: Re: How does one discovery-write court intrigue? Intrigue (any kind, really, but royal courts were particularly known for it) is a series of setups that lead to a pay-off. For example, a handkerchief

@Mendez196

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You don't have to PLOT, you just need to realize, as you discover the story, that you have somebody plotting against them. Then, as we write, this is something we keep in mind (and perhaps notes).

IRL, if somebody hates me or just needs me out of the way, and they are plotting against me, they too are discovering their plot as they go along. They want to make my spouse suspicious of me, so they look for opportunities to sow doubt or misunderstanding. That is what you do while writing: As you write your POV character, double check your scenes to see if there were opportunities for your villain to do something nefarious. Either by moving that handkerchief, or lying to somebody, or whatever.

Your villain, just like your hero, has some larger goal, and just like RL is feeling her way to it as situations develop. You don't have to write from the villain's POV, but you need to stop and think from her POV once in a while; what can she do to advance her interests? Then that is something that happens to the POV character (or if the POV character is not the target, something she sees happen or hears about).

The OTHER method I have used often is back-writing. Which requires some rewriting, but for things like court intrigue, it should not be too much, because the whole point of the intrigue is to be pretty under the radar. So where you need some dramatic reveal, you can go back and have your POV character experience the acts leading up to the reveal, without cluing in to the overall pattern (or the perpetrator) until the reveal. They blow things off as accidents, or their own absent-mindedness.

The reader won't know the difference, they read the book in order, they don't know what order you wrote it in.

For me discovery writing (the only kind I do) is discovering the characters and plot as I go, but that can still entail a lot of backtracking, rewriting, discarding, and other changes. It is the story we discover, and if the story needs some intrigue for a setback, once I "discover" what the intrigue is, I can go back and weave it in. If that demands changing the course of a character or direction of the story, then so be it.

As I have mentioned before, it is important to me to always have a workable ending in mind, and I have notes on that. I don't know exactly how I am going to get there, but I know it is one possible satisfying conclusion. So if I am weaving my intrigue into the story, and that somehow makes my possible ending impossible, then I need to either devise a better ending, or I have to do the intrigue differently or undo it altogether. (My system creates a dated backup of my new writing every night, so I can always revert to ANY previous day).

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