During the entire month of April, I’m participating in the A to Z Blogging Challenge. The alphabet will be my motivation, though the content of the posts will be very similar to what regular readers are used to. Check out the link for more amazing bloggers, and enjoy April!
I have always said I’m a character driven writer. I imagine the characters, they tell me their story, and I flesh it out on paper. In the last couple of months I’ve found a flaw with this statement. I’ve discovered it’s too simplistic. Let me take a step back.
For many, many years, I only had so many characters. All of my stories centered around them. I would get an idea, write 10k-40k of random words and then realize I couldn’t pull it all together and give up. Those would probably be best described as my ‘pantser’ days, and the reason I plot now. But I loved the characters, so I would never get rid of them. I’d see what story they were going to work in next.
Sometimes it would be an amalgamation of previous stories, and sometimes it would become it’s own, brand new story. For my very favorite of those characters, I finished their stories. All in the last three months.
A couple of things I discovered because of this:
- Since none of them exist in the original story the brought to me, I’m not shooting from the hip and writing what the voices in my head tell me to. Not exclusively anyway.
- I still have all these old story ideas that are actually viable now that I have a better grasp of novel writing
I don’t know if anyone else has ever worked this way in the history of anything, but it seems to be what’s working for me now. I’m going back through all my old story ideas and seeing which I want to tell. Those 10k-40k worth of words have become loose outlines (Because I wrote the scenes all over the place, I had the major conflicts sketched out).
Except, I already used those characters. Not just personality traits and physical descriptions. Like those exact characters down to the same names, back stories, all of it.
So now I’ve got these plots created for these characters who already have a world of their own to play in. That means…I have to create characters to go with my plots? That thought threw me off when I first had it. I couldn’t do that. Plots are driven by characters.
Except apparently they’re not completely. And characters don’t seem to be completely driven by plot. As I come up with new people to fill these holes left by the originals, I realize I still can’t write the stories until I *know* these new people. Where they’re from, how they dress, what they do for a living (but not their last names. I hate thinking up last names. They’re unimportant to my creativity and only tossed into the story if I need them).
And what I discovered was both are so intricately intertwined that I need to find out little things about each before I can discover more about the other. I need to know what my female MC does with her free time to know what she brings to her new apartment with her, but I need to know that she’s going to lose something very important to her before I figure out how she’d react to it.
So I’m no longer claiming to be either a character or plot driven writer. I can’t let one or the other completely control the story, they have to be able to compromise to make things work.
What kind of discoveries have you made about your own writing as you’ve grown in the craft?
That I know embarrassingly little about how I actually do the stuff that people tell me I’m best at. I can ‘splain how I do the stuff that I need help with–namely, making sure characters have some sort of arc–because I’ve taught myself, with great gritting-of-teeth. But “you manage to give all your characters a distinct voice, how do you do that?” leaves me spluttering. Because I don’t know. And I’m pretty sure that means I’m going to hit a snag with it, one of these days.
The voice thing confounds me to no end. I hear ‘I love this character’s voice’ followed by “this character’s voice is kind of flat” and I have no idea why I could make one work and not the other…the easy answer might be I don’t know all my characters equally, but I know that’s not the case here…or I believe…
Anyway…yeah, what you said ^_^
I know a few writer’s who start with a plot and then create the characters needed to tell the story, but I usually can’t do it that way. Mine, like many aspects of writing I’ve noticed, is a mix. I often start with a dream, so it’s a scene or a few scenes along with the feeling of the character. From there I daydream about it and the character starts to develop as I explore how they react to different people and situations, from that character and story develop.
Same with the by the pants or prepare ahead of time. Since I have the whole story pretty much in my head but also just write, I do a combination.
Great post for today!
I tend to have the main outline of a novel in place before I start writing it, but though I think I know what direction the story will go, the characters often stun me by going down a completely different path. I never know them fully until I have completed that last page. Until then, I’m on tenterhooks wondering where they will take me.
Great post today.
Good luck with the rest of the challenge 🙂
I’m a little bit of both. My stories usually start out with a premise or a single character and I build around that. My biggest discovery is how important pacing can be (there’s that buzzword!). It can really make your book so much better if done well!
For me it always starts with the characters. These people just show up and take up residence in my head until one day I think ‘ Hmmmm…. wonder how X would react if Y happened’. And a novel is born. They don’t always work, but it’s a start.
Good post 🙂 Every story develops a little differently for me but I start with a basic idea, plot, write, turn pantzer, go back and plot, write, turn pantzer. But somehow the story gets finished and that’s the important thing.
Stopping by as part of the A-Z Blogging Challenge 2012. Great start to the month!
I find blogs like this helpful because I haven’t stepped foot in starting my first book. However, I do plan for my first book to be non-fiction so it works a little differently.
I was in a novel writing class once–and we were working on mystery novels. I had to complete the first 3rd of the book to pass the class–which I did. I wrote it 15 years ago– and I learned so much from that class–and the critiques that came in from my professor and peers. I can’t say if I started with a plot or the characters–but it seemed to work at the time. Maybe one day, I’ll finish.
Great post!
Cheers, Jenn
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I’ve discovered that my writing is better and more in depth if I care about the story of the subject matter but if I’m writing something that I either have lost interest in or was never interested in to begin with, I rend to try to breeze through it to get it over with, which can result in a script or article not representing my best work.
I’ve also discovered that I sometimes pick favorites among my characters, lol, focusing more attention on them and this is something that I have to keep at bay because playing favorites is unfair to everyone involved in the story.
~Nicole
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