l i l e p h y t e


November 6th, 12:39 | I'm ghost-writing my own novel

Well, it's been six days, I'm about 6K words in, and my story is, predictably, out of control. On the bright side, I actually have a story now, with matching characters and everything. I'm quite happy about this development.

For those of you at the last Ladies' Night, thanks for all your suggestions. Sadly, that woman with the Hallowe'en candy, and her framing of the security guard for murder? Yeah, umm, not so much. That whole line, along with the incompetent cook has been, not axed, but definitely "lost" in the haze. I've got lots of warm fuzzies about where the characters I've actually kept (and the new ones I've invented) are going though.

But it's interesting. Despite knowing, in a grand-scheme kind of way, where my story's going, and what's going to happen/has happened/is happening, I'm still amazed by some of the things I write, by the filler I've chosen for those in-between bits.

This time around, I have borrowed much more heavily on people I know in real life for my characters, rather than just trying to make them all up myself. Maybe it's that aspect of realism that's making it easier for me to bring out their emotions, or maybe it's something else, but I've never had such an easy time making my characters live the way these ones are (at times, in places, on my good days). It's a good feeling.

It also interests me to see what I'm filling the gaps with, because my subconscious is dredging up all sorts of things I hadn't planned that I don't really realize until I see them, half-unfolded, on the screen. It's a little uncanny, like ghost-writing, except that it's telling me more about the things I guess I should maybe be thinking about a little more anyway.

It's a strange semi-confessional kind of catharsis, and I'm starting to feel a little nervous about all the people I've promised can read my prose, if I ever finish it. (Fear not, I wouldn't wuss out of finishing it just so people can't read it. I'm too stubborn for that.) I've written lots of things I considered "too personal" to be shared with the world at large (my teenaged rationale being that they Wouldn't Understand It, of course), but I've never written anything so baldly. There's no disguising the emotions here, no abstraction through hippopotami and absurdist word-trappings. There are people, and they're interacting. And sometimes their behaviour makes me cringe, not only because they're awful, but because I know where my subconscious is getting that sequence of actions from.

This year's novel-writing is going to be educational, to say the least.


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