Okay. it's been six days, and it's time
to stop prentending.
I am very, very, disappointed with my nano. I've written
maybe, 60 words, since November 30.
Here's the thing. I like my plot. I like
my characters. I like the entire thing. But I can't be my characters. I'm about
to do a horrible job of explaining what it is, exactly, that I'm disappointed
about.
With the other things that I've written, and are still in the process
of writing, I always can be my characters. I know them, at some basic level, and
this is going to sound cheesy, but in know their souls. It's not enough to know
how they react to situations and what they think of the world and what they like
on their pizza and to know every single thing about them. That's not enough.
It's like they become a part of me that I can understand.
I'm going to have
to use an Eragon reference, even though I know that any of you don't like the
books for various reasons. But really, the whole true name thing is the thing
that makes the most sense to me, in the way that I can be and understand my
characters, characters like Shade Chase. For those of you who don't know, In
Eragon, there's the whole ancient language, and those words can be used to do
magic and all that good stuff. But in that language, everything has a true name.
I don't have the exact definition, since I'm writing this on my iPad at 10:30 at
night in my bed, but that true name, besides giving you all extra power and
irreverent stuff, the true name of an ob ject, animal, or person, is basically a
description of what they truly are. It is a long name, of course, but the way I
see it, it's putting that thing's soul into words.
That's what I get about
most of my characters, almost every character I've ever written. I know their
true names, their souls, even if it's something that could never be put into
words.
Maybe it's just because I was under pressure with the whole word
count bar graph thing during Nano, but I can't get any where close to my
character's true names. That's why it took me so much name to write. I would
just sit at the computer, staring at the screen, procrastinating by going to
YouTube and checking my email, but I couldn't get to my characters, and I still
can't. I take at least forty five minutes to an hour and a half of just lying in
my bed before I can fall asleep, so that's when I do all my thinking. And I
could never think for my Nano characters. There was nothing there.
It might
be a time factor. After all, I've been writing about Shade Chase for nearly two
years now,and she's the character that I know the best. Maybe I just didn't have
enough time to get to know my character's true names.
But I don't think it's
that, because I've written far less about other people, and i still know them
far better. Take Endey. He's an RP character, for goodness sake. But I know him
so much better than three people I've written five thousand words about.
I
can tell them what to do, and I have to lay out how to do it, step by step, for
me. I don't need to that in other pieces. I tell them what to do, and I know
right away how they're going to do it. They would never dream of doing it any
way else. It's like my Nano characters are just that, characters. They're not
their own people, they just dance like puppets on a string.
Maybe I'm not so
much as disappointed in myself as saddened by how much work and thinking and
staring at the screen for hours it's going to take so that I can learn their
true names.
__________________
Does anyone else have this
problem?