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 This has also meant that at least 90% of the original MS is obsolete, but the basic skeleton ideas were good, so they're being (drastically) modified for integration into the new one.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

Losing The Plot...

I've been working on being aware of the artistic side of writing - finding a voice for the characters, working a story that actually moves, finding a style and voice for my own writing... But it's like everything I ever learned whilst studying English Literature somehow went in through one ear and out the other, as if I never even bothered with it and wasted two years trying to learn more about it. Right now I'm wondering how I actually managed to pass, because I clearly learned nothing!

I tried, I really did. But I got side-tracked again. I get caught up in circles of dialogue that (when I read it back) I realise don't really end up going anywhere, or adding to the characters/ story. It's annoying - I know better than that, in theory at least. Then I forget what I was trying to focus on and end up somewhere that I had no intention of going, and end up list in useless drivel that makes very little sense - in general and in relevance to the "story". And with what I'm coming up with, I use that term loosely.

I went back and thought I came up with an interesting way of structuring the plotline. Then it went out the window as "stuff" just got generated instead, and I got caught up in other ideas and the word-count. I'm definitely going to have to back and look at it again - instead of trying to stick to plot and structure, I end up ridiculously over-emotional about the characters and end up dumping them in situations that are pointless, rather boring, and based solely in their own misery and confusion. Then it turns into a disorganised mess that takes another week for me to simply work out where to even start sorting it out. It's not ideal.

I need to go back to the drawing-board and write up a new, more specific storyline structure that's far more focused than what I have now. Maybe if I get more organised with what I want to do with it, I might actually get somewhere and be a little more productive. It would also help if I actively remembered and implemented all the points from studying the great works in English Lit and used them constructively with my own writing.

So, as an IT geek, I'm thinking notes, cross-references bullet-points and a whole lot of interesting and coloured spreadsheets. And I have also worked out that forgetting everything I learned in studying English is not a good idea when trying to write something that should at least be vaguely coherent.