Monday 20 February 2012

A writer's insanity

Read through my last few posts (all of 2012, really) and you'd probably agree that we're dealing with one loopy writer here. This is a WriYe blogging circle post, though, so I'm not just talking about me being a bit freaky. It's my characters that are the focus.

Specifically, those characters who like to invade my head and start talking.


I like those characters and here's why: without a talkative character, my stories just don't get written.

Actually, that's not entirely true. A couple of my best characters have just turned up to (figuratively speaking) lean against the wall with their arms folded and glare at me. One of them steadfastly refused to reveal enough about himself to become a proper character, so I ended up recruiting him as a muse. He turned out to be a bit of a smartypants, but chatting with him has gotten me out of more plot holes than I'd care to count. His name is Scott Burns.

If you want characters taking over my life, though, the prize is probably always going to go to Frost, my katana-wielding vampire. I woke up before dawn one morning and in the shadows of my room for a second I actually saw Frost coming to kill me for the things I'd done to him. He had plenty of reasons to want me gone at that point, too. Frost didn't have a good time of it as a Siana Blackwood character.

Then there's Toby. He doesn't just come and lounge around in my head telling me to write. He picks up his entire world and dumps it down right at the front of my thoughts. We've almost never talked outside the story, but he's the most vocal character I've ever had for just forcing scenes to play out in my head. You can tell that by the fact that I've written somewhere around 170k over two and a bit stories about him. His life is just getting worse and worse, though. Neither he nor I have the slightest idea how I'm going to drag it all together to give his series a happy ending at the end of this story.

So, like  I said - without noisy characters none of my stories would get written. If my characters don't feel like real live people I can't quite see, I don't write about them. If I'm already writing about them and they turn out like that, they die. A few times, dying has turned out to be just the thing to make that character terribly important to the story.

Random characters, stabbing my main character is never appreciated. Even if it was an awesome scene and perfect for advancing the plot... That was my favourite character and you just stabbed him! Okay, so that happened in NaNo 2010. I should be over it by now, but those characters are whispering about rewrites.

My head is full of characters. Some of them are quiet and some are restless. As soon as a new set of characters starts talking I start writing about them or else risk going even crazier. At the moment I have three projects on the go. I'm amazed my fingers still work to type blog posts...

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