One of the great challenges writers face is letting go. When you create a new character, you try to make it unique. Colorful. Realistic. And as different from yourself as possible. Otherwise, it just becomes a self-therapy for your alter ego, and your characters all look and behave a very bland and boring same. The farther you go, the more freedom you have. Then, you face a moral question. What is the one thing you will never ever let your hero do?
And when I say mine, I mean yours. Now, so far you have only had two books, which means we cannot discuss those who survive into the third and fourth installment of this series, but we sure can dabble a little into the protagonists, antagonists and other gonists featured in The Betrayed and The Broken.
Well, well. I am in the process of writing the last six chapters in the fourth and final book of The Lost Words series. As you imagine, the plot is very much complete, but that does not mean all the stories have been fully resolved yet. In fact, there is still time to kill a few more of the main characters. That’s a must, no?
This sounds like a post-trauma group therapy slogan, but iI assure you, it is not. We’re here to discuss a rather interesting topic, namely, does one improve in whatever they are doing after doing it for a long while? There’s the so called 10,000-hour threshold of excellence and a few other metrics, all of which tell us that you will get better, no matter how bad or good you are, just by doing it. Well, I wanted to see if this was true, so I put myself to a test.
Well, in the last year, I was quite busy finishing Book Two of the series, and then cranking up Book Three in a record time of about three months. The effort gave me a very good opportunity to observe and evaluate my own writing habits and see whether I was improving, so to speak, using my own yard stick as the measurement tape. And I think there might be some truth in old proverbs.
Two weeks back, we talked about characters. I gave you my opinion on what book protagonists and heroes ought to be like, or rather, what they ought not to be. Normally, my characters tend to be devoid of stereotypes and the usual drama slash flamboyance. And I make sure to have a clear picture of what they should look like before committing them to paper. However, the last article did not address the grave risk of character monotony.
Now that the early promotional fever is somewhat over, I can focus on writing about my writing. It sounds recursive, but then it is not. Indeed, at this point, you may be asking yourselves what else can this site offer other than simple news about the book’s progress. Well, it will not be as hectic as Dedoimedo, but it sure will offer useful, witty articles on the topic of writing now and then, entirely from my personal and biased perspective. And the first one is on characters.