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The Darkness Within...

So, after thinking a little bit more about the whole "write what you know" thing that everyone will always quote at you if you want to write, I got to thinking about what I really did  know. And I came to realise that one thing I had been trying to write about I did not know about - and that was happy things.

Now, I'm not meaning to sound like an over-dramatic, self-pitying misery guts here, but the general fact is that happy and cheerful isn't something I've ever really experienced. My life has (in the majority) been difficult, dark, and rather gothic in its execution. I've been one of those people who've rather suffered through fault of their own and others, and I've been to very dark places. I have subsequently not  been to very happy places - even if I did (or I even may have) - I doubt I would even know it, to be honest.

Therefore I'm back at the question of why am I trying to write it? It's hardly going to be authentic as a piece of writing, and what I managed to get from others was that it rather wasn't really authentic to  me. My mother was rather surprised to read one attempt at a manuscript, citing it as something of light-fluff that she finds in her Mills & Boon books. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that until I clocked on that it wasn't a strange snipe at my writing (trying nicely to say it was rubbish and had no substance) - it was that I think she was rather taken aback that I would actually try to write "fluff". I'm not a "fluff" person - not to write anyway (though I do like the odd chick-lit and chick-flick).

Back to my usual analogy of song writing, I have not written any "fluff" songs since I was about 15. By fluff, I mean lovey, traditional pop-esque Moon-In-June, lovey-dovey things that Britney might have sung when she was also 15, with basic lyrics and easy rhymes, where silly people always write "mine" with "time" and  "sigh" and cry" because it's too much effort to come up with anything else. I write dark, gothic, and (as some people will no doubt call) "depressive" songs and music - it has a hard, dark theme of suffering and general feeling of being trapped in a nightmare, thus:

  

Black rose dying from your poison
Screaming ghosts haunt the nightmares in my head
All I see is desolation
Can't escape the terrors in my mind...
    

Screaming Alone inside my head
Grasping desperation till I'm dead
Black fingers pouring threads of war
From wounds that I can no longer ignore.

Thinking now, I know I was probably just trying to use writing as a way of escaping a life that always feels like this - when it comes to songs I always write what I feel. But that just means that I don't really know what I'm writing about - I do sarcasm, dark humour, intensity, deep darkness, living with fear and depression.

  

I don't really do cheerful. So I'm happy to report that I've stopped that now. I'll just stick to dark humour and mild sarcasm from now on. I think it'll come across as much more authentic, and so will my beloved friends (read: Characters). 

  

Narratively Speaking

All right. I think for my latest writing attempt (i.e. Novel manuscript), I'm going to have to completely deconstruct what I've already done and realise what's there (apart from names and some basic plot-points) is just basically useless. It's sketchy and unfocused. And a bit rubbish, really. The idea's there, but it's not translating to paper. Or rather, Word doc.

I've agreed with myself that a big part of what I'm trying to write, and the point that I'm making (even in the title), is about isolation. Common sense then says the obvious option is to therefore isolate the narrative - it really should be in First Person. Not every-person, which is what ends up happening in Third Person works. Ones that I write, anyway.

Having it in First Person will keep it focused, bring in more though processes and characterisation of protagonist, and will make that person the driver of the story without getting sidetracked into others' thought-processes.

I was attempting to do this in Third Person. It wasn't working. I imagine because it logically made little sense. Also I think it didn't allow me to really "connect" with them (the protagonist) properly - with what I have in mind for this it would be very hard to make sense of some of the complexities of the character without they themselves being the one to describe them. After all, it's easier to get sucked into someone's mind, and someone's world - even with all their crazy and skewed logic - when they're the one telling you about it.

Unfortunately this means going all the way back to page one and deconstructing what's already there to accommodate this. And it's more that changing that lead character's name to "I" on the page. It'll change the dynamic, the observations, writing patter and probably all of the book all over again.

But I like the thought of this. It makes me hopeful it'll get me somewhere, and also allow me to move on past the mind-block I've had for about a week. All hard work, but surely a good thing? I'd like to think I have the capability of creating something that's actually rather decent - and that eventually I'll crack the key to my personal style and do just that. Just like with writing songs.

Just for once I'd like to prove to the voices in my head that they're wrong - and listen to the other voices in there. The ones who are good characters just waiting to be born and given full lives in the worlds of my future novels.

Getting To Know You...

I'm maybe starting to get the hang of this writing malarkey, me thinks. I don't mean that I'm suddenly Agatha Christie or Enid Blyton (and no, I'm neither 75 nor 6 years old, but they've been my favourites since I could read and no one has done better!) - but I think I am starting to learn about putting into practice the things drilled into me studying English Lit. Like what's the point of the book - what is it trying to say, what exactly is it looking at, and why should the story be told at all... Well, apart from keeping me occupied where otherwise I would be bored out of my brain, of course.

I managed to work out the main focus of my story and what the characters were playing for, as it were. I realised that it focused on a different aspect of relationships, and that the story is telling a tale about something that is really more about the "what happens after the Happily Ever After" ideal, as it were. Especially when (in your character's opinion) it's not really the ideal result one would assume that it perhaps ought to be.

I managed to get a lot of character clarification and I organised everything in new notes from scratch. Then I wrote a new synopsis on it to see how it goes together, and I'm starting to get a better understanding now of what I want to do with it. Of what I want to do with then, and the journey I want to take them on. It's still not perfect, but I'm really now seeing how the jigsaw pieces come together and start to create a picture. The more pieces I put in, the clearer I see the end result and the quicker I can conjure the next correct piece, or where one is not sitting quite right and needs to be moved and replaced.

It took a few weeks to get there, and a few days of rather intense thinking (I would've had to have gone to lie down if I hadn't already been in bed suffering insomnia) to manage to start seeing these previously vague characters as whole people, especially the lead. She's the first one I've really got to know in too many years (I really invested in two others but then lost the MS files on my laptop of the time and subsequently stopped getting emotionally involved - big mistake!) - I think we're both starting to get something out of it.

Now I'm starting to get to know them, I'm starting to get a real idea of what they would "realistically" (and, yes, I do use that term loosely) do, say, think, feel, react, behave, etc. This has also meant that at least 90% of the original MS is obsolete, but the basic skeleton ideas were good, so they're being (drastically) modified for integration into the new one.

And the more I know them, the better I understand them. So the better I write them, and the better the reader understands them - important when the journey is so affected by what they think, feel and fear. And if you don't understand them, you don't understand the choices they make- and then neither does anyone else. Then the motivation for what's going on is lost on everybody. Which isn't helpful.

Psychology and motivation is definitely a big part of writing literature - yours and the characters'. You need to know your ideas and motivation for writing it, and you need to know the thoughts and motivation of the characters.

I think I'm now starting to get to grips with mine.