A Journey
The Word in the Daily Post is Relocate. I wrote a tome about that word, about the number of times I’ve moved. Wrote it all out, let emotions spill onto the page, let myself look in the mirror to see what and who was there.
It was too much. I deleted it.
It took me on a journey. Not all journeys are intended, nor are they all beneficial. This one wasn’t intended, and it definitely wasn’t beneficial.
It did help me on the journey of learning.
Because if there’s a journey involved, there should be a map, and even if the map isn’t the action of the journey, it can help avoid the pitfalls of heading down the wrong path.
The first post – it wasn’t the wrong path, necessarily, but it wasn’t yet a clear marker on the map. It’s not ready to share. It’s not ready to leave my mind. I deleted it because I remember it all.
Some of those moments in my life add elements to the stories I write. Of course they do. I may not remember them as defined and clear moments, or who was there, or how it began or even how it ended. What I remember is what was internal. How I felt, how the reactions of others brought on anger, empathy, rage, sympathy, fear, joy.
If I hadn’t lived those moments, could I truly get inside a character and let her show that emotion or reaction or facade? I don’t know.
But there’s also a problem with that. Some things are too much, and we cope with them in the real world by ‘putting them away’ until we can deal with them. If I do that to a character in a story, they aren’t complete or whole. And it’s easy to see and feel. Or not.
That makes for a character who isn’t wholly believable.
If the reader can’t see or feel the reaction, the inner, the instinctive moments in the words of that character, if they can’t empathise and become, the character is lacking. There can be no mask in the POV character. If they behave in a way that hides every reaction and reality of their life, they’re lying to themselves.
In the real world, it happens a lot. People do that. They hide from themselves. Or that’s how it seems. If they have that argument in their mind, though, it comes out. They know their own truth. Hidden, but they still know. Internal, deeply tucked away, but it causes reactions of a particular type, something natural that responds to the next time ‘it’ happens.
In a story, the POV character can do that too, but it has to be clear to the reader what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, so it gives a reality element to the inner workings of the character. The motives for the character’s internal actions and reactions must be real.
Story world is not the world we live in. It’s much more real than that. The reader has to know what the character feels, why they do what they do. If the reactions (or lack of them) aren’t appropriate to the person, there’s no real person inside the character.
What a waste of a story that would be.
And because I’m tired, that’s where we end for Today. Later, I’ll do a character interview with the Main Character of the current WIP and see how she feels about it all.
WIP – Valki: up to midpoint, where the main character and the main protagonist find out just how similar they are, and what a shock it is to the third party. The stakes are raised (no, not the wooden ones, it’s not a vampire story). I hope to have the first draft completed by this time next week, but I’m not going to rush it. I already know there are bits that need some more effort, or complete extraction, so if I leave them in the back of my mind for a while – who knows? The world may come right, or the original idea may be compounded by a new spin …
Caption: The things a writer at work needs to consider … it’s enough to make a cat yawn.
