Trials

We had a blip last week, getting so engrossed in our writing, we both managed to forget about our blog! I’m still pretty impressed with us though for managing to keep up with this on a weekly basis and to have come five months in without missing a week? It’s a pretty good record! And hey, we were hard at it, working on our world so I think we can be excused just this once!

But we have been hard at work on our characters once again. And, honestly it never ceases to amaze me how we can have a character who is fully formed in our heads, who we think we have developed wonderfully … only to find that there is a missing link. You think you know all there is to know about him or her, only you never really realise that there’s one tiny corner of their past that they don’t talk about. Not really anyway, not until you have this other character who comes in and says … hey, by the way I know that guy/gal and have done since we were yay high!

And at that point you know it’s going to be bad.

Sure enough, suddenly this little corner of the past that you didn’t even know was there comes to life. Completely and utterly. We’re overwhelmed with the information that they’re now throwing at us and of course they want to write. Nothing useful, they just want to write for the other character so that they can get their chance to say hello and go over all of the past and things like that. 

Sometimes, it is useful. Sometimes going over the past can reveal these hidden gems when we sit down and start writing it all and it will go into our notes about things we need to retain for future reference. And then there are those other times, where they write nothing useful and it has no bearing or significance on anything really. But it’s good for character development, even if it does drive us to distraction half of the time.

And that is the tricky thing about writing, or well one of them at least. Figuring out what characters want. What they need. What happened in the past. And it becomes both rewarding and frustrating when you have those pieces that slot into place but are left wondering why the hell something wasn’t mentioned before! But that, alas, is the joy of writing, and if we didn’t come up with these little tests and trials then we would be bored of it all too soon!

We’re back at it today – wish us luck, who knows what we’re going to discover!

~ Clara