Epiphanage
I think I’ve had an epiphany. (Do they usually hurt?) I realized today that the biggest problem for me with finishing a novel is attention span. I can devote a little more time to my characters than the ones I read about in a book or see in a movie, but not an incredible lot longer. I have to write, write, write, fast, fast, fast, or I lose interest. There are several possibilities as to why this is the case:
1. My characters aren’t cool enough. This is a distinct possibility, as I’ve gotten quite a lot of feedback lately about making my characters more… er… charactery. Of course, I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet, but I’m working on it. One idea I’m toying with is that they’re really… er… charactery in my head but I haven’t managed to get that down on paper. I think that’s a problem with my style, and one I can fix by changing my scope in the front half of the book. I need to widen the angle a bit and show my hero and heroine interacting with people other than each other earlier on in the book so that by the middle, when they start seeing more and more of each other and less and less of other people, we already know who they are and how they should react, and we understand why they fall in love. Good theory, right?
2. Some of Romeo’s ADHD has rubbed off on me. When I first had the epiphany, he was sitting across from me and I glared at him and told him it was his fault. He just smiled and nodded. Smart man. The solution to this would be just to write faster. Easier said than done, but not impossible by any means. I have at least an hour every day when I could be writing instead of surfing the internet or (ahem) blogging.
3. I’m plotting too much. I’ve already considered this angle, and I’m sure there’s some truth to it. The last novel I finished was gnashing-of-teeth-and-wailing torture for me to write by the end because I already knew what was going to happen to them and their story was finished in my head. Writing it out lost the fun. I think one of the reasons I succeeded my first time out on NaNoWriMo was that I saved a lot of my outlining until I was almost done. I always outlined a little bit ahead, but not so far ahead that there wasn’t some mystery and excitement left for me to discover, and I let myself veer as far off the outline as I felt like while I was writing. I’ve tried A LOT of other methods since then, but none of them have worked as well. Of course, that means my first draft was crap. But I can learn to edit. I will learn to edit. Sigh.
All that said, I’m parking my butt in front of my computer to work on Panacea Man for a while. I’ve neglected him since the end of November and that just will not do. This is The Big One right now in my head, and I will hate myself if I don’t finish it. It’s got so much depth to it, so many issues to explore. And there’s so much I want to say about it. That should keep me going for a while.
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