November 10th, 15:22 | Short nails and insufficiently two-dimensional characters

My nails are evenly short and unbroken for the first time in... I don't know, but it's at least a month. (It's not so much that I suck at keeping my nails all girly and pretty, it's more that I try to grow them out, and usually one or other of my ancillary activities leads to at least one chipped/broken nail within four minutes of my even thinking about having long, neat, possibly manicured nails.) Did I do this because I got sick of the broken nails? No (well, almost 'no'; the clasp on my goddamn jeans just ate my left thumbnail -- there was a razor-straight gash right across it! gah!) for the most part. The sad truth is that I've been motivated to hack back the claws so that I can type faster (yes, it does make a difference, even to the girl who completed 4 hours of her compiler project in inch-long fake nails because it was the day after formal, and I couldn't get them off).

I'm not sure why I think this will help me; it's not like my brain is merrily churning out plot ideas and actions for my characters so fast my poor little fingers just can't keep up. If anything, I'm having a creativity drought (sound familiar? yeah). I think I'm going to try the ten-minute bursts of writing (usually somewhere between 300 and 500 words in that little burst) to inspire myself. If one of them actually launches me into The Zone, then I'll just stick with it. (Duh.)

I am making some progress, as my wordcount (11,181 or 11,352 depending on who you trust) can attest, but my characters' actions are beginning to seem more and more contrived. This whole "novelling" gig was much simpler when my characters didn't have emotions that they take seriously. I mean, the crazed domestic goddess who wants to murder her neighbour's Pomeranian? She had absolutely no qualms about any of it (seriously, folks, not even about cornering it in the elevator, and kicking it to death, not that I've ever even dreamt of doing anything like that myself, ahem) until she started trying to enlist the help of her other neighbour. Currently this guy doesn't have much personality (seeing as how he's possessed by his cat and all), so it was mostly just her rambling at him. Somewhere in the middle of her rant, my character realized that she was talking about a living, breathing, (yapping) dog, and that the owner of said dog would probably be quite upset if the dog were to mysteriously vanish, as she had been so blythely suggesting only two lines before.

And all that's fine, up until the point where my character decides that she cares about arbitrarily wiping out a Real Live Lifeform, in a move that would probably make her A Bad Person. Now, I ask of you, what in the sam hill is going on? These are characters in a project of mine! They're supposed to be two-dimensional and, you know, responsive to my bidding! They're not supposed to just flesh out ethical depths for themselves and ruin my, if not comedic, at least not overly serious plot tangents. ARGH!

I'm beginning to understand why in the movies directors are always stalking around, rolling their eyes, muttering "Actors!". My book is full of fucking divas.

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