When Characters Write Themselves

I've mentioned it here before but sometimes characters write themselves. I always thought authors were ... not really kidding but using hyperbole when they said that, but I'm telling you, that shit is for real. You'll find yourself writing something with absolutely no idea where it's coming from. The story will take off in a direction you never intended. They may be your fingers flying over the keyboard but the words don't seem like they're yours at all.

It can be ... disconcerting, to say the least. Disconcerting and yet, most of the time, awesome as all get-out.

The most recent example I have of this is the latest chapter of my current Once Upon a Time story. It's a series of sequential mid- and post-ep one-shots chronicling Emma finding a place to belong over the course of the first season. Little unseen moments between the scenes.

This conceit of mine became an issue when I got up to "Hat Trick." We spent most of the episode with Emma so unseen moments were few and far between, but there was too much good material within the episode for me to bypass it entirely. I rewatched the episode, found my span of unseen time, and started to write.

And what came out ... that was all Emma and Mary Margaret. It was not me at all. Believe me, I know how it sounds when I say things like that. These people don't really exist, and even if they did exist, they most certainly would not choose to have their conversations through, you know, me. But it does happen, and I don't know that it's something you can fully understand until it happens to you.

I certainly didn't understand it. Hell, it's happened to me more than a few times and I still don't understand it. But it's a real thing that happens and what it results in can be really cool.

Don't believe me? Check out the chapter below, entitled "Family By Choice." And believe me when I tell you that I have no freaking clue where this came from.

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Maybe ...

My write goal for this weekend was to spend at least one uninterrupted hour on The Witch of November. To ensure that I would have no distractions whatsoever, I unplugged the router. That's right, no Twitter or Facebook to capture my attention!

So I took the laptop into my room, put Vertical Horizon's Burning the Days album on the CD player, and started Chapter One over again. Yes, I've written and rewritten Chapter One about seven zillion times (give or take), but this time, I think I might actually be happy with it.

I don't quite know what the difference is except for that I think I loosened up a little. I wasn't as focused on making it all sound perfect; I just wrote. I kind of took an example from the writing exercises and just went with it. 

And this is some of what I came up with:

Allie Sullivan knew the second the Frisbee left Charlie Davis’s hand that she was in for a very long day. With one hand shielding her eyes from the late-June sunshine, she watched the neon yellow disc slice through the humid sea air like a hot knife through butter.

It soared high above her head and finally disappeared from view after clearing the tall wrought-iron fence surrounding the property all the way across the barely-two-lane side street. Allie spun on her heels and fixed Charlie with an exasperated glare.

“Oops!” The boy’s best I’m-so-cute-and-innocent smile brightened his face.

Allie heaved a sigh and rolled her eyes heavenward. Charlie hadn’t even managed to last ten minutes before doing something obnoxious and aggravating. She shouldn’t have been surprised, though; Obnoxious and Aggravating should have been the kid’s middle name.

Charlie Obnoxious and Aggravating Davis, she thought. Had a nice ring to it.

A mischievous glint lit the boy’s bright blue eyes, and any doubt Allie had as to exactly why her friend had whipped the Frisbee so hard disappeared. “I am so not going over there to get that,” she informed him.

Charlie raised a single eyebrow at her. He didn’t move, didn’t say a word, and Allie realized that he was simply waiting for to give in and head over to retrieve the Frisbee anyway. Well! Two could play the stubborn game, and she crossed her arms over her chest and returned his calm stare to prove it.

The two of them deadlocked, staring at each other, neither willing to let the other win. For quite possibly the first time in all of their eleven years, it was Charlie who relented, though he did so in typical Charlie fashion.

“You’re such a baby,” he snickered, playfully rolling his eyes at Allie. Then he brushed past her as he started across the street.

No, it's not perfect. But it's more "me" than what I had before, and I think I like it.

Because I Felt Like Sharing

As an aspiring writer, I have a need for feedback that borders on the pathological. However, because of that "aspiring" qualifier in my previous sentence, I am terrified of offering up something still in progress for feedback.

