![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/FogOfWar.jpg\" "\\"FogOfWar\\"")
<\/a>From Wikipedia: Fog of War<\/p><\/div>\n
A new world is expanding in my head on four different levels. I should know this feeling by now, but I still find it very odd because I don\u2019t really understand how it works.\u00a0 You know those freeze-frame sequences of a flower blooming, each petal opening in bright, impossible color before your eyes?\u00a0 First-drafting this new novel feels like that, except I\u2019m in an entire garden of those flowers and I\u2019m blind-folded, finding them by touch.<\/p>\n
First, it\u2019s happening in a particular scene, when the voice of the main character is coming alive to me in the way she experiences the room where she is, with the night rain on the skylight just before she climbs through.<\/p>\n
As one scene leads to the next, I\u2019m going with her, discovering the community where she lives, with its physical layout and purpose, its friends and enemies.<\/p>\n
Beyond that, for the third layer, is the larger world with its weather, political system, wealth, boxcars, century, and connectedness. I don\u2019t even know where my character is on the planet yet, except that she must be closer to the equator than where I live, because of the light.<\/p>\n
The fourth level involves layers of time, as my character develops memories of her family and how she came to be where she is. An elusive story is gradually, organically emerging from her and what she does.<\/p>\n
Where the novel will actually begin I don\u2019t yet know, because all of these early scenes could end up cut. Shaping the novel will come later, but this is where I begin to know it. It\u2019s so different from the revising I\u2019ve been doing that it hardly feels connected to the same job.<\/p>\n