Characters

Though I haven't gone into it in depth in this blog, I define myself by the breadth of my creative experiences. I enjoy spending time with creative people of all breeds and have explored a lot of artistic avenues on my own. Sometimes this makes me fear trying to do everything and never really getting good at anything, but it also gives me plenty of room for comparison when I need a new perspective.

A day or two after I intended but still more or less on target, I've started to tackle this manuscript. At first I felt so resistant to reading it at all. I found any excuse not to break open the thick folder, didn't even want to look at my 291-page manuscript.

But eventually I settled in and devoted a bit of my Saturday to it, burning a sweet-smelling candle and listening to Tim Buckley with my cat and papers on the couch. Eventually notes started to come out like I was giving stage directions, telling my characters to spit words out like they were too bitter to keep in their mouths anymore. I hope that means the characters will eventually feel more three-dimensional, like I can feel them in the room with me as I tell them how I want them to be.

This is going to be a long process though. They're only on their first read-through of the script, the set is still being built, there definitely aren't any real props yet. The characters are still sort of a mystery. Months from now, they will feel like real people existing in a little world inside our own.

Incidentally, after I'd finished finding the copy engaging and quick to read, after I'd marked up a good 40 pages before the end of my CD, I found myself hating everything about it. The flat characters and the plot that was unbelievable, immature at best. Then the worry started sneaking in, the suspicion that it was really just unsalvageable.

Going back, though, why can't this feel like I'm preparing for a play or a concert? Why can't my plot and characters be revealed in layers over the course of months? Why should I be embarrassed to show my friends a draft and ask for suggestions when I know everyone knows it's undeveloped? It's like showing my brown underpainting, my storyboard, my initial sketches. Certainly no masterpiece yet, and no way to know where it will end up when it's done.

Taking a cue from NaNoWriMo itself, when I was motivated by the fact that I'd told so many people I was writing 50,000 words in a month, I've set another deadline. I've told some friends I'll give this thing to them by Christmas, and I intend to do just that. No matter how much editing I have done. Because you can't start working on your character before you've read the script, and you can't prepare for the concert without attending your first rehearsal. At some point, everyone's work looks like a vague sketch or a bad sightread, right?