Thursday, October 26, 2006
Back In the Groove
OK, it has taken me a few days to get back into the writing groove. (Granted, most of that time was taken up by a sick three-year-old and a constantly hungry baby.) After hitting a snag on Sunday with the current short story, I couldn't find enough energy to rewind and restart, even though it only involved about 750 words. The problem was that I realized that the main character had turned into something he is most definitely not: a uber-hero capable of taking down Schwarzenegger. It was a little too much. It was like Dan Brown's Angles and Demons where the college professor is able to fight with one of the world's greatest assassins and is able to hold his own. Yeah, right. So, I turned it around and had the character get the shit kicked out of him. But now that I've been able to make the fix (and grumble that I had to throw away about 700 words), I was able to move forward. I've actually written over 1700 words today. I'm finally in the home stretch. As long as I'm able to keep going, I should be done with the shitty rough draft sometime tomorrow. I had originally thought that I'd be able to finish on Monday, but an extra few days isn't that bad. Now I have to find some kind souls to read this draft and tell me what's wrong with it.
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2 comments:
This is a constant problem, characters who take on unexpected traits. Usually it's a mistake too and you have to go back to the road wrongly taken and start again. How do you suppress these errant instincts? And why are they always uberesque.
I don't think you can suppress it, only recognize it when it happens. I think it's part of the creative process. As for giving characters superhuman abilities, that's just wanting to give those characters everything they need to overcome the obstacles they come across - which is usually a wrong move. It's heartless to want your characters to suffer, but it's unrealisitc to expect them to always come out on top.
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