The Black Dagger Brotherhood_ An Insider's Guide - J. R. Ward [83]
V? Vishous is and has always been—and excuse me for being blunt—a prick. A self-contained, defensive prick who doesn’t like me.
Putting his story on the page was a nightmare. Every single word was a struggle, particularly when it came to his first draft—most of the time I felt as if I were having to pry the sentences from bedrock using a kiddie hammer and a salad fork.
See, for me, drafting is really a two-part enterprise. The pictures that I have in my head guide the story, but I also need to hear and smell and sense what’s going on while I’m doing the writing. What this usually means is that I step into the shitkickers of the Brothers or the stillies of their shellans and go through the scenes as if I were living the events through whoever’s POV I’m in. To do this, I play the scenes backward and forward, like you would a DVD, and just record, record, record on the page until I feel as though I’ve captured as much as I can.
Vishous gave me next to nothing to work with, because I couldn’t get behind his eyes at all. The scenes that were in POVs other than his were fine, but his? Nothing doing. I could watch, but only from afar—and as a lot of the book is from his perspective, I felt like banging my head against the keyboard.
Look . . . yes, this is fiction. Yes, it’s all in my mind. Except, believe it or not, if I can’t get into a POV deeply, I feel like I’m making stuff up—and that isn’t a happy place. Honestly, I’m not that bright—I’m not going to get it right if I just guess. I have to be inside a person to do things right, and having the V-door slammed in my face was the root of most of my misery.
Things did break eventually, though. More on that in a little bit.
The second reason Lover Unbound was a hard book to write was that there was content in it that made me nervous, because I wasn’t sure whether the market would bear it. Two things in particular worried me: Bisexuality and BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadomasochism) are topics that not everyone is comfortable with even in terms of subplots, much less when they involve the hero of a book. But that wasn’t the full extent of it. In addition, V had been partially castrated and had forcibly taken a male after he’d won his first fight in the war camp.
The thing was, V’s complex sexual nature colored a lot of his life—including his relationships with Butch and Jane. In order to show him properly, I felt like I had to present all sides of him.
In the first draft of Lover Unbound, I played things so conservatively that the book was flat. I went very light on the bondage scene with him and Jane right before he lets her go, and I didn’t put anything about him and Butch in at all.
In the process, I totally violated my own rule number two (Write Out Loud) . And, big surprise, the result was something that was about as appealing as a dead sunfish on a summer dock—nothing moved and it stank. I stewed and hemmed and hawed for a week or so, just tinkering with scenes involving John Matthew and Phury. In my heart I knew I had to jump off the cliff and stretch some boundaries, but I was exhausted and uninspired from the effort of trying unsuccessfully to drag V’s POV out of him.
Talking to my editor was what got me off my ass and back in the game. She and I discussed the things that were weighing on me, and she was like, “Go for it—just get it all in there and let’s see how it plays out on the page.”
She was, as usual, right. In fact, the message she gave me that day was the message she’s always given me since way back in the Dark Lover era: “Push it all the way, go as far as you can, and we can evaluate later.”
When I went back into the manuscript, I was one hundred percent committed to balls-to-the-walling it—and was surprised that there were really only three scenes that I markedly changed. Two were with Butch and V, with the newer content