Mar
Revelations of Character
My characters have revealed some interesting facts to me as of recent. For one, I have discovered that my character Hope is in fact a Taoist of sorts- or to say the least she preaches said philosophies and on the outside it may appear as that she is putting them to practice but on the inside she is in complete conflict like her soul is just being rubbed the wrong way from one end of the book to the other till she finally makes peace in book two.
Also, I was reading ‘Character, Emotion, and Viewpoint’ by Nancy Kress last night. It’s an awesome book as I’ve decided my favorite thing about story telling is those I tell it about and all the little things that make them- them.
So, I was nearing the end of the book last night when she makes the suggestion of viewing your entire story (in your head) from the eyes of all of your characters one at a time. I had just made a decision about POV that I’ll get to in a minute and decided, what the heck, it might be fun. That and I was really bored.
To my slight amazement I came to the conclusion that the story will best be told from Emily’s eyes. She’s such and innocent and simple creature at heart I feel it would give the whole story a deeper meaning. Sometimes, while comparing my two star characters, I become worried because Hope seemed so much more complicated and motivated than Emily but I think telling the story through her eyes will help. Not only will it give a much needed depth to Em as well as provide several sub-plots but it will also bring even more intrigue to Hope as well as suspicion which as we know is always a good thing.
If you’ve been following my posts for awhile you know that I’ve been having trouble deciding whether or not I should write in first person POV or not. It looked really fun and I tested it out finding that in some areas it comes fairly natural to me -but- after all this and a lot of reading on the subject I’ve decided that fun and functional only have three letters in common and that’s not enough for me to base a decision on.
I’m going to use third person and while the main focus will be on Emily and everything happening through her eyes there will be some scenes, even a whole chapter or two, that will be played out through either Hope or another more villain-like characters POV.
So, yeah. Lots of revelations. Joy. :)
03Mar
something i’ve occasionally done is to step away from a story and write it from the other character’s perspective. the same scene, just another view. i even set this as a writing prompt on a crit site at least once. it can not only show you more of your perceived main character, but also insights into your secondary characters, which can they influence your primary character again. i wrote about 40000 words of a novel during one nanawrimo (i believe), before finally accepting that the character i was focusing on simply wasn’t the right one; but a secondary one i kept being pulled to was the main catalyst. funny how these things happen. but yeah, joy. :-)
03Mar
J1M: I think it was meant to be, this whole thing. First writing, or viewing at least, the story from Hope’s pov (OMG it just occured to me that I wrote the wrong character in, Amber is a similar char in another story *slaps head*) and then viewing it from Emily’s. It’s helped me look so far into Hope’s mind and now I’ll be able to do the same thing with Emily. A facinating experience.
It’s amazing what characters do when left alone to stew in our minds. We only need to have our senses focussed in the right spots to pick up on what they’re saying and how we need to express it.
Yeah, the Nanowrimo was awesome but it sucks so much to write all that and then realize you need to make large changes because that’s just the way the story goes. My begginning ended up as my ending and my ending ended up somewhere in the middle and my main char swapped genders. :D Gotta love it.