Tag: characters

Character Consideration

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Working on the edit today, I realized a thing.

When I set about the not-insignificant task of changing Accidentally Inspired from a stage play to a novel, one of many changes I orchestrated on the front end (read: before I actually got into the draft and all the pieces started coming off like a bunch of janky flywheels) was the addition of a love interest.

It seemed natural.  Still seems natural.  She’s not out of place in the narrative.  I think I gave her a totally plausible raison d’etre or however you say that fancy French thing.  I like her character, but I’m not like in love with her character (that would mean I had invented a character too perfect and would therefore be a Bad Thing).  She plays a role in the story but is not, strictly speaking, critical to it.  All in all, for a late addition to the party, I’m pretty pleased with her.  However, I’m afraid that she may be entirely out of place in the novel.

I can’t be sure.  I waited a good six, seven weeks to dive in and start the edit, which I think has been enough time for me to distance myself from the prose.  However, in reading this character, I begin to wonder.  When I originally conceived of this idea, oh, let’s just call it ten years ago, the principal ten characters sprung immediately and organically into being.  Each played his or her role perfectly, fitting together like jigsaw pieces.  Now, revisiting the story, changes are inevitable.  As I’ve noted before while I was writing the draft, in its translation to the long-form novel, the story has sprouted new legs and arms, a tail and a few new tongues.  New characters sprung up like strangling weeds, and strangely, each seems to fit the new narrative just as well — if in a smaller capacity — as the originals.  To be fair, the love interest fits in there, too.  But to stick with the puzzle metaphor, the thing is not finished yet.  I’ve got the edges and the corners built, and I’m working my way in to the meaty center, and a lovely picture of a foggy London Bridge is taking shape.  Problem is, the love interest sure looks like a foggy bit of bridge or possibly a bit of misty waterfront, but it’s possible, just possible, that she’s a piece of the Golden Gate instead.  You know, she’d fit the theme, but it’d be wrong to say she was intrinsically a part of things.

Problem is, of course, that now the demon of doubt has its scouring claws in my brainmeats over the whole thing, and now my entire take on the character is tinged with the unmistakable feel of overthinking.  Am I resisting her because she’s not a part of the original narrative and thus feels unnatural?  Is she just fine where she is and she’s only tripping my radar because I’m hypersensitive to imperfections in the draft?  Maybe she’s truly honestly unnecessary and I’m ignoring my genuine justified doubt over her in a bid to cater to a hypothetical audience I’ve not even earned yet?  Probably, as with so many things involved in this process, it feels murky because the mushy center of this narrative cake hasn’t finished cooking yet, and I won’t really be able to iron out an answer until I clean up the story a good bit.  Maybe my keyboard needs more chemicals to properly ponder the question.

One way or another, I’m going to have to make a call on this girl sooner or later.  Problem is, having woven her somewhat intricately into the draft, I’m terrified at the prospect of having to remove her thread.  If there’s nothing wrong with her and I cut her out, then I’ve defaced this tapestry ostensibly for nothing.  On the other hand, if she’s poisoned and I don’t cut her out, she could rot the whole project from the inside.

Like so many other things, the best I can do for now is flag her for further consideration and toss her on the pile of “deal with this later.”  That’s a pile of problems I started in the draft and which is growing at an alarming rate since I picked up the edit.  I imagine that in just a little while it will develop its own gravity and pull me through a ripple in spacetime where my story will stretch out to infinity and the only sustenance I’ll have is my own failed, mangled prose, squealing like that belly-alien thing in Total Recall for me to put it out of its misery.

Why are my peripheral characters so much easier to write?

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My writing over the last couple of weeks could not be more schizophrenic.  One day I’m on fire, the next day I’m frozen in ice.  First I’m barely able to type the words as quickly as they are coming to me, then you could sail ships through the gaps in between the words that come to me.

So, am I up or down?  Manic or Depressed?  Today, I’m up.  I’ve just written a scene which flowed from the reservoir of my brain like a rain-fed stream, full of (what I imagine must be) crackling dialogue, crisp, direct prose, and even the delicate flourish of metaphor coloring the pages.  Difficult to write good metaphors on the fly while I’m drafting, I’ve found.  Some days it just doesn’t happen, and I certainly don’t like to force it.  It bogs me down.  Those days I leave lots of notes to Future Me: FIND SOME BETTER COMPARISONS or THIS IS LIKE SOMETHING BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT YET, FIX IT.  None of those notes today or yesterday, though.

