Ssssh - don't tell anyone - but I know who the first victim will be...

...so, in outlining the first few chapters, I decided to kill off one of my characters.  Not a major one, not yet.  But this represents a loosening of the hold on the initial crew.  The initial draft is so old at this point (and poorly done, I can now say without offending myself) that the characters have been comfortably safe in my mind far too long.  As this character exits, two more will take the place - two I recently designed who are far more interesting to me.  So this murder is not without merit.  I honor the veteran while embracing the newer vision.  As such, I have to remind myself of the great truth:

I'm not their buddy.

You can't be a writer

...if you're not going to be fearless.  The world has too much repetition, too much sanitized prose, too many cliches.  Take your character and tear a big hole in him/her.  Flaw them.  Then take words and flay them.  Beat them down and watch them as they stand.  Make epics out of molehills.

I'm still too timid.  Time to put blood in the inkwell.

Safe, for now.

Okay, I didn't kill him.  I thought about it, though, but a spark of a notion from a week ago reemerged and came to his rescue.

Protagonist gets another chance to redeem himself, because I changed him from vanilla to french vanilla.

No, not the sort of french vanilla with an outrageous accent, you silly king.  No, this is the kind where I took Mr. Boring and added a bit of the charming rogue to him.  The journey through the book will find him not only emerging from the bounds of his own making (familiar to me, I admit), but embracing and incorporating the bolder side of himself.

Yeah, when stated in this manner, it doesn't seem epic.  This change of character is a subplot, of course, and it's in its early stages.  I have only finished a basic outline for chapters one through three, so who knows what will happen?

And her, I see her and I need to keep my distance, lest I fear letting the story happen to her.  She's what I want for myself, which makes me perilously capable of protecting her when I should not.  Mr. French Vanilla has to take my place.  Whether or not I punish him for it along the way, I don't know.  Yet.

Still not excited about him.

...why fear a flaw?  Seems I may be too attached to introduce negatives now.

I'll not wax poetic about what the word "negative" constitutes, except to say that the tribal consciousness needs to back off and have some tea.  Whatever the case, my protagonist is fleshed out on a character sheet (this is the same protagonist I was considering for the chopping block) and, reading the details, I continue to yawn.

I used to find the notion of his "vanilla" nature to be something that would evolve over the course of the book, but now I view this as a cop-out.  It seems to be just me running from the hard work of designing these people fully before putting fingers to keyboard.  I need to know who they are and why they are prior to setting off on the story.

My first section of chapter one exists because I can see that new character clearly, or at least more clearly than the others.  I get a sense of who he would be in a crisis.  My heroine, I am closer to her completion as well.  Maybe she'll take over the main spot, if my protagonist doesn't get off his vanilla ass and get some persona.  Not that there's anything against a female protagonist: far from it.  It's just that I, like most men honest with themselves, know nothing about the complexities of feminine worldview.  So I default to my grunt-grunt-ooga-ooga, which is far easier to interpret on the page.

I jest, of course.  I don't know how the protagonist situation will play out.  I'm open to letting the book write itself, and on occasion I just add a note or two.  I do know that a boring man needs to become a little more interesting before even I will pay attention to him.

Character Sheets

So I found a "fiction writer's character sheet" online some time ago, which is your basic multi-page fill-in-the-blanks biography of your story's characters.  With such fields as "expletives" and "source of greatest embarrassment" in addition to the usual height/weight/etc., it makes it very clear that there's a lot more to your character than you might at first imagine.

My first section of chapter one features the first character I detailed from a vague sketch.  I couldn't write a word until I had done so, and even with this little biography, I was only able to manage 500 words.  Although I expect this will expand in further drafts, the fact is those 500 words flowed easily.

Section two of chapter one focused on the character I eluded to in my previous blog.  He's one I detailed a long time back, but even with a character sheet, I just can't seem to write well about him.

What I know now: he's not conflicted in some way that will be tested during the story.  He's plain vanilla.

So writing will cease until I know two things: who my protagonist really is, and who my main villain really is.  Some writers are capable of designing these two things as they go, but I am clearly at a roadblock.  I know, in general, who the bad guy is and what he seems to want.  I know who the basic hero is and what he wants to prevent.  But what hinders either of them?  The big conflict is the MacGuffin, so to speak.  The real story is in the characters - it's what we care about.  I have to know them, so that you can care about them.  And I can't charge into this book until I know them - not just the surface, but the tortured, neurotic chewy center.

Funeral day?

I suppose if you can't write freely about your main character, maybe it's time to nudge them into the garbage can and create someone new.  After all these years of floating these fictional people from back burner to front to back and front again, something should have clicked within me.

You can't write about someone you don't know well... and if we don't know each other by now... just like in real life... you either make time, or you make tracks.  He's not letting me in, so I think it may be time to visit another house entirely.

It worked once, so far.  My first new character pulled quite a few words from me.  He deserves worthy co-conspirators.

Upgraded self-talk

Your best bet for moving forward, independent of tribal nudges/shoves back to the collective's perceived center, is to simply remind yourself that if we were all meant to be the same, surely there wouldn't need to be so damn many of us.

It's fine to agree with others, and to want to lead others toward a more open path (or off the path, which opens everywhere to you), but conformity for the sake of "fitting in" or being afraid of upsetting the arbitrary status-quo is a wall-yourself-in method that limits your potential function as a human.

Of course, it seems like we all do this, present-blogger included.  Walls make us feel secure.  So I suppose the better question is "how high does the wall really need to be?" and, to follow, "what view do I have from the top?"

That walled-retreat should be just that - a retreat, not a prison cell.  What good is a feeling of security if there's nothing but a tiny room at your disposal?  Are walls really a positive force if they're keeping the whole world out?

Esoteric notions.  Hypothetical meanderings.  Whatever they're called, these questions are expanding within, blasting out of my rather limited intellectual confines.  And I'm hanging on, tail-end, bracing for the ride.