On Adapting a Minor Character into a Major One
When I first met the Duchess Tremontaine, she was visiting a friend on the Hill, that elegant and exclusive portion of the city where the nobility lives, with its broad streets and gorgeous town-houses whose back gardens slope down to the river — as far away as possible from the ancient Riverside quarter, though it is not that long a walk if you cut through the Middle City. Diane was alone with Lady Mary Halliday (Lord Basil’s second and much nicer wife), “clothed in billowing yards of soft, exquisite lace, giving them the look of two goddesses rising from the foam.” And they were talking politics. Lots and lots of politics.
It was Chapter 2 of my first novel, Swordspoint. The Duchess showed up again in Chapter 7, hosting a barge party to watch fireworks over the river in the middle of the winter, wrapped in furs. From the riverbank, the “less fortunate” admired her equipage: “Flames and black smoke spun back from the torches set in its prow, surrounding it with danger and glory . . . .[but] the barge managed to give the illusion of a giant swan on the river.”
It goes on from there. Diane de Tremontaine is mysterious to everyone, attractive to many, frightening to some. There was a husband, once, it seems, and for a woman who claims no interest in politics, she seems to know an awful lot. . . .
When we were brainstorming a plot for Serial Box, I threw out the thought that Tremontaine could be about Diane’s rise to power — set, say, ten years before the novel, which would appeal to fans but leave things open both for new readers and for the team of writers joining me in Riverside for the first time.
“Could you make it fifteen years?” our publisher Julian asked. “Just in case we want to draw things out some?”
So, a few days later, there I sat, staring at Tremontaine: Episode 1’s empty, blank page 1 in the face. I put Diane high up in a mansion, so she (and the reader) could see the whole city spread out before her — and before I knew it, she was talking with her husband….and suddenly all these matters I knew intimately from my other novels came springing up, only this time they were from her point of view, and Much, as they say, Was Explained.[1]
It was weird. I knew her from other characters’ view of her, but never from her own. But as I wrote page after page, her mysterious story was all so obvious, now!
The other Tremontaine writers, who have read Swordspoint and its two sequels, each had very different feelings about the mysterious, complex Diane.[2]
And that turned out to be the key. For Tremontaine, the protean Diane could be a different person to each of our own characters, with a mystery at her heart: perfect, when you’re working with multiple writers.
What is she hiding?
Oh, lots of things. You’ll see.
[1] I have also taken pains in the opening pages of Episode 1 to make clear that the main characters of Swordspoint are not yet old enough to appear in Tremontaine: that way, new readers have nothing to worry about, nothing to catch up on; and people who might be looking for them can just calm down.
[2] The hardest part was getting everybody to pronounce her name “dee-AHHN.” No, I can’t tell you why it’s essentially French; it’s just always been that way for me. I made up the name Tremontaine (inspired by the equally made-up SCA name of a brilliant, charismatic, long-vanished duke), and again I can no more tell you why it’s “the Duchess Tremontaine” but “the Duke of Karleigh” any more than I can really explain why my City will never have a name (well, of course, it has one, but nobody uses it: just like New York: “Do you live in the city? I grew up on Long Island, but we used to go to the city for theater…”).
Originally published at blog.serialbox.com on October 30, 2015.
