So I sat down last night to work out a better tactic to move this piece forward in a direction I could sink my teeth into, or if not, at least a direction I could see. I failed to that end yet again, as I still have no idea what I am writing about, even with 7k+ words about two characters, and now, a location to boot. I figured I’d try taking a hint from something I heard long ago: that location can often be a solid character. I thought that since I was just focusing on building characters and getting words on the page, that this may be a key for me to build out a third character without flooding my writing with a bunch of people. Additionally, this would hopefully force me into concrete imagery as well, since it is easier to descriptively write about solid places in ‘concrete’ terms… ok, that was bad, but hopefully you get where my head was on this angle.
Suffice to say I am as equally dispassionate with the location as I am with the two characters I have already worked on. This, I can assure you, is going to make it much more difficult to pull 1600+ words a day for another 3 weeks to make the 50K mark. I need to find my interest in this all. My two characters are flat, one dimensional, and lifeless, but worse, I don’t care what happens to them; which is the death of any piece of fiction. I need to care about something here, otherwise this is an exercise in the abundant use of unnecessary and unconnected adjectives. Hmm, I guess that last sentence kind of proves the point, doesn’t it….
I was hoping that pushing through with a location would spark some sort of emotive connection to this all. I want to be passionate about my characters. I want to care what happens to them. I want to know who they are. And this is the problem I have with fiction; they can be anything I want them to be, but not until I care about them, and I wont care about them until I know more, and I wont know more until I write more, but I can’t write more until I know what I want them to be. BAH. Travelogues and diaries, op-ed columns, and general musings on life are so much easier for me than fiction. All I have to do is write about things that exist. With fiction I have to create things which don’t. And that, my loyal readers, is NOT EASY.
So, today, I am going to step away for a bit. Do some laundry, watch some crappy TV, and try tot relax. Rest up. Build back those reserves of emotion that have been drained from me for the past few weeks and then sit down this afternoon to really crank out some big time word counts. I will not focus on ‘trying’, I won’t over think it like I have above, but rather I will just sit down and continue building these three characters until something snaps, or until I hit 50k, whichever comes first. 🙂
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