On the one hand, it would be nice to know if I'm on the right track. On the other, it needs so much work and I don't want people seeing it and yeesh.

Yeah, you can see the dilemma.

But I'm bored and antsy tonight. So against my better judgement, I'm offering up this little snippet. Have at it, kids:

Eventually the Witch broke eye contact with Allie and stepped back, appraising the two kids with one withering glance. “You children want easy answers. Well, I’m not about to just hand them to you on a silver platter. You think you’re so intelligent? Figure it out on your own.”

Lillian Blackstone sniffed and turned on her heels, preparing to walk (or float or whatever) out of the room. “You know what, lady? Nothing about this is easy!” Allie hollered, the anger dripping in her tone. Then she blinked, clearly surprised by her outburst.

The Black Widow paused in her tracks for a split second before whirling around and fixing a terrifying, furious glare on the girl. When she stepped forward again, Charlie inched closer to his best friend, fumbled for her hand, and grasped it tightly. “You forget your place, child,” Lillian grumbled, her low register sending a deep shudder down Charlie’s spine.

To his complete surprise, Allie held her ground. Though her hand trembled like crazy when she pushed her glasses back up on the bridge of her nose, she didn’t break eye contact with Lillian. “I forget my place? You’re just an angry, bitter old woman who died decades ago! You shouldn’t even be here right now! You’re the one who’s forgotten her place.”

Fury burned in the Witch’s eyes, her lower jaw jutting out, as she gritted her teeth and clenched her hands into fists. “In my day, children had respect for their elders.” That self-satisfied smirk curling back onto her lips, she raised her arm and held up her hand, palm out, in front of Allie. The girl dropped to her knees, crying out in agony and wrapping her arms around her stomach.

“Allie!” Charlie knelt down next to his best friend, trying to pry hands away from her stomach so he could see what was wrong. The Witch lowered her arm and Allie stopped whimpering, although she was quite clearly still in pain. “What did you do to her?!” Charlie cried, glaring up at the Witch.

“She’ll be fine,” Lillian replied in an off-handed tone. “Sometimes a little force is necessary to keep children in line.”

I kind of already don't like the rhyme in the last lines there, but I don't know how to reword it. I don't feel like a woman who died in the 1920s would say "okay." I could perhaps use "all right" but that somehow doesn't have the same dismissive connotation as a simple "fine." *shrug*

Finding a Voice

I don't know what happened, I don't know what I did differently, but I think I've finally found the voice I want for The Witch of November.

I can't even really explain why it's different from what I'd written before. It's not as verbose and a little funnier than before. I also think I've managed a nice balance between the adult voice for the narrative and just a touch of kid voice to give the prose a punch.

Have a snippet:

“I’ll be right back,” she muttered, more to herself than to Charlie. All right. She could do this, right? It shouldn’t take more than a minute to find the ball and squeeze back through the fence and she could totally handle sixty little seconds. And besides, the longer she stood there thinking about it, the more nervous she’d be. A rescue mission like this needed to be done quickly and without thinking. Kind of like ripping off a Band-Aid.

But then again, she’d always been afraid to rip off the Band-Aid super-fast.

Rolling her eyes at herself, she gave Charlie a small wave and took off for the back yard. The next time Charlie fired the ball over the fence, he was going to have to be the one tromping into the Witch’s yard to get it back. Even if he called her a chicken on top of calling her a baby.

The plastic ball had rolled to a stop a couple inches shy of the wooden deck attached to the back of the house. Oh, Charlie so owes me an ice cream for this, Allie thought as she dashed forward and wrapped her hand around the ball. A real ice cream sundae from Sweet Indulgence, too, not one of those little treat things he usually got from the freezer at the 7-11.

“Hey, Allie!”

“I’m coming!” she hollered back. Cripes, that boy had no patience. She hadn’t even been gone a full minute yet! What more did he want from her? “Relax! Jeez.”

A flicker of movement in the dining room window stopped Allie dead in her tracks. Oh, holy crap, if that was even the Witch … that one little glimpse of her from the safety of the lot across the street had been more than enough, thank you very much.

