Quote:
Originally Posted by fishyfey
lol, I love your analogy Alexandra. I actually have set that book aside and am working on another one.
I realized that I didn’t have a strong main character and that writing her was starting to feel like moving around a paper doll with no personality. I may return to my novel, but it was my first serious attempt into writing, and I feel like I’ve learned so much from it that I am better prepared to write my next novel. Only way to get better is practice and persistence!
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Sometimes you are not ready for a character; sometimes a character isn't ready for you. I had written a couple of short stories -- had the beginnings and the endings done, but no idea how to connect them together. I left them both for years, then one day, I wrote them both in a day, and had them both published. One story was called the Footnote and I couldn't do it because it was tricky -- how do have a main character in a story who is just a footnote? The other I had to figure out a strange relationship between a boyfriend who was a paranoid conspiracy theorist and his girlfriend who believed every urban myth imaginable. How do they interact? Why are they together?
Sometimes you have to stay back and look at the whole; other times, you don't have a certain experience or understanding, and that's okay. And sometimes, you have a weak character, but then go off to write another story -- and somehow, this character would come to life in a different story with other characters -- so you scrap one story and then weave the character into another one.
That's the great part about writing fiction -- you can change things as you go along...