Well, here we are again. And I'm woefully unprepared, as usual.
I keep coming up with all this other stuff for the space story. The protagonist has appeared, complete with a name for once, but I keep pushing all that aside. Because I have to finish Elsbeth. I have to make her a real person. This is what usually happens, and why I end up with shallow characters. I get distracted by shinier parts of the story, and abandon the boring details.
So here I am, wondering how Fomalhaut and Aldebaran1 figure into this story, with this ship endlessly coasting among the stars, but I have to stay here and decide on my antagonist's political views. And religion. And what word or phrase she uses a lot.
I had one goal. Make one good, solid character. And my god, is that hard.
This is the thing they always talk about. If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. Outside of NaNoWriMo, I never manage to do that. Here I am, with a good three or four hours after I get home, and I spend it doing… anything that's not writing. That needs to change. I think the issue with the character creation is that I have this big stupid list of questions and if I can't come up with any new arbitrary answers, I just don't work on it. It doesn't feel like writing. Because it isn't, it's just filling in a few blanks. Boring! I need some… thing to write about. Like pick an aspect of her personality or backstory and just free write a description or a scene or something.
That's what I need to do.
But what do I choose to write about?
Should I just pick something off the questionnaire and see where it goes? Because there are a lot of dumb questions on there that have nothing to do with the story. Any story. Like "What were they like as a baby? Or a child?" Who cares? I can't imagine how that would possibly be relevant to any story that doesn't revolve around the character's childhood.
Maybe I should just pick a random point in her life and try to write about it. As long as it doesn't involve children. Which is tricky, since she has/had a son. But I just don't know what to do with children. Of all the people I can't relate to (which is to say, all people), children are way up at the top of the list.
"But you were a child once," you might say. I was a lot of things once, but I no longer remember.
That's not the point. This is about Elsbeth. So let me ask you this: what part of her personality or history would you want to know more about. Leave me prompts in the comments, and I'll write something from them. Like, "Describe a time when __" or something like that.
I really just need to sit down and work on this damn thing instead of screwing around. I just need some help.
I'll see you Friday.
Subscribing to the idea that someone who "turns evil" has always had that potential and that the underlying personality traits for things like revenge may simply be hidden or controlled, I have these questions of Elsbeth:
ReplyDelete"Can you describe a time when your darker side started to show through? Were you aware of the warning signs? Finally, what pulled you back from the precipice?"