Emma Michelle Morrison was about to become an Olympian when a disastrous injury in her last domestic tournament before the Games knocked her off the American women’s saber team. Devastated, and burned out after years of competition, she retreated completely from the fencing world into grad school.
You don’t remember Emmy Morrison?
There’s a good reason for that—she’s a figment of my imagination, the protagonist of a murder mystery set at a US Fencing Summer Nationals. At the moment, she’s only half-formed, a cartoon wandering through the second-and-a-half draft of the manuscript, but she’s becoming an interesting character in this version.
For this draft, I’m changing the point of view from limited third-person (“she wondered whether the coffee stand was open yet as she stomped through the hotel lobby”). In the first draft, I didn’t yet know enough about either the plot or Emmy herself to do more than sketch out the basic story. This version, though, lets Emmy tell the story in her own words as the narrator.
I’m not sure the finished story will end up being told in Emmy’s voice, but I’ll learn a lot more about her and how she thinks and acts in the process of writing this draft, which can only make the story better.
Mary Griffith 