Friday, February 20, 2009

in which: i am alive, well, and killing my characters.

I’m not a mass murderer, I’m a writer!—Cornelia Funke, Inkheart, of course!

Well, then. Here I am at last—more technical difficulties yesterday… actually, if you knew me, you’d realize it’s a small miracle that I don’t have more technical difficulties than I already do. (I get lost dealing with my sister’s iPod. Yes. Really.)

So after my brief skirmish with stomach flu, and a rotten writing week (last week, no energy, very few words), I rounded the corner into Monday. Cleared my schedule, just to focus on writing, to get back on track… and it was terrible. Not a good thought in my head.

(Note to self: when you make all your characters smile and laugh and turn slowly and you bloat their speech with adverbs? You’re stalling. And you don’t know what the scene is about.)

Tuesday, then, I came with my sister to her local campus, loaded down with my writing work. She has studio art classes, and they take a long time. I figured that if I stranded myself with my outline and my blank notebook for twelve hours, Scenes Would Be Written.

And indeed they were. I wrote nearly 6000 words in one day, and it was wonderful! So the story is up and singing again, all the characters alive and talking… oh, all except one. The one that I had to kill in the student café, on Tuesday night.

I was actually looking over my shoulder, feeling a little tense about this. Plenty of my characters come to bad ends, or have sad endings to the story. But they all deserve it, all of them… except this one. She’s a perfectly good character, a wonderful person, the kind of girl I’d like to meet—or would have liked to meet.

If any of my characters fell out of the book (you’ve read Inkheart by now, so you understand me, right?), she is the one I’d have to watch my step around. (Well, and the villains. Let’s hope they stay on the page.)

Because of all of them, she’s the one who could ask the most uncomfortable questions (such as: Why on earth did you kill me off, and before the end of Part One? I didn’t even get to the midpoint!).

And I wouldn’t have a thing I could say to her. (Um, we needed to raise the stakes. I had to show how powerful the villains are. Because my protagonist has to stand alone. Because it was scene eleven, and I had to write scene eleven to get to scene twelve… Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to cut it.)

Other than having to watch my step, in case my characters are on the loose, I’ve been doing great. I think I’ve fairly recovered from the famine of last week, and I’m back on target. I hope to finish writing Part One by the Ides of March (how’s that for ominous?) at which point I intend to collapse, read some quality fiction, and then ask my book:

What are we doing next? (I’m not even going to try and guess ahead of time. I might be learning my lesson. At last.)—jl

Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 02/20 at 01:09 PM
(0) Trackbacks • Permalink

<< Back to main