The Empty White Room

When I was originally starting to write the story of young Rene XIV and the usurper Sebastien, I was moving right along with the brief prolog and started the first few paragraphs of the first chapter. Due to other responsibilities, I had to set it to the side for a while. When I came back to it the next day, I couldn't seem to get it going again. Since I had a strong image for the second chapter, I decided to jump ahead and write that one, then come back and tackle getting the first chapter moving.

So, after perhaps a month, some work on another novel later in the sequence, and other life events intervening, I came back and reread the abortive beginning of the first chapter. Immediately I realized what was wrong with it -- it might as well be happening in an empty white room.

We have the boy king and Cardinal Chartremont, but there's absolutely no sense of setting. There's none of the exotic environment of the Floating Palace, the court, any of the stuff that's going on. It's as if the interaction between them takes place in a vacuum.

So I have to try to give the scene a sense of place, which means backing up long enough to capture the image of the room in which they're standing, of the temperament of the people assembled there, all the things I need. And as I do that, I finally get another bit that's been eluding me -- a better sense of why the two men are even meeting in the first place, and what it all means.

But it's an easy trap to fall into -- to want to jump straight into action, and in the process fail to ground that action in any sort of surroundings, to the point that it might as well be taking place in an empty white room.