Lately? I’ve been finding all kinds of excuses to not write. Why? Because my current project scares me a little. It’s darker than I thought it would be. There are great tsunamis of sadness that seem to engulf and overwhelm every page, and I worry. I worry that its not just a reflection of the times, but of my own psyche. I could abandon it. Try to churn out another HEA, enemies to lovers, satisfying romance, but something about this book, this idea, this yearning feels deeply important. And maybe that’s why I’m struggling so much with the characters.
yeah, I really do have that many things marked in this book… try to nerd on my level
So, in my procrastination this week, I went back to one of my favorite books on writing. “Naked Playwriting” by William Downs and Robin Russin, to rehash what it is about these characters that’s interrupting my flow. And also to refresh myself on themes that are not only applicable to theater.
Bcause I have a sneaking suspicion this book is a tragedy.
And I’m a romance writer. I write sins, not tragedies (Poise and Rationality). I write redemptions and happy ever-afters. I write feel-good and resolution because I want to see them in the world. I have a sneaking suspicion that the world has beaten that hope out of me. I suspect, my sense of romanticism and love has been steadily destroyed over these last ten years. I suspect that once that blindfold was tugged off by every heartbreak, disappointment, news article on the rape and abuse of women, and failing justice system, it became impossible for me to put any blinders of Happily-Ever-After back on.
So maybe this is the book I need to write. Maybe I need to get the tragedy out of my system. Maybe someone dies at the end. Maybe they’re already dead. Maybe the reason it feels so rainy and sad is that I have been out of the light for sometime now. And maybe these two ill-fated lovers, are the parts of myself who are desperate to do something in a world that constantly binds hands and hearts.
So back to Character. Just like steel, as Downs and Russin write, is boring as hell when it’s broken down to it’s bare facts, so characters are cardboard nothingness until…we shape them into agents of doing. Good stories happen when characters are doing something. Falling in love, struggling through crisis, winning, losing, overcoming etc, etc, etc… When I ask myself what these characters are doing, the obvious answer is incredibly boring. They’re suffering. They’re both stuck in past tragedies and meet along some astrological plane of existence, stewing in their own morbidities. Two depressed fucks just standing around staring at each other. Waiting for me to do something with them.
When we consider Micheal Foley’s “Age of Absurdity” he speaks of humans has having four ignoble truths:
We can’t sit still
We can’t shut up
We can’t escape self-obsession
We can’t stop wanting things
Pause for a moment and read that again. Am I the only one who feels personally attacked? Good, we should. We should consider our ignobility. Our flaws. The conflict we bring into our own lives and how it will apply to characters (both on stage and on the page) is what drives a story that seems to be stuck on a stormy, cold beach at the end of the world.
In addition to knowing those unflattering things about the character (and ourselves) we must consider that they are not in a vacuum. They are a part of the plot, inseparable. They are the drivers, the instigators, and they are all under this dark sky of theme. So while they don’t necessarily reflect real people, they need to feel natural within the context of both the plot and what the story is about, in total.
For the next couple of weeks, and leading up to November (where I intend to put myself in a social media time-out and focus on finishing this novel–tragedy or no) I will be asking myself how each of my characters display and act out these truths, I will ask where they are in the world, and what it is that they both so desperately want. What they’re willing to do to get it. It seems, at first, so easy to fit them into an appropriate box, but this process has proven to be deceptively simple and requires a lot of work. And it could be work that no one will end up reading. But that’s not the point of writing. As a good friend once reminded me on my last birthday:
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”–Kafka
I hope that this gives you something to think about, when it comes to your characters, and how complex writing well really is. Why it can’t be done by a machine, not in the ways that matter. Not in the ways that tell real stories about human existence. But anything worth doing, is worth doing well. And if this one takes me a little longer, then that’s the time it takes. Good luck out there.
