Watching Fleabag and Daisy Jones & The Six has really stressed to me the need for well developed characters. What’s more Fleabag and Russian Doll have given me a nudge to be a big more provocative with some of the changes I’ve come up with when it comes to fleshing out the novel’s characters.
Women are going to either love or hate what I’ve come up with.
I honestly, at the moment, don’t know which is reaction to expect.
All I know is things are getting spicy in the way that modern adult readers of thrillers expect. Things getting spicy is a way of keeping tings serious and thought provoking.
But because I’m doing all of this in a creative vacuum….I just don’t know. It could go either way.
Well, if nothing else, I have a stable first few lines of the first novel in this series. It’s really, really good. Everything else the last few days, however ,has been in a severe amount of flux. I’ve rearranged the order of the first act a dozen times in the last 48 hours.
My literary hero.
What’s more, after making such a huge deal of how I was making the chronology of events tighter, tonight I turned around and made it exactly what it was to begin with. But at least I have a reason for doing so — I’ve realized that if I’m going to do bad things to character, I probably need to give them enough page time so you like, actually care about what happens to them.
That’s a huge flaw in a lot of thrillers — they open with a dead body and the reader hasn’t even had time to take their figurative coat off in the figurative theatre yet. So, my first act now gives a lot more page time to two characters that are going to have something bad happen to them.
My struggle for me as the writer is to make you character about these characters in a way that is interesting enough that you’ll keep reading even though in real terms Nothing Is Happening. (I’m being a little harsh on myself — a lot is going on, but if you had no emotional attachment to the novel going into it I could see you thinking that in some respect.)
I’m supposed to get my cast off tomorrow, so that will be something of a New Era for me. As such, I’m pretending to myself that I’ll stop fucking with the outline and actually get back to writing one a second draft. I’ve really, rearranged things. The story flows a lot better now and there’s a lot more room for character development.
But there comes a point when I’ve got to stop fucking around and get back to writing. Breaking my ankle has definitely reminded me that I have a limited time on this earth and death be no proud, as they say.
Anyway, I’m really, really pleased — with the first novel’s beginning, if nothing else. I’ve got to power through and wrap up this second draft as soon as possible. I think I’m going to continue to use the weekends to read and develop the other novels in this series.
I just have to keep an eye on the calendar. If I don’t get more serious, it will be year from now and I’ll still be struggling with the second draft of the first book. Ugh.
So. Here were are again. I realized something last night — I had cut back the story so much that there was zero character development before the story got going. So, I’ve decided to add back some more scenes and re-structure when and why the second act begins.
I’ve also decided to flesh out the outline AGAIN while rereading a number of basic books about novel structure and character development. This pushes the actual writing back towards mid-month, but it’s worth it in the long-term. And, hopefully, this will speed up the other books in these series as well.
In fact, I might just set aside one day of the week to just tinkering with the other four novels in the series so I’m moving forward with them, too, at the same time as I’m working on this first book.
So, I still have a massive amount of work to do. But I think I’ve figured out a way to speed the process up just about as fast as I can. The reason why I’m starting from scratch is I was looking at my proto first draft and I was like, “Wow, this is great!” So much so that I was having problems thinking what to edit to make a second draft (or 1.5 if you want to get technical.)
Thus, I decided to throw myself at rewriting everything and use sheer force of will to take things to the next level.
I’m now wading into figuring out what is “real” in my epic five novel series. It’s a lot of fun, but it ‘s also a huge pain in the ass. The reason is, there comes a point where I run out of things to say about this or that thing and I feel guilty that I’m not writing 25 pages on it.
But I guess everyone is different when it comes to how they develop and write. So, as long as I write or read *some* it’s ok. I’m really hoping to start writing a lot again at some point just after January 1st. I’m going to use the holidays to take a chill pill and just develop and read.
