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 This has also meant that at least 90% of the original MS is obsolete, but the basic skeleton ideas were good, so they're being (drastically) modified for integration into the new one.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.