Oh, hey, look at this, it looks like I haven't blogged in, uh, let's see...*checks watch*...almost two years now!
Yeah, so, in hindsight, I started this blog at just about the worst time humanly possible. The time when I was nearing the end of the first semester of my BSN degree program (aka the exact moment when the freshman wave of "Hey, I can do this!" gives way to the crushing realization of "Fuck, I actually have to do this"), and also nearing the beginning of the mercifully brief "working two nursing jobs" phase of my life.
As much of a bummer as it is to type, I mostly didn't blog for those two years because there just flat-out wasn't much to blog about. I started this blog mainly as a platform for my main loves, horror, reading, and writing, and frankly while I was in the BSN program for almost two and a half years, I had very little drive or motivation to lend time to any of these loves. It was exceedingly hard to find the motivation to read my ever-growing TBR stack when I was spending all my time reading articles about quality assurance in the hospital setting. It was harder still to find the motivation to continue my fiction writing when my Global Public Health class was demanding me to hypothetically solve the AIDS crisis in Africa. Yes, I realize this sounds like lame whiny excusing as I'm typing it out. I admit, I suck.
But now that I've been finished with classes for nearly three months, my drive to do, well, everything is coming back. I'm actually reading for leisure again! I may turn out a semi-decent showing at the upcoming Camp NaNoWriMo! I can shamelessly binge an entire season of Penny Dreadful without consequence! The possibilities are limitless!
And now that I have that drive back, I also have the drive to blather into the void about said things.
Today I'm going to blather about the aforementioned Camp NaNoWriMo. My NaNo showings ever since my last win way back in November 2014 have been rather sad. I think the highest I've cracked on any event since then is 11k. It's been a bad time. For July Camp this year, I decided to do something a little different, since that's what Camp is all about. Now that Camp lets you select an hourly time goal for your writing instead of a word count goal, I decided to commit to one hour a day of researching and outlining for the novel I've been brewing for years, and have thus far had two false starts at actually writing.
This particular novel has been with me the longest out of all my writing ideas. It's been in my head, in some form or another, since I was around 16 or 17. That's a bit less than a decade of my life. For most of that time it remained stalled in vague, "hey I have these main characters and this idea that would be kinda cool" form. Only in about the last year and a half have I seriously started fleshing it out into tangible novel form.
That year and a half has been a rough time. Simply put, this project is way out of my comfort zone. It has its roots in horror, to be sure. But it's also a historical novel incorporating real events to some degree, meaning that my usual route of "meh, that seems right???" won't serve me here. It takes place over a long chunk of time, well over a decade, meaning that I actually have to plan shit out more in advance than I'm used to. And most damningly, it consists of two intertwining stories told from two separate viewpoints - in other words, taking the amount of prep work I would have for one of my normal stories and doubling it.
Wheeeeeee.
It's not been easy going, and I have a long road ahead of me still. But as cliche as it sounds, I feel there's a reason this story has stuck with me for this long. Slowly but surely it's revealing its true form to me. I can see the shapeless lump of clay I started with beginning to contort into something. And just a couple of nights ago, it decided to throw me for my biggest loop yet.
One of the biggest frustrations I've had thus far with this novel is that its two stories have been wildly differing in their developmental hurdles. Story A is...well, I won't say clicking along, because that makes it sound like it's coming along a lot faster than it is. Plodding along is more like it. Yanno, it's got a basic structure, the characters are being fleshed out, the plot mechanics are slowly one by one dropping into place. It's slow, but we're getting places. Story B, meanwhile, has been dead in the water. Not so much in terms of plot - if anything, it's been coming along easier plotwise than Story A. But in terms of finding any semblance of meaning to the characters or figuring out the narrative structure or just finding any motivation to write the damn thing, it's been like pulling teeth.
And all of a sudden, a couple nights ago, a major problem hit me in the face like a ton of bricks.
After all this time, I finally realized:
The character who I had assumed was the protagonist of Story B all this time is not in fact the protagonist.
Now that I think about it in hindsight, the signs were there. I had done several of those interviewing your protagonist character-building exercises for this guy, and every time it did not go well. Each exercise I threw at him he remained, head stubbornly shoved up butt, unwilling to self-reflect in any meaningful way or take any responsibility for his own story. Each scene I tried to have him narrate felt artificial; it was like he was placating me by telling me what I thought I wanted to hear about his story.
And then there was his foil, a character who had been there since relatively early in development, hanging out on the sidelines and clinging to the story. A huge chunk of his initial character development was the fact that he was perpetually overlooked - by his family, his friends, the woman he loved, the alleged protagonist who was his friend and business partner. And evidently by me, the author. This character finally grew a spine the other night and spoke to me.
It's such a weird feeling to find out that a huge chunk of this story I've been working on was fundamentally wrong this whole time. That instead of being the story of one character telling us "this is the story of how I ruined my life," it's actually the story of this other character telling us "this is the story of how he ruined his life and how my part in his ruination changed me forever." To be perfectly honest, part of me is kind of indignant about it. I feel like grabbing my new protagonist by the collar and shaking him around a bit. "You were here ALL THIS TIME, why didn't you say anything?!" But on the other hand, a huge part of me is also relieved. I'm not gonna pretend like this revelation is the One True Thing That's suddenly burst open the floodgates of creativity and solved my myriad of issues with the story. It's still an inching-along process that more often than not feels like waiting for decades-old molasses to pour out of an upturned jar. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a clearer handle on the story now than I did a few days ago. Now that I've finally realized whose story I'm actually telling, the pieces are beginning to fall into place. Perhaps I might be able to get some decent work done this Camp after all.
(I'm sure these words will be hilarious on July 31st when I'm curled up in the fetal position sobbing over how stupid this story is being and how stupid I'm being. In the meantime let's just all pretend to be optimistic, 'kay? 'Kay.)