It still needs work, of course, but it's reading more the way I want it to now. Which has turned my "There's no way in hell I can do this" into "I just mght be able to do this!"

Writing Pride

Sometimes I'll be reading a book and I'll think, "I can totally do this!" And then other times I'll be reading a book and I'll think, "Oh, there is no way in HELL I can do this!"

I'm on the "no way in hell" end of the spectrum right now with regards to The Witch of November (although the edits have been going better since I stopped trying so dang hard), so I decided I needed to do this post now rather than later.

I've kept a lot of the fanfic I've written on hard copy. I tend to fall in and out of fandom (I'll go through, say, SVU phases and Sports Night phases and so on) so sometimes I feel like re-reading some of the stuff I've written. (Please tell me I'm not the only one who does this!) Most of the time, I read it very critically, all, "Holy crap, this is kinda horrible." Especially the older stuff. Sometimes, though, I have flashes of, "Hey, this actually might be kinda good!"

So, at the risk of sounding terribly conceited, I'm going to link to the couple of stories I've written that I actually like, if only to remind myself that I do have some semblance of talent lying around somewhere, hee.

-"Lost in Time", a Charmed story it took me three dang years to get out on paper.

-"Stalemate", an SVU story that is kind of AU (alternate universe) in that we were never given any info about Casey's family so I gave her one. It is probably the most dramatic story I've ever written and was therefore very challenging, but I do like the end result.

-"Hide and Seek", the most recent fanfic I've written. It's a Harper's Island fic through the eyes of the killer, so it spoils the end if you haven't seen the whole thing, but you have no idea how much fun it was to write. Which should worry me, I think, hee.

And just so this doesn't look like I'm shilling my old work (because I'm really not ... it's more for me to remember that I can do this and that it's not hopeless), here's a snippet from The Witch of November, a letter from my ghost to her husband, back when she was still alive (there are a few of these scattered throughout the story).

Frustration Level: High

Writing is just like anything else: it looks easy until you try it.

I used to think the hardest part was getting the story out. Then I became entrenched in the world of edits.

I mentioned in my previous entry that I don't have a real process. I just write and think of my next steps as I go. I have run into problems doing that, namely when I get stuck, I can't jump ahead to another part in the story and then go back to where I was stuck. If, for example, I get stuck in Chapter Six, I can't jump ahead to Chapter Eight because I don't always know what Chapter Eight is going to be, you know?

So when I get stuck, I have to plow through it until I get unstuck, all the while thinking, "Oh, I can go back and fix it later."

You know what's harder than I realized? Fixing it later.

Part of my problem is I'm attempting a voice I've only written in once or twice before. I managed it in a Supernatural fanfic I wrote a couple years ago called "Corpse Fire" and I remember it being relatively effortless back then. Not so much now.

For some reason, the first draft of The Witch of November is ... not really verbose, but written in a more adult voice than I really want. And trying to change the voice I've already written is freakin' hard.

So, I want it to read roughly like this:

“I’ll be right back,” Allie muttered, more to herself than to Charlie. She could do this, right? Because really, it wouldn’t take more than a minute to find the ball and run back through the fence. She could totally handle sixty little seconds. Besides, the longer she stood there, the more nervous she’d be. This kind of rescue mission needed to be done quickly and without thinking. Kind of like ripping off a Band-Aid.

But paragraphs like that are kind of hard to come by.

Most of it is like this:
 
Of course, what should be was never what usually happened. Allie stared at the sheets of paper with a frown on her face for a few minutes. Nothing jumped out at her; the spells or rituals all seemed to have different ingredients and different methods. Some were what Allie thought of as white magic: candles, herbs, blessings. Others were classic examples of dark magic; nothing called for eye of newt or any other cliché ingredients, but most of them called for drops of blood, wilted flowers, and other things that called up images of Halloween and the macabre.
 
Which is ... okay, but it lacks both the punch and the humor I want. It also doesn't sound like an eleven-year-old.

(And people thought I was kidding when I said the first draft was terrible! Ha!)
 
So what do I do now? Try to figure out whatever I was doing when I wrote that first paragraph up there, hee.