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 moved from one room to another, a word whispered, a letter falsified, are setups that lead to, for example, one dead Desdemona.
When one is a plotter of stories, every step of the intrigue is laid out before one starts writing. But what if one is rather a discovery writer, and the story is not told from the POV of the main plotter? That is, what if a character is supposed to observe certain occurrences, the meaning of which is only revealed later? Does one write setups, and find out later what the pay-off is (and clean up those that do not pay off), or does one write first the pay-off, and then go back and set it up?
Both approaches seem confusing: if a character does something (setup), shouldn't I, the writer, know why (pay-off)? Or if I start with the pay-off of, for example, my MC being manipulated into killing his wife, shouldn't I have already written him being manipulated there? It feels like chicken and egg to me, I'm not sure how to solve it.
3 answers
When one is a plotter of stories, every step of the intrigue is laid out before one starts writing.
Well…, no.
I sometimes think discovery writers imagine that plotters are passionless stone Easter Island heads who tonelessly drone about Destiny and the Immutability of Time. So it was outlined..., so mote it be!
Plotter-ing and discovery-ing are not mutually exclusive. I don't think they are actually "techniques", or "disciplines", but more like temperaments or personality types, like extrovert / introvert. You don't get to choose but you can work within your strengths.
You will have to plot out a court scene to some degree or it will become nonsense sensationalism and melodramic reactions. Each attorney plans ahead. They do not just show up at court and wing it. You will need a somewhat plausible baseline to establish the court situation is serious (not just a segue to "Guilty!" and then a prison fight). Most characters will walk in to court having planned to present certain evidence or fulfill their civic duty. These characters and their plot-crucial testimony will need to be plotted. Their sympathies and emotional reactions are left to discovery
You will also need to plot the course of the trial itself, so it can follow believable procedures and a logical progression of evidence over time. The good thing is your POV character doesn't understand the procedures and her confusion can cover you, but many people have a casual knowledge of court proceedings. Obvious errors will break credibility.
The testimony reveal vs delayed payoff sounds like plotting to me. I really don't see why you'd try to avoid it. Is there no middle ground where you have a working outline but are still free to make changes as you discover details along the way?
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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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I construe the court you refer to as a royal court with nobles of various ranks creating a veritable swirl of intrigue. Politics in a court setting is nothing less than lethal, the stakes are high and if it comes to light in the wrong way, could be construed as treason.
I love your premise. If I were doing something of the sort, I would need to create some of the main plotters, understanding that at times certain aims would align, creating temporary alliances between otherwise contending forces. Duke X might require the assistance of Marquis Y to bring about something mutually beneficial.
I would lay parts of the conspiracies out, overlapping at times and then ask myself what my innocent character, Count H might observe. I would then step back and start the story, only the occasional facet of conspiracy visible at any time.
The women are often as dangerous or more so, as they will have the ear of many and often be overlooked or seen by their fellow characters as pawns in the game, forgetting that the most powerful piece is the queen.
I think of my characters essentially as billiard balls, each encounter changes both and they, while changing direction, must remain on the table.
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