The cynical optimist

I’ve talked about the fact that I’m a writer in the middle of attempting to write a book a few times on here I believe, but if this is your first blog post of mine that you have ever seen, I’m a writer in the middle of attempting to write a book and I can safely say I have no clue what I’m doing. (Insert Newsies gif here.)

The first draft of a full length novel I’ve ever finished was one that I meticuloulsy planned out, a 3 page outline, character charts and details galore, and then finally I started typing and once I did I never looked at any of that work again. I won’t say it was wasted time, because I know those characters like the back of my hand. I knew their motivations and I knew their secrets and their fears and who they loved. I KNEW THEM.

The novel I’m working on now however, started in a completely different way…

I was walking around Salem, you know the city with the witch hunt…it was around halloween and we were listening to a guide tell us about the brilliant history of the city. The buildings were from the 1800’s and they had stories, ever single building had some sort of significance, whether it was haunted, whether Houdini once escaped the jail…whatever everything had life, everything had a story, and I left there thinking about how much I wanted to write a fantasy novel, or even a paranormal one…

That november during NaNoWriMo, I opened a word document and started typing, I started and restarted the book several times but finally after the stumbling start I was off to the races. every night was a new surprise, I was learning about the characters as they were willing to tell me, I had a vague very generic idea about what I wanted to write… (Leaned very heavily upon Game of Thrones as I had just finished reading the first book.) but when I got the character to the first city I was met with a false prophet and a religion that sacrificed innocent kids to a goddess…and that was infinitely more interesting to me than a king, and a carbon copy of Eragon and Game of Thrones.

I tried to move my characters along,

“Come on Frey, yes Cain is a terrible human being and should have never had followers to begin with…but there are much bigger fish to fry..” I would plead with my MC each night and each day I wouldn’t progess the main story any further but I would end up delving deeper into the lore of the religion and the people of the city…

After awhile, I finally gave in a decided that this was the story I was supposed to be telling. I thought i had told the story well, there was conflict, there were fights, there were ghost people and there was death and grief. it’s was well done.

November ended and I let the whole world leave me and I forgot about it.

Fast forward to now and I’m working on that book again. I’m realizing that though for the most part the story is fleshed out and the characters are real and lively, and it has some good humor to it, there is one glaring hole in the whole thing.

My antagonist has no reason to do what she does.

She gains nothing from toying with these people, She could have just as easily stayed wherever it was she came from and lived a happy life, but instead she causes war and death and destruction just for shits and giggles? I don’t get it. I’ve wracked my brain trying to give her a backstory, trying to give her motivation, trying to make her less 2D; I don’t want a villain who is evil just for evilness sake. I want a villain who is motivated by real human emotions. But everything I type lately seems wrong. Her story escapes me…and it sucks.

There are days where i feel like I can’t write.

There are days where i feel like that first novel was just a fluke.

There are days where I feel like i’ve forgotten it all.

But I have to keep trying, I have to keep typing in hopes that one day this whole thing will make sense. .
Wow…okay this might have been my longest blog post to date, and i’m sorry for talking your ear off, I don’t have a big writing community to call my own, at least not yet and I needed to get these thoughts out of my head to make room for the ones that need to be in there…if you’ve read to the end thank you…if you have any suggestions or thoughts, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as fast as I can.

Maybe now, I can sit down and seriously think about my writing problems and figure out a solution…

Well as I like to say on here….Here goes nothing….