(no subject)

[truepenny]

I have this problem in my writing. My characters are too nice and too accepting. They HELP each other, and never mind boggling at a camel--they'll cheerfully swallow a whole menagerie.

I correct for this by deliberately writing difficult characters, prickly characters, mulish, intractable, rebarbative characters. matociquala says all my secondary characters are assholes, and she's really not wrong. But if I stop paying attention--if, for example, I'm trying to FINISH THE GODDAMNED BOOK ALREADY--I backslide. My editor says the end of The Virtu happens too quickly and too easily, and she's really not wrong, either.

The line of demarcation is quite appallingly clear. The end of Chapter 10, we're all arguing and scheming against each other and saying catty things. The beginning of Chapter 11, suddenly everybody's taking their Prozac and skipping hand in hand through fields of flowers like Maria and Heidi. And while this is all lovely and heart-warming, it's also WRONG, and I have to fix it.

And I have no idea how. I've been staring, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically, at the beginning of Chapter 11 for three days. Be mean to each other! I say to my characters, and they look at me in bewilderment and say, But we don't want to. Look--we've grown as people! Isn't it wonderful?

Wonderful, I agree, my teeth gritted. Now cut it out and revert to form.

And they start to sing "The Sound of Music."

Maybe it's time to start listening to Depeche Mode again.

Comments

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

The line of demarcation is quite appallingly clear.

What a delightful explanation of these problems. (Hardly surprising that it's delightful, really, but still.) It makes one wonder what sorts of conversations Mark Twain had with his characters as he was wrapping up Huck Finn. Sans Prozac, I suspect that Jim, Huck, and Twain would all have been much grumpier. Plus, your characters know about Prozac, and could rationalize any sudden changes away by, well, magic.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I have the opposite problem. My main characters abuse and bait one another fairly continuously. I have to make the effort to write scenes in which they're actually getting along.

My sociopathic character's theme music is Depeche Mode. It may help.

Where's the trigger in the first ten chapters that can renew the war in eleven?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's right there at the end of Chapter 10, a big beautiful bomb like the ones the spies use in Spy vs. Spy. It's just that in the current incarnation of Chapter 11, the bomb is a dud.

[larryhammer]

Depeche Mode + Nine Inch Nails on repeat shuffle, with a side order of The Cure.

---L.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

My characters are too nice and too accepting.

I've that problem with one of the novels-in-waiting. I keep going, "Look, Robby! Bad guys!"

He shrugs and tells me, "Nah, they're not so tough." And he keeps being right, too.

Not sure there's anything to be done for it. Bah.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

There's always something to be done. It's just a question of figuring out what it is.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

For the novel-in-waiting, I'm very much hoping so.

For the character, not so much.

I suspect it will lack narrative drive. *g*

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's time to start listening to Depeche Mode again.

I think you might be right. "We call it Master and Servant."

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

Hee. My characters run the other way -- they're all so busy being "Helpful" to one another, they cause more problems than they solve. Maybe Maria helpfully dresses Heidi's goats in new play clothes cut from the antique curtains that were the last gift of her dying grandfather?