I’ve been spending a lot of time contemplating my story these past few days. I haven’t had a lot of free time, but every chance I get I try to fine-tune my ideas more. I’ve got the beginning worked out for the most part and I know where I want the book to go. I actually came up with an idea for three books, which is really exciting. I know where I want each book to start and where I want them to end and I have some of the intermediary details worked out, but I still have a lot more to figure out.
Today, I’ve been trying to work out one of my main characters. I need to figure out what his situation in the story is before I can write it because his story is integral to the rest of the story. Any road I go down with him will change how the rest of my characters interact and pretty much a lot of the plot revolves around how he is set up. So, I need to figure him out.
I did finally decide on how he and one of the other main characters meet. I had a general idea of how I wanted them to meet, but I didn’t have specific thoughts. Today, though, I came to a conclusion about that. I think it’s pretty good. It’s got some of the ideas I was tossing around on Sunday mixed in with a few other things.
I do need to be decisive about my main female character’s back story. I’ve already gotten that part written down, but I think it needs some revising to be a little clearer.
In my writing class, the teacher said to just write things down and then go back to edit when finished, but I have a hard time doing that. I’m such a perfectionist when it comes to my writing (and a lot of other things lol) so I have a hard time writing something that I thinks needs fixing and not going back to fix it. I think that’s why it takes me so long to write my stories and also why I never finish them. I just get so frustrated about not having the perfect structure and wording. Oh well. This time, I’m just going to write and see where it takes me.
Another thing I’m going to forgo for now is writing my character profiles. Normally, I come up with all of my main characters beforehand and write out descriptive profiles about them, but I think I’ll do that as I go. I think it might be better to write the story and as I introduce a character, decide then what I want them to be like. That might be easier than trying to decide EVERYTHING all at the beginning. I have to fight my OCD tendencies. lol.
So, yeah, I’m pretty excited about this. It’s going to be fun writing this story. It’s been hard narrowing down to one story to focus on, but it’s nice to just have one instead of all the other ones. I still have tons of ideas for them all, but I’m just going to be writing this one for now.
Wish me luck!
Good luck and have fun doing it. My writing class teacher talked about the same thing, to just write out whats in your head at the time and go back later to edit it. She also talked about how each writer is different though, and no one way is right or wrong. You’ll get there.