While I update…
I’m going to pull down the pages for Origins. Not because I’m giving up on the story, not a chance. I’m still stuck in the same place for months, buuuut I’ll get to that later. No, I’m going to pull it down because the pages, particularly the Character page, is just badly written, awful, and makes me cringe. It’s not even that the characters are bad, because I don’t feel like Emily and Isabelle are bad characters.
The way I wrote and described them (Especially Isabelle) is just awful.
And I know part of the problem. They were both created when I was a writing noob, trying so hard to analyze personality traits and create well-thought out, developed characters. I looked at the scenes of the movies, thinking things such as “OMG Marko just put his hand on his chaps he must have a secret injury possibly healed there let’s put that in.“
Two notes: One, I never actually thought THAT particular sentence, and two, yes, really, that’s the sort of stuff I came up with. I can remember watching the scene between Max, Lucy and the Boys in the video store, studying Dwayne like I was some sort of behavioural specialist when I was writing Signs of Change. One of the actual things I thought, and I cringe to admit this: “He keeps looking all over the place like it’s something he’s never seen before he’s studying it really closely WHAT IF HE WAS TEMPORARILY BLINDED BEFORE HE GOT TURNED” as well as “He’s so quiet I wonder why WHAT IF HE COMMUNICATES WITH HIS PACK MENTALLY BECAUSE HE GOT INJURED BEFORE HE TURNED AND COULDN’T SPEAK SO THAT WAS HOW HE COMMUNICATED AND HE JUST GOT USED TO IT.”
Please forgive the capsrape and complete mary-stuish thoughts. I lose all former writer cred, I know.
That’s why I need to take down those pages, and why I need to completely overhaul Unknown Blood and Signs of Change. Back then, I thought that analyzing every minute detail would make my writing better. Yes and no: The way I showed above, that’s the wrong way. Peoples’ eyes naturally wander, they never remain fixed. And some people are quiet. Marko and Paul don’t speak either, but that doesn’t mean they were temporarily rendered mute. It means that they recognized that it wasn’t the right moment to speak and they probably had a good laugh over Max’s immediate infatuation for Lucy when they returned to the cave.
August 12, 2011 at 10:17 PM
You had me laughing while reading this let me tell you. The thoughts that went through my own mind when I pictured Marko’s possible injury or Dwayne’s muteness was really quite hilarious. Although I have to say that they aren’t as crazy of solutions as you think they are as to how they may or may not have come about in the vampire world. Although I think David would get really fed up with with Dwayne if he were a mute and probably would have just ended his misery. I wish you luck with the clean up job. Just know that you’re not the only one who reads stuff back over and says, holy shit, what was I thinking? LOL.
August 12, 2011 at 10:24 PM
Haha, thanks Jenn! I know I’m not the only one, but I reread my stuff and think,”Dear god, what was I, high?!”
XD
There’s definitely crazier stuff out there, no doubt about that in my mind whatsoever. And thank the skies above for improvement.