Why does this always happen?

[ostarella]

I sweat and worry and bang my head against the wall until I have a story/chapter almost completely finished - and then I wake up in the middle of the night with - THE SOLUTION!

As in - why this story/chapter is a piece of shit and how I can fix it.

I was ready to finish the long short story for the contests (deadline March 31) and it was... adequate. But the spark just wasn't there and I didn't know why. I was blaming it on the fact that there's a romantic element to it - which I don't do well - but that was bullshit. A cop-out.

About 2 AM, I woke up with this screaming in my head - "If you don't care about the characters, why should anyone else?"

And it was true - I didn't invest in my characters. They were just that - characters. Characters going through the motions. I didn't have people living through an emotional event.

Soooo...

Not tossing the story - too late for that. But I've printed it out, cut the different sections apart and started rearranging, editing, tossing, adding... Akin to what I'm doing with Tess, but in a shorter version. And every sentence - new or old - is being looked at as if these were my neighbors, my friends, my family.

No more characters. These are people. People I care about.

Talk about getting one's mindset straight...

Comments

[beckyblack]

Ah, the middle of the night epiphany. It can sound so weird to talk about characters as real people and of course, I'm not going to argue that they actually are real, that would be crayzee. But yes, to really feel the emotion of the story they do have to have a kind of reality. I guess they're real the way the other personalities are in that dissociative personality disorder. They're sort of other people sharing the same physical existence. They may not "take over", but at times they do seem to have minds of their own. Once they start getting stubborn and refusing to do stuff, or you start getting relucentent to do mean things to them, or let them do mean things that they are demanding to do, that's a very good sign. :D (And in the latter two cases, the reluctence must be resisted!)