I find myself wanting to get back into writing as soon as possible, however. I’m just about finished a new fleshout outline and the structure of this new draft works well enough for me to throw myself into things. But I want to do things properly.
When I get back to writing, I want everything to be locked down so things go smooth enough that I can “just write.” The thing I notice about published novel, which is so tough, *IS* the level of consistency, of canon. So, that’s why sitting down and writing out what is “real” is so important. Only by having a cheat sheet of sorts can I have the best possible product when my beta readers — however I manage to find them — read the second draft.
Finding beta readers given that I have no friends, no one likes me and I’m flat broke is going to be a real pain in the ass. But you have to believe. You have to keep the faith. I’ve gotten this far, I can figure out somehow, someway to get within shouting distance of getting published in the traditional manner.
Jesus, this sucks. Due to a very freak set of circumstances, I find myself with a broken right ankle. The only bright side to any of this is it’s not like I broke my arm, hand or wrist.
The current state of my right ankle.
I can still write.
And, for the time being, I’m definitely encouraged to write and read because it’s extremely difficult for me to do much of anything else. Just tonight, I’ve managed to prove to myself that I can, in fact, just listen to music and write because if I don’t I grow very, very bored and frustrated.
As such, for the time being, I’m going to spend ever more of my waking time working on these four novels. Though, I will admit, my current run-in with the medical system has me again thinking about a novel or screenplay I have rolling around my mind that is pandemic relatedly in its theme.
But, for the time being, I’m just going to focus on these four thrillers I’ve been working on while dabbling in the screenplay concept I’ve discovered I work to work on as well.
I’m obsessed with picking just the right name for the characters in this four novel thriller series I’m working on. At the moment, I’m quite pleased with what I’ve managed to come up with. I love some of the names I’ve come up with, I’m extremely paranoid that someone will steal a march on me and use similar names to what I have, forcing me to find new names.
This is a very real possibility, but at the same time, as I keep saying to myself, make decisions on what you do know, not on what you don’t know.
Some of the better names I’ve seen in fiction include Don Draper, Shiv Roy and, of course, Lisbeth Salander.
The name “Don Draper” is so very, very good because it tells you exactly what to expect from the character. “Don” evokes Don Juan while “Draper” evokes “drape her.” What more can you ask for in a name?
I don’t know anything about her character or the show she’s featured on “Succession,” but I love, love, love the name “Shiv Roy.” That’s great name. It’s loaded in such a way that you can play with the audience’s expectations a great deal. Nearly anything the character does, or doesn’t do, will be loaded because of her name.
Meanwhile, “Lisbeth Salander” is so great because “Salander” is very similar to “salamander.” You get the sense that this is a small person who is nearly impossible to kill, just like the animal her name suggests.
Anyway. The thing about character names is while one can come to love them, they’re also fairly easily to replace with some thought. So, if the worst happens, I can always go back to the drawing board and think up new names for whichever characters I feel I’ve been forced to rename.
So, this four novel series began as one novel that was started because of my personal white hot rage against the Trump Era. This morphed into two books because the story was just too big to be told in one novel. And then something happened that I totally did not expect — Trump lost.
As such, there came a point when I realized I needed to recalibrate the project. I was on the couch, just about asleep, when I realized something: I had a huge backstory in my mind for the two novels I was working on. So big, in fact, that I could write two novel-length stories about how we got to the opening of the first book in the two-book story.
My creative past…and future?
That’s when I realized that a great way to “fix” the problem of Trump losing was to go backwards in time and tell those two “prequel” stories, then come back refreshed and with new eyes on the two modern-era books I was working on.
And that’s exactly what I’ve done.
Much to my delight, this plan has worked out quite well. I do have a lot of insecurity every once in a while about such a thing project, but the two additional prequel stories I’m working on are really strong and really compelling and so there you go.
The whole thing won’t make any sense until the whole project is finished and you can read the four novels all the way through and see my entire vision as a whole. But that comes with the territory of having a vision, I suppose. You have to have “paper” that people can read before most people are willing to accept that you know what you’re talking about.
