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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The Trouble With Mainlining and Writing at the Same Time

I mentioned in my previous post that I had an idea for a pre-series Supernatural fanfic, one which I hoped would kickstart my creativity again so I could get back to work on The Witch of November. And I also mentioned that this idea came about because I'd been mainlining Supernatural for the better part of a month.

Well, there's been a little unanticipated problem with that: it seems I have been watching too much Supernatural for the idea as I had it to take off. Want to know why? Because Adult Boys have been talking at me for the last month or so, and that's making it difficult for me to find the proper voices for Wee Boys.

Now, don't get me wrong ... I tend to mainline while I'm doing fic. Mainlining is what helps me get the characters right (or as right as I can make them) in the first place. The issue is I've had various seasons of Supernatural on my television for over a month now, and very few of those episodes include flashbacks. Wee Sam and Wee Dean are, apparently, easier to find for me when I haven't been listening to Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles for a month straight.

But this doesn't mean I'm giving up on the fic. Oh no. It just means I have to set it within the series' timeline and make it a casefile fic instead.

Best I can figure, I should set it somewhere in the early part of season three. For story purposes, I need it set at the start of a school year. Season one starts in October/November of 2005, which is too late. The boys are occupied with Zombie Angela in late August/early September in season two. There is a small time jump, though, in season three between "Sin City" and "Bedtime Stories" that could work in my favor.

See? Really wasn't kidding with that "geek" thing.

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.

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!"

Back to Basics

I used to take public transportation to and from college: two trains and a bus. Yes, that meant I spent a lot of my time not only riding trains and buses but also waiting for trains and buses. To pass the time, sometimes I'd do homework. A lot of times I would read, both school texts and books for pleasure. Other times, I would write.

Because I didn't have a laptop at the time, my process was writing on looseleaf paper snagged from my binders for class and then typing it up when I had enough written to make it worth it. My first draft would thus be handwritten and I would then edit it as I typed it all up.

Since getting a laptop, I've gotten away from the whole handwriting-it-all-out thing, simply because typing is so much easier! I type a lot faster than I handwrite, even taking into consideration the fact that my finger is pretty much glued to the Backspace key, so it just makes more sense to type everything.

Due to certain circumstances this past weekend (read: going out of town for a family wedding), I bought a notebook to write in on the long car ride since I didn't want to drag my laptop with me. And I discovered that there's something about handwriting in a notebook that I've ... missed, for lack of a better term.

I felt more connected--both to the piece and to my own style--when I was trying to recreate my first chapter from memory rather than just rewording what I'd already written. I'd missed that, seeing a blank sheet of paper and watching it fill up with ink and words.

I realize I'm not going to be able to handwrite my 82,000-word magnum opus in a little one-subject notebook but I can use what I've learned. How about instead of doing my normal line-by-line rewrite for my edits, I go back to basics a little bit and try to recreate the chapter? Maybe I should even push the content I've already written further down so I can't see it and just let the edits flow, only going back to check when I feel I need some direction.

Maybe I'll have an easier time finding my voice if I give myself a blank slate, so to speak.

Accepting Change

Part of the exercise of writing something as large as a novel (current word count: 81,457) is being comfortable with change.

As a rule, I kind of dislike change. In my personal life, I mean. I like things the way they are because ... well, it's the way things are. You know what to expect (for the most part). Change brings the unknown. Change is the unknown.

But with writing, change is kind of necessary. Sometimes it's something as simple as the story taking a direction you weren't intending (like I said before, that stuff about the characters writing themselves is no joke). Sometimes it's accepting the fact that a story just wasn't meant to be written in the voice you were envisioning.

I had intended on making The Witch of November read as kind of conversational, like you're inside the kids' heads or that the kids are telling you the story. I've successfully managed that voice once or twice before, but that's not my usual style.

Out of all the edits I've done, I edited the diary entries and letters from the 1870s the least. I actually like and am pretty proud of those, and I think it's because I let the voice fit the writing rather than trying to make the writing fit the voice.

Part of the reason I think I found the conversational kid voice so hard is because I was trying to make it funnier than I am. Because I'm really not all that funny. (Well, not consistently ... I'm funny in fits and starts ;)). Trying to force humor is never a good thing, and trying to force a voice on a story that doesn't fit it isn't a good thing, either. Even worse, every time I wrote and rewrote the first chapter (I seriously lost count on what revision I'm on), it sounded less and less like ... me.

So you know what? Screw that voice. I've decided to just write the dang thing in my own style, and in all honesty, it flows a lot easier when I'm just being myself.