My grammar check quite obviously failed grammar in school.
These last 1000 words (not in order, just here and there) have been a nightmare to write. I've had to do some major storyline restructuring, which is a bum.
Sometimes you've got to take a character you love and rip their heart to pieces, or make them into a complete jerk and then send them to reform school (that's a metaphor, by the way. There are no reform schools in my story). But, hey, at least I know now how it feels like to be someone like K.
Characters sometimes just mock me by going 'nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah, I'm a generic cliche, and you're so bad at writing you can't make me better!'. Ditto with dialogue.
I have missed countless amounts of Top Gear because I'll be writing, it'll be nearly eight thirty, and then I'll go - 'I'll just write a couple more words,' and then before you know it it's ten and you've missed it.
When you write something you love homework suddenly becomes that much more unappealing. Who wants to study physics when you have a novel screaming at you to hurry up and finish?
When I write it's like one massive revenge attack. A schoolkid has no voice, but...a writer does.
1 comment:
Writing as a revenge attack! It's a while since I thought of it that way, and in relation to fictional writing.
Will you remember the hours you spent watching Top Gear or the hours you spent writing?
In both situations - the character you love being ripped apart, and the jerky character going to "reform school" - there is a big change. Conflict in their lives makes the story more appealing, perhaps, and adds more words!
As for the character being a "generic type", that's when you need TV Tropes, and find a way to avert and subvert his/her particular cliche. And this is when you take a mountain view over the story (the "God" view) and ask, "Well, are you serving the story?"
Your last sentence made me think hard about who has voices and who doesn't. In some times in history, schoolkids had voices and writers didn't. And, also, the schoolkid's identity is subsumed in the collective voice.
Just enjoying Grace Woodroofe at the moment, her piece, "I've Handled Myself Wrong".
And the Finlay sisters make up Stonefield.
Wanted to tell you about the "Plot Clinic".
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