Of Hurdles, Stumbles, and the Fall... · 4:12am May 23rd, 2014
No I'm not retiring, but I couldn't think of a better title.
I guess you could say I've been 'stuck' for a while now. A little while after putting out Fluttershy's House of Villains, I got to work on a new story, and quickly pumped out 5k+ words for it and had the entire plot outlined (10-15k words).
Then, somewhere around 9k words, a third of the way through the second part of the fic, I realized I forgot to make the characters not suck. I'm really at an utter loss. I started out trying to write a Romeo and a Juliet, but after what one could call the 'honeymoon phase' or 'boy-meets-girl phase', I realized there was nowhere to go with their relationship and they were still far from their destination at the story's end.
I've been tempted to scrap the story, but there plot underlying it feels really good, so I haven't been able to let it go. It feels like if I could just make the characters more of... characters, I would have a really great story on my hands. The problem frustrated me to the point where I just slowly thought about it less and less, until I barely ever worked on it, letting programming and other activities take over the time I used to spend writing.
Usually when I hit a wall, I either find a way around or over it, or I accept the problems as mistakes that have already been made and carry on. This time I haven't managed to do either.
I guess the main reason I'm posting this is to voice my frustrations, rubberducking in hopes of finding a solution, but also I feel like I owe some explanation.
It's like getting to the post office but leaving the package at home in away. Also ignore me I have never wrote a story in my life.
It won't be easy but if the back bone of the story is worth saving maybe build another story on it but with the characters as you had wanted them...
Nothing worth doing is ever easy.
I know the feeling. Not being able to figure something out / accomplish something, wanting to just do something else instead.
I find that backtracking helps. Starting a piece over from scratch. For example, rewrite the characters, but not necessarily the plot.
Don't know if that was really worth calling advice, but good luck anyway. Remember, it's what you enjoy doing that's important. You don't owe an explanation unless you've already made promises, which you more-or-less haven't.
I guess I'm in a similar situation… ok, I'm in exactly the same situation. I actually was able to sit down and write today, though, so I made progress. In my case, I have tons of ideas that I'd love to see written in engaging and immersive (is that even a word?) ways. But I have neither the drive nor, in my defeatist opinion, the skill to execute them. In response, I took to doing many other things (my most recent of which has been attempting to create a physics problem solver program in Visual Basic to teach myself Object Oriented Programming because I'm still a little more than six months away from taking a class on OOP with C++, and I can't wait anymore).
For you, the only advice I have is that given enough time, something will come to you. Sometimes that requires going back to the very beginning and doing even more planning than what you normally do. In this case, it sounds like your characters may not have enough meat to them to make them interesting characters. I'd revisit their backstories and see if you can't invent some things that would become obstacles that need to be overcome along whatever journey you have planned for them. Or, you can do what I'm thinking of doing for my own situation, and continue on with how it is for a chapter or two more, have some huge event happen no one would expect that forces your characters into a worst-case scenario where their flaws naturally develop over time in order for the story to go on.
In my case, it was the character development. Once I realized that my characters needed to, well, develop as characters, I hit a major wall because I was writing for characters that were, for all intents and purposes, portrayed as having very little flaws by the show (writing for the princesses is incredibly difficult in this sense, and having two OCs that are supposed to be their equals but not also without flaws doesn't make things easier). So I've had to stop and really consider where I want every facet of this story to go. It's been forever since I made that realisation, and it was only a week or so ago that I figured what had to be done. Now I need to go back to the very beginning and re-plan everything I had, but it will be worth it in the long run.
I'm sure hearing about my own trials and tribulations isn't going to help you much with your own, but it's all I can really offer. I hope you do get through this, because no one wants to have to kill off an idea. It's like killing a little part of your soul.
Sometimes you have to kill your darlings.
Apologies to Faulkner and King.
Fucking roll with it.
The number one thing that goes wrong in Romeo and Juliet stories is forcing a relationship between two characters that have no chemistry. Characters who don't particularly like each other, who don't have anything in common, who are only together out of inertia or selfish reasons or social expectations. After the heady rush of youth and independence has worn off a lot of those couples find that there's just kind of nowhere left to go, and they drift apart.
Examine that! Flip the entire thing on it's head and make it a bitter, sad story about a loveless relationship and a messy break up. Characters often tell us things about their stories that we might never have expected. Maybe your characters are telling you they're not right for each other.
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I was sort of planning on using that. The first few times the two meet it's a 'honeymoon' phase, but then where I left off was in the middle of a conversation with the one character asking the other 'So where is this going?' I want to use that. It would be the easiest/best fix, I think, but I haven't quite figured out how it plays out within the frame of the story so that they have a more realistic romance beyond just crushing on one another.
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I moved on for a while and started working on the next story after it, but shortly after I hit a wall in that, and then... well, hitting a wall on two separate projects sort of discouraged me. I barely wrote for a few weeks.
After posting this blog, I managed to get over that hurdle in the second story (the one that isn't the topic of the post), and I'm feeling a lot better about getting over the first hurdle now. I guess it just took a bit of typing and talking to organize/realize my thoughts and figure out what to do.
I don't have time for a full edit and dissection but if you want I could give it a look over. Can't hurt.