Saturday, November 21, 2009

Making Progress on my WIP (Is that redundant?)

OK. First the big news. I have an ear infection. And the secret's out. Yes, I am four years old.

No, not really. But seriously! Since when do adults get ear infections? I just got a note on facebook from a friend who had one on July, and she's a little older than me, so I guess I don't feel so weird, but it's still odd. I've never had an ear infection in my life. Hurts like a son of a bitch. Now I feel extra sorry for little kids who get them. I guess they're not just a bunch of whiners. (Now that I'm one of them, we're not whiners, we're people in pain who need and deserve your sympathy, dontcha know.)

Now, on to my other news. I have finally begun making new progress on my Work In (supposedly) Progress, TRP. TRP stands for The Reluctant Prophet, but I call it TRP to be both mysterious and lazy.

I came to a standstill right around the beginning of November. I guess to protest NaNoWriMo. No, not really, but it did seem to coincide.

I had an epiphany. I didn't stop writing because I was so busy. I was busy, but that's never stopped me before. No, I came to a standstill because I didn't like my characters. The parents are total assholes (that hasn't changed) but the MC (a seventeen year old girl) had a serious chip on her shoulder about everyone else in the world except for her best friend, a girl who has up and run away. The only person in the book who had any redeeming qualities was the runaway girl, who we aren't *really* going to meet until midway through the book. Everyone that my MC (Becca) came in contact with was someone who desperatly needed to be punched. No one had anything nice to say. I was sick of them all.

Even though I knew that I was going to go back and edit the hell out of my first few chapters after I had completed my text, I had to do it now. I had to make major revisions just to get myself to like these people well enough to want to write more about them to see what happened to them. (I mean, I know in general what happens to them, but they were so repellant as people that I really didn't CARE to ever put it down on paper.)

I didn't mean for my MC to be so unsympathetic, but she just ended up that way after a few days of frantic keyboard pounding. I went back through, took the chip off her shoulder, gave her a couple of different people to talk to that gave her nice things to say - not just opportunities to fling barbs at people like a monkey with extra poo on his hands. I don't know if any of this will make the final edit either, but damn, I sure do like Becca a lot better now that she's not being all cunty. So now I do care what happens to her, so I guess I will write it.

I'm at about 8900 words. Far from where I wanted to be at this time, but further than I would be if I told The Reluctant Prophet to just go to hell.

4 comments:

  1. I'm feeling kind of like this with Crys. There's no reason to care what happens with her. I'm working on it, but I probably won't get to it until the second draft.

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  2. "Cunty"? Whew. Well, if that's the way you felt about your own protagonist, maybe it's a good thing that you sanded off some of her rough edges.

    It's funny how sometimes characters just take on a personality you haden't really intended and then you've got to reel them in and straighten them out.

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  3. I am dealing with the same thing now. I never intended for my MC to have such a chip on her shoulder against her own father, but it just came out that way.

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  4. I have problems like this at times. I go back and re-read and realize my bad mood came out in my character and it doesn't exactly fit.

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