A good writing session, then.  But still one that leaves me a little flummoxed, because it’s a scene taking place entirely between secondary characters.  Not leading roles.  Not even supporting actors, really.  These are characters that only appear a couple of times in the book, and writing them is as easy as swinging a cat in my house and hitting a toddler toy (which is to say, it basically happens on its own without interference from me multiple times on the daily).  And it makes me fargoing ANGRY.  These guys are bit parts.  Icing on the cake.  Curlicues on the calligraphy.  They’re not, by any stretch of the imagination, the main players.  Sure, they have bearing on the main action of the story, but they are by their nature peripheral.  They’re not who I have spent my time with.  They’re not who my audience will spend their time with.  So why are they so goldfingered easy to write?

Maybe it’s because the stakes are low for these characters.  Well, not for the characters themselves — obviously they have their own concerns in the storyline as it pertains to them — but rather for myself as storyteller, my particular stakes in regard to these characters are low.  Low stakes means low pressure.  Low pressure means I can just let it happen, like an old guy squeezing out a few drops after a prostate exam.  I don’t have to worry about what repercussions their interaction will have on the plot, because I’ve already decided that, and they can’t affect the plot very much in their own right anyway… kind of like a fridge magnet stuck to the side of the space shuttle wouldn’t alter its trajectory too much (yeah, I know the space shuttles are defunct now, I’m just… jeez, okay?  Leave me alone.).  I can just set these guys alone in a room, wind them up like clockwork toys, and let them do what they do.

What’s frustrating is not that these peripheral characters have been so easy to write, these last few days.  The frustrating part is how much I’ve been struggling with my main cast lately.  It feels like, even on my good days, the strings of authorial intent are clearly visible tugging on their puppet-like hands and mouths.  On my bad days, it’s more like I’m shoving cardboard standees around a stage and taking still photographs, trying to make it look like it all fits together when it looks like a bad diorama from the third grade.  Hackneyed.  Forced.  Boring.  Awful!  You would think that my main characters would be the ones I’m in love with, the ones that spring fully-formed from my head like Venus and go out into the world creating wild plot devices and surprise twists.  And to be fair, they’ve done their share of that.  But I think I’m growing just a little bit weary of them.  I guess it’s not terribly surprising that I should do that; after all, I’ve been spending the better part of one thousand words a day, five days a week, with them for oh, going on four months now.  Still, my main characters should be the ones I love, right?  The ones I can’t wait to write for, the ones that just boil over when I put them on the page?

I’m just pontificating, here, but maybe I need to think of my main characters a little bit more in the way that I think about these bit parts; just step back off of them a little, loosen the reins, and allow them to do a bit of story-building on their own.  It feels like, as I get close to the end, I feel myself steering them more and more toward the ending I have in mind, which takes away their agency and, as a result, ends up being just really crappy storytelling.  Problem is, here at the end, there is very little story-building left to do, which means I’m going to have to go back and tear the engine out of this thing and let them do their story-building back in the middle where things started to go all squidgy, which is going to mean more rewriting and…

Hey, Future Me, are you reading this?  I’M SORRY.  I’M SO SORRY. But your job is getting bigger every day.  Good news is, the draft is almost finished, which means you get to start your job soon.  We’ve got your office all ready, and a case of bourbon to help you deal with it.  You’re going to need it.  Wait, where are you running off to?  Come back!  WE CAN’T HIRE SOMEBODY ELSE TO okay he’s gone.  Sharknado.  Anybody else feel like editing this first draft for me?  I just totally flaked on myself.  Or rather, my future self flaked on me.  Or rather rather, my future self will be flaking on me by the time I…

God, make it stop.  I’m at 95% now.  I can make it.  I might burst into flames as I cross the finish line, but I can make it.

Somebody Greased the Wheels

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The words came easy yesterday, easier than they have in weeks.  I wish I could say it’s because I feel confident in my ending, but I can’t.  I still don’t 100% know how the dharma thing is going to end.  I mean, basically, I have the chain of events, but as for the ins and outs, how the characters will react, what will become of them… it’s all up in the air like a bunch of chainsaws at the end of a suicidal juggler’s act.

