I finished the first round of revisions on the novella I mentioned a couple posts back. Which means, of course, that I am now firmly in the “This is terrible why do I even bother trying to write” stage of things.
Which, in turn, means it’s time to stop thinking about it (this is why I pawn it off onto beta readers, because I cannot be even remotely objective at this point in the game), which means I need to think about something else.
Ah-ha. Time to get back to Magic In Disguise! That’s been stuck at 20,000 words for way too long now. I claimed writer’s block when I first got stuck, decided to work on Wings of Song for a while, and when I hit a wall there (not a huge one: it’s Christmas in that story now, and I can’t bring myself to write winter when it’s so lovely outside and our winter was so long and miserable, so I’m waiting until my memory has faded a bit. I’ll probably get back to it in August when I’ve started to melt from heat) I took a break from writing all together until the novella demanded I write it.
The brick wall on Magic In Disguise hasn’t gotten any less solid, but I think I’m finally ready to bash away at it until it crumbles. (Don’t you like my elegant metaphors?) Plus I miss Maia and Len. And Becket. Every so often I feel guilty for not doing more to promote and market Magic Most Deadly, because I feel like I’m letting my characters down. Then I remind myself that the very best marketing/promotion plan is to just write more about them, and write well, and so I dive back once more into their world and determine to give them another chance to shine.
Come July or August or whenever, when I start to feel lonely for Julie &co. from Wings of Song, I’ll give Magic In Disguise a rest, and change once more.
I’m not sure it’s entirely healthy to be this attached to all my characters, but it certainly is the best motivation in the world.
Oh, I dunno about “not healthy”. It’s so fun to get to really *like* your characters. I couldn’t imagine writing any other way. I’m not sure I could switch back and forth between stories like that though; I have this thing about wanting to finish stories in one go (both reading and writing). And you’re so right about the best way to promote your characters; people want more!
Oh, I would love to be able to finish my stories in one go, but I’ve learned that when I do hit those inevitable brick walls, it works far better, for me, to take a break and work on something else for a time rather than keep pushing. It’s not always the most productive method when it comes to not-writing projects (as the innumerable sewing projects stashed in my closet attest), but it does at least seem to work beautifully for writing.
I don’t know how to not get attached to characters when we write about them. I know for me, I pretty much have to allow myself to feel what they’re feeling in order to adequately write for them. Also, it’s entirely understandable why you have to stop writing one thing and work on the other. Inspiration for different things happens at different times. We can’t choose it. Forcing it only produces bland, more cardboard writing, I think.
It’s always slightly disconcerting to get yourself out of your characters’ heads and remember that, oh yeah, I’m me, not an upper-class magician in the 1920s, or an eleven-year-old girl in the 1930s, or – in the case of the novella, and this one was REALLY disconcerting – a grieving widow suddenly catapulted 300 years into the future, onto a spaceship. And then go make supper and try to carry on a normal conversation with your family.
So many different lives, carried in one head …
I wish I was MORE attached to my characters, so that they would literally knock on my door all day long, begging for more attention. Alas, it is too easy to get side tracked on all the busyiness of summer. But there have been times when I’ve been hopping between projects and characters from different stories start fighting in my head when they aren’t getting attention! and I’m like, wait, you guys don’t even KNOW each other, you live in different CENTURIES, how can you be talking to each other? 🙂
Ooh, I’m glad that last has never happened to me! That would be too weird. My brain’s a crazy enough place as it is; it might just explode if my stories started leaking into each other.