January 15, 2011

Drama, Drama Everywhere! Part 2

Once upon a time there was this lovely Villain. He was all planned out by Author to be wonderfully vile, have a semi-complicated past, inspire disgust and fascination, tempt not only Main Character but also Major Secondary Character (MSC), have wants and needs, and yet still be able to be relatable in his motivations. Things were progressing so beautifully.

One day, while Main Character was being belligerent to Author, Villain began to think he deserved another story. His (im)perfection existed at a level far beyond the ability of this puny story to portray his true greatness. Villain toyed with this idea, waiting until Author and Main Character had finished their shouting match to bring his proposal forward. Author didn’t really want to deal with Villain right then, being much more concerned with staring off into space whilst attempting to save the story from death by black hole.

Now, Villain was intelligent. As soon as he realized that his conversation with Author would go nowhere (about three words in), he went to confer with other characters. Unfortunately for him, Main Character had sequestered herself in some private place for some private gloating over her power over Author, and the rest of the characters either had lives to attend to or were incurably unobservant when off-duty (*ahem* MSC *ahem*). That is, except for Mystery Character. Mystery Character agreed that Villain should find a new story and, rather enthusiastically, the two of them began to concoct a delicate and subtle plan to convince Author of their position. As soon as they finished their designing, they began to implement it.

January 02, 2011

Drama, Drama Everywhere! Part 1

As far as it’s going, my current WIP has had the most drama of any of my stories to date. One would expect that this is a bad sign, but many would find it very encouraging, if a little exhausting. Let me explain:

My first sign that something was up, something different, occurred while I was happily working on my outline. I had plotted out a rather lovely and twisted course for the story to follow, and I was figuring out a little more about Main Character’s head space. We were going along merrily, reviewing a scene and her emotional reaction with it, and how she has this big secret that she can’t tell, and how an incident has just brought it to the forefront of her thinking (this secret is vital to the plot and must not be revealed until a certain moment in order to facilitate the proper feeling of the world falling apart). During this scene review, I start to write down how Main Character feels as if she wants to spill this secret to the world, but she doesn’t...