The last two days have been an amazing whirlwind. Yesterday afternoon and last night…epic for my brain. I shall elaborate ^_^
When I started the whole character guest post thing, I had no idea where it would go. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, or what I was going to write, or how I was going to be my characters without giving away critical story elements.
I’ve read the way other people do it, and each time it’s different and entertaining. If you want to see it done well on a regular basis, a great group of writers does this over at The Character Cafe. But that’s not the way I think. Each time I tried to reproduce one of these styles, I came up short. It wasn’t my voice. (Hearing that phrase a lot lately. I never thought I had one. Rumor is, I actually do).
And then I let Scott out to play. Honestly, he’s the safest. I know him that well. I know Max Rae better. And Zach. But playing around as Rae means giving away bits of me and Zach…If I ever met a man like Zach, all bets would be off. Forunately he’s imaginary and people like that don’t actually exist.
It pushed me inside all of these characters’ heads more than I thought it would. It’s been this slow build-up of inspiration that’s becoming some amazingly fun writing. It all culminated last night in a scene that totally took me by surprise. My characters made sparks fly in ways I haven’t seen in ages. The anger, passion, frustration, fear, and flat-out chemistry…I had no idea they were capable of these things when the situations were right. It’s been a long time since my characters surprised me. I’ve missed it.
Not to say I’ve written the greatest novel ever. I’ll probably go back on the re-read and say “it’s crap…it’s too much” delete, delete, delete. But for the first time in a while, I had electric fun re-discovering these people who have lived in my head for the last twenty years.
Oh, and I got to spam the pages with emoticons and some gramatically horrid netspeak, which amused the hell out of me. All in the name of authenticity.
When was your most recent/favorite moment where you just absolutely fell in love with the story you were writing?
I have a scene toward the end of my book where one of the main characters just loses it completely. I think I wrote that whole climax in about an hour and half because it just flowed. Letting this really controlled guy just lose his shit, was so much fun.
Yay for great writing moments! And thanks for promoting the character blog. I know exactly what you mean about not being able to follow some of the authors’ methods from that blog. I can’t even do it the way some of the others do, it just doesn’t work for me. And my way seems to garner less comments on a regular basis but I can’t force myself to write in a style that doesn’t work for me and my characters. But it is hard at times not to give important things away. I’ve already given up a couple things from stories but doing my best to keep from doing it often.
I’m liking most of the MarNo scenes I’ve written so far. The one last night was interesting because there are the two main characters in it. One is from the village and the other is new. Yet the village boy cries and the new boy tells him a secret, and it’s only chapter 4. They interact well, so I can see the friendship blossoming to more in the future. Will make for a good pair.
I usually alwaus fall in love with my novels during the revision/rereading stage. When I’m first starting something, I just know it’s crap. But after looking at it again after a few weeks/months, I see that it has great potential (sometimes!). 🙂