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| There is no Planet B |
Do you think it easy to lay a foundation for a novel? Think again! Every novel needs a storyline, but it also needs a theme – a basic, bedrock, underlying foundation.
We struggled for a while because we had two themes, but really needed one foundation for Obelisk Seven.
Our two themes were the obelisks, which came first when we decided to write our thriller, and global warming, our controversial topic (click here for more on this choice).
But try as we might we could not link these two themes into one unified whole.
So we spent many days doing some brainstorming.
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| Tardigrade or Water Bear |
And then one day we stumbled across an article about designer microbes, and we had our third theme, which linked the first two: an engineered microbe that could create mayhem in the little world we had designed, and enable us to bring the three themes together in the climax.
And, naturally, with three themes, we found that we could not work with only two lead characters – we ended up with one for each theme: Nick for the global warming challenge; Gliffy for the singing obelisk quest; and Kate for the search for the new microbe that was eating carbon in oil and coal deposits.
Three themes, three characters, and one story.
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