This is just a quick reflection, but it’s one that has really helped my fiction writing to develop, and I hope it can help you if you get stuck working on your stories.
When I was writing my first novel, The Sadness of The King George, I would sometimes get stuck on what certain characters should do. I had the main arc of the plot, but I would get stuck on how its inhabitants would act or react in certain scenes. It wasn’t until I got near the end of my second novel (which will be published early next year) that I realised I was making a basic mistake by looking at things the wrong way round. I didn’t have to dream up what my characters should be doing and thereby graft my ideas onto them; they knew the answers. It’s a subtle switch — because we obviously create our characters — but I’ve come to the realisation that if you’ve drawn them well enough, then your characters can come to life and provide you with all the answers you need to move your story forward. This goes for the plot too. Again, in my first novel, I was guilty of simply starting writing at point A and aiming for point B with little thought as to what was going to happen during the intervening 80,000 words. This meant I often got stuck on what should happen next and sometimes ended up in dead ends. It was a bit like building a tower and just going up and up and up, stacking ideas on top of each other, without paying any attention to what the foundations were telling me to do. I initially approached my second novel in a similar fashion until I realised, about three-quarters of the way through the first draft, that what I’d already written held the answers. Themes or ideas that I may only have come up with as a passing reference earlier in the text could return and be developed. In my new novel, one of the major characters was initially a minor one added for convenience, but when I reached an impasse about two-thirds of the way through, I paused and looked back and realised that everything was laid towards him being a major character, and given what he was like as a person, he would clearly have wanted to be a major character. The answers were all there. I just needed to listen rather than keep talking. This might all sound obvious to you, but to me, it’s a bit like one of those old magic-eye pictures (which I could never get my head, or at least my eyes, around): once it’s pointed out, it becomes obvious.
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AuthorI'm a writer and editor from Birmingham. Nothing fancy about that! Archives
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