by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Something occurred to me recently that really changed how I see this novel I’m developing. I realized that while the concept is strong, I have zero character development. In fact, the story is more conceit than it is a story. In other words, imagine if The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind dealt more with the fact that you could delete memories than how it influenced the every day lives of the people connected to it.
So, as such, I again find myself realizing that I have one really good plot in my mind — what happened to me with ROKon Magazine — and as such I need to lean into that. I think, at least at this point, that what happened with me and Annie Shapiro in Seoul is going to be the basis of the first half of the second act. The rest is going to be completely a figment of my imagination. But by structuring the story this way, I am able to tap into a lot of basic character development that is inspire by things that have actually happened to me in real life.
In other words, write what you know.
But it’s going to take a lot of work. I’m going to have to bang the reader over the head with how I get to the situation I need to get to so I can use what happened to me in Seoul in the first place. And I’m really going to have to be careful that it’s just not me mentally masturbating — again — about how wrong I was a decade ago by a bunch of manipulative, backstabbing expats. I need to use what happened to me in broad strokes so I simply use it to give the story character development and heart and that’s it. This story has changed so much since I started developing it that hopefully once I finally start writing it that it won’t be an enormous mess because I’ve overthought it too much.
We’ll see I guess. It will be interesting to see how things work out.
