Linda Hansen-Raj over at Fangirl Cantina sat down with Rogue One novelist Alexander Freed to discuss the mechanics of writing the story.
FG: Not having the benefit of seeing the movie, knowing how scenes were edited, what the score sounded like, how did you choose which viewpoints to tell the story from?
AF: That was one of my first tasks when I sat down with the script: breaking the film down into chapters and scenes, and figuring out who would serve as the viewpoint character for each sequence.
When I’m writing original material, I typically build scenes around characters – there’s no question whose head I want the reader to be in. Here, I had to figure out not only which character had the most at stake in every scene, but also what unique perspective they might have to offer – and what I was okay leaving out (because not every character will notice everything going on in every scene – the audience may see something in the film that a viewpoint character in the book simply doesn’t care about).