It definitely would have helped if I had had a “muse” in my life to help guide me through this process. But, I guess, there’s just as much a chance that any woman in my life would have discouraged me from starting this whole thing to begin with. It has helped a lot, in some ways, that I have not had anyone to tell me “no.”
I find developing and writing female characters a lot more fun because of how much of a challenge it is to do so as a man. I often also populate my work with POC including American Asians, etc. This is all well and good, but for the fact that at same time this thing that I’m told is expected in a modern writer is also, in itself, something that can cause problems.
‘Double dees, double deeze”
Because I’m a white “CIS” male.
So, there is something of a paradox. I’m suppose to have representation in my work, which I find myself doing anyway, and, yet, because I’m a white man, that, by definition, is a problem.
It can make the whole act of creation rather frustrating. All these rules I have to follow — which often have contradictory expectations — can cause you to grow angry at them. As an aside, I will note one of these rules that makes me seethe is the Bechdel Test, which I’ve heard described as originally proposed as a “half joke” in a fucking comic of all things.
So here I am, slaving away to write the best four novel series that I hope might be popular — especially with women readers — and I’m expected to have representation, but if I do have representation then it’s bad because I’m a white man writing from a female, or POC point of view.
What’s more, it’s now a fairly ridged ideology among some that these works also have to feature two women talking about something other than a man. I call bullshit.
The point is for me to tell the best story possible that entertain the audience for hours using only their imagination.
As such, you, as the writer, in my opinion, need to follow your truth north. If you’re a white “CIS” male, you just can’t win with some people. By definition, they don’t like you and don’t like anything you produce. It’s enough to make me want to write under an assumed identity or something. I’m only half-joking, as it were.
Anyway. All I can do is try my best to flesh out my vision on the page and see what happens.
I am beginning to believe on a tentative basis that I may have figured out something crucial about the plot of this first novel in the four novel series I’m working on.
I think I know what this story is about.
I had two choices and I decided to go with more emotional, more visceral option. The one with heart that would probably appeal to women readers more. There’s still the other stuff that I’ve wanted with this story as well, but the primary focus is something so basic to the human condition that I think people — especially women — are really going to like it.
But I’m still just on the first draft, but knowing what the novel’s point is, it’s goal, helps a lot with how I lay out characters and their motivations. I must note that I say shit like this all the time then everything falls apart and six months later I say something similar, thinking this time the decision will stick.
So. I’m reading and re-reading a number of books so when I throw myself back into actually “just writing” the first book in the four book series I’m working on, I won’t feel like I’m spinning my wheels.
More heroine for this first book looks like this:
Mixed with this:
Things, in some ways, are going so well that there’s a huge amount of momentum for me to just “keep writing.” The only thing I’m worried about at this point is in my quest to write a first draft I can believe in, I’ll continue to have the whole thing collapse on a regular basis and four years from now I’ll be in exactly the same place I am now.
Which would suck.
And, as such, here I am reading as much as I can before I start writing again. One thing I’m really focusing on is character development. I say that because the first book in the series is a lot more like Mare of Easttown, in its own way, than, say, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. But one has to note how, well, boring that book is for the first 135 odd pages. It’s just dull as dirt. I’ve often speculated it’s so bad because that’s the part of the novel that Stieg Larsson wrote and rewrote and then something happened and he realized how to fish the rest of the series.
At least, that’s what makes me feel better to believe.
I just refuse to keep spinning my wheels because I started writing again and I wasn’t prepared. I want to know exactly who my characters are, what they believe and, most importantly, what their motivations are. Given that I’m just writing the first drafts of these novels and that sounds rather dumb.
But, as I said, it’s very difficult for me to “just write” crap because for me to write something, anything of fiction, I have to believe in it. The upside o fall of this is my storytelling ability has improved significantly since I started this breached birth creative project.
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