Characters are People, Too

I have encountered a very stubborn character. This is a character I've written before, but I've been revising an old series of stories and rewriting them and she has gotten even more stubborn than I've expected. She is, quite frankly, refusing to be written. How does this occur? Well, I wrote the first book in the series and that main character just wrote herself.

This one? I open the document and every word feels like I'm bleeding onto the keyboard, one drop, one word, at a time. I have a plot outline I like and a good overall arc, but the actual writing is just creeping along. It's like writer's block, but a very tightly focused beam… Maybe we should call it character block?

What's a girl to do?

My advice to anyone in the same position is to change projects, if you can. You can fight it for a while, but if you go on too long, the frustration will mount and then everything else will grind to a halt too. Every writer, at least every one I have ever met, has had to deal with this kind of dilemma at some point.

Characters are people, too. When you're really involved in what your writing, they take on their own life. I don't mind it so much when they actually write, but when they dig their heels in is when it gets annoying. But you can't let it stop you, or derail your writing entirely. Work on something else for a while.

In my case, I think I'm going to swap entirely. This is a series, so I'm going to swap the books planned as 2 and 3. 2 is the stubborn one, so she's getting bumped down the line. Maybe it will make her more easily handled if she knows that I mean business, eh?

We'll see how it goes. If any writers want to chime in with your own advice for unruly characters, feel free!