by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Well, I have YET AGAIN gotten out of the first chapter of this novel. Now, I plan on re-reading AGAIN the second chapter to see if I can make it good enough to be considered part of the third draft.
I continue to not only do all of this in a vacuum, but to have no idea what I’m doing. All I have is just my gut and a few hunches as to what make a good story. It definitely going to be interesting to see if what the reaction of a professional manuscript consultant will be once I save up the money necessary to get them to read over the novel.
At the moment, the story is a mixture of Stieg Larsson’s original Millennium series and Bill Hader’s TV-show “Barry.” I have a pretty clear vision of what I want to do with this story, but it’s a much more difficult struggle than I could have ever imagined.
I still need to think about how to improve my characterizations. I’m getting there, but I need to make things more clear as to motivation. I keep learning — the forgetting, then remembering again — the fact that a passive protagonist is a boring protagonist.
As such, what happens is I come up with what I think is a pretty good plot then I realized — duh — that my heroine is way, way, way too passive and everything gets thrown up in the air while I figure out how to have her push the plot forward by doing whatever she has to do to get what she wants.
Anyway. As I keep saying, but for being 100% extroverted I would go radio silent with this novel. But I just can’t help myself. I sometimes need to vent about how things are going with this novel, over and above my natural extroverted nature.