That said, I had a flow going, and I’m not one to look a gift horse in the beak — that’s a good way to get your face bitten off.  Nor am I one to complain about having an easy writing session, especially when I’ve really struggled lately.  To what can I attribute yesterday’s flow?

I think it’s because, here in the closing moments of the story, there’s a bit of a return to form.  The main character is back on his quest, the supporters are back in place doing what they need to do, and the villains have been more or less dealt with.  Conflicts resolved, the story can proceed happily in the way that it wants to.  It’s all that conflict that gets in the way of just letting things happen.  DAMN YOU CONFLICT.  Except, the ego-writer reminds me, conflict is the sustenance of the story, so even though I’m wrapping the story up now, that doesn’t mean I can hop off the conflict-train to hurt-town.  Incidentally, I spent the evening mulling it over and I spent this morning’s run kicking around the moment where I left off last night and suddenly the last bit of conflict came to me.  Something about the heat and the fatigue and the rivers of sweat running down my face triggered the perfect last hurrah for the story’s conflict.  Conclusion?  All writers should run.  Alternate conclusion?  Running solves every problem.  Alternate alternate conclusion?  It’s fargoing hot outside and I’m a little baked, there is no alternate alternate conclusion.

As long as I stay on track (and, against all odds and expectations, I’ve stayed perfectly on track throughout this entire process), the first draft will be done in about a dozen more writing sessions.  A dozen!  It almost seems too close to put a bow on the events of a story, too immediate to properly process.  Like a sudden cinder-block wall on the highway, it looks like I’m going to plow right into it before I can get to where I’m going.  But I think that’ll be okay.  Rather too much than too little, and god knows how much the draft will change when I get into the editing phase.

I feel like my words of late about the novel betray a sense of melancholy about finishing the book.  Well, “finishing.”  My laser-beam focus since April has been to get the first draft done, and with the achievement of that (I just scared myself a little, considering it a fait accompli) and in that sense, I am finishing.  And I do feel a bit of sadness, a bit of aimlessness, a bit of my-nemesis-is-dead-what-will-I-fight-for-now emptiness creeping in.  But I don’t think that will last.  I look back over what I’ve accomplished in the last few months and I realize that the act of writing no longer intimidates me like it once did.  I have ideas for books and plays that I am just bursting to write, the only challenge when this one is all said and done will be deciding what I set my laser sights on next.

 

Today’s Writing Session Sponsored by The Beast, Apparently

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More on that title at the end of the post.

The writing had me in a weird place yesterday.  I was stressed about where my story had ended up and where it was headed, and I felt the significant gravity of self-doubt and intimidation about the task of writing a novel weighing heavy on my shoulders.  It was one of those days when I really think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, when I wonder if this whole thing was really such a good idea and whether I’d be better off using my spare time to play video games or read or watch TV or otherwise waste my time.  Of course, you have those thoughts, and then you remember the old adage about how nobody on their deathbed says they wished they’d watched more TV.  No, Writing this novel is one of those — I won’t say Bucket List items, because that’s a term that gets tossed around too whimsically for my tastes — but it’s one of those Things I Wanted To Accomplish.  And, like with so many other things in life, I’ve found, the day-to-day struggles become easier to bear if you keep your eye on the prize, so that’s what I try to do.Read More »

Follow Me Over This Cliff (Or, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’s Fading Star)

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Last time I did this was fun.  Let’s have another terrible review of a terrible entertainment option.  Today’s target?

The Following.

Spoiler Alert, etc, etc.  Here I’ll be talking about the show, its characters, its plotlines, up through the current episode.  If that’s troubling to you, this is the point at which you should turn off your computer and rethink your life, because if you’re able to be significantly upset by prematurely learning some vague details about a show that you’re watching after the party, perhaps the decisions that brought you to this point were not the best ones.  (Though if you’re still watching the show, I doubt if there’s much I could spoil for you, as the show spoils itself by virtue of running headlong into virtually every cliche in the suspense/crime procedural/gritty hero/criminal mastermind genre simultaneously.)  That said, if you don’t watch The Following, there probably isn’t very much here for you.

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