forced, so I knew they weren't good. For a long while, throughout all of Nothing More, in fact, I contemplated sending Cass to Knoxville. The conflict of Beware of Dog was always going to happen, but in early iterations of the novel, it drove her out of state, to the safety of her brothers in Tennessee. There, she might have a fling with Evan. Or Lewis, the young farmer Aidan takes under his wing in Lord Have Mercy. I even considered coming up with a new character to serve as her love interest. For every novel, there's a flipside, a "what might have been." What if Tango and Ian had wound up together back in Loverboy? We'd be looking at a very different Dartmoor landscape right now. In the same vein, I knew that there was certainly a story there for Cass in Tennessee, and maybe even love. But no story takes place in a vacuum. Once you make those creative decisions, you have to stick with them, so you'd be better be sure of them. 

I didn't feel sure of anything regarding Cass until I considered Shep as her partner, and then everything fell into place. 

Their banter is some of my favorite in the whole series, and I'm truly in love with Shep's very in-character love confession. I had no idea when he first strode into Raven's office and introduced himself with sleazeball flirtation that he'd be perfect for Raven's little sister, but that's how it played out. That's how it works.

Even ten years on, I have those waffling moments where I debate the direction of the series, and its characters; but those ten years have taught me to wait patiently, and, eventually, the right course will make itself known. That's also one of the fun parts: the thrill of discovery within your own universe.