Baby steps
Aug. 21st, 2010 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perchtaReading lj posts by writers plus finally reading Flirt by LKH made me take another long look at why I haven't been writing. Being the kind of person I am, I'll now list the realizations I've had.
1. I'm still letting my fears keep me back. Procrastination is a form of protecting myself from risk; I need to get through it. Again.
2. The afterword in Flirt reminded me of the importance of music as inspiration. I'd already been thinking about how one character in my current story (it counts as current even if I haven't done more than half an outline, right?) suited the entire Masterpiece Theater album by Marianas Trench.
3. I realized I had no soundtrack for the main character. Which made me realize that...
4.I had no real grasp of the MC's personality. And really, how can you write about someone so nebulous? What's their motivation?
5. I realized that few of my MCs ever have well-developed personalities. Hideous epiphany. Beyond loosely basing them on myself (and asking myself, 'what would I do here?'), they had no individual personality. And while I could reassure myself that if I were writing cheap romances, identical characters between books are okay, I'm not writing cookie-cutter romances. I'm not even writing regular romances. All of which doesn't even address that primary issue of never having created a full character in the first place. Very embarrassing.
6. Which leads me to this; has this failure to create a full & rich MC this been the biggest cause of my failure to finish a novel outside of NaNoWriMo? When the MC has no real focus, then how can the story have one?
So, I surfed around and found some character creation questions, which I will have to gird myself up to answer over the next few days, and hope I come out the other end with a functional, fun & write-able main character!
Oh, and I've started 'auditioning' various albums to see if I can get a feel for this MC, and finally give her a dammed soundtrack!
1. I'm still letting my fears keep me back. Procrastination is a form of protecting myself from risk; I need to get through it. Again.
2. The afterword in Flirt reminded me of the importance of music as inspiration. I'd already been thinking about how one character in my current story (it counts as current even if I haven't done more than half an outline, right?) suited the entire Masterpiece Theater album by Marianas Trench.
3. I realized I had no soundtrack for the main character. Which made me realize that...
4.I had no real grasp of the MC's personality. And really, how can you write about someone so nebulous? What's their motivation?
5. I realized that few of my MCs ever have well-developed personalities. Hideous epiphany. Beyond loosely basing them on myself (and asking myself, 'what would I do here?'), they had no individual personality. And while I could reassure myself that if I were writing cheap romances, identical characters between books are okay, I'm not writing cookie-cutter romances. I'm not even writing regular romances. All of which doesn't even address that primary issue of never having created a full character in the first place. Very embarrassing.
6. Which leads me to this; has this failure to create a full & rich MC this been the biggest cause of my failure to finish a novel outside of NaNoWriMo? When the MC has no real focus, then how can the story have one?
So, I surfed around and found some character creation questions, which I will have to gird myself up to answer over the next few days, and hope I come out the other end with a functional, fun & write-able main character!
Oh, and I've started 'auditioning' various albums to see if I can get a feel for this MC, and finally give her a dammed soundtrack!
