Over the last 24 hours I’ve come to the conclusion that writing is like speed dating. Nothing has really changed, and yet it has. You have characters, and you put them into a ‘trial’ piece of writing together, and within 20 seconds of doing that you have more of a backstory on said characters than you ever thought possible.
Characters that really shouldn’t connect do. And you’re left wondering … how. I mean, I’ve never done speed dating, I’d be rubbish it at it because I’d either babble and forget to breath and probably pass out or sit and stare. But from what I’ve seen in the movies and read in books it seems to me that this is how our characters connections sometimes work.
We’ve had some characters that have had a bond, a link that we didn’t really know how to make it work. Not without breaking some pretty fundamental things … that was until we realised said fundamental things weren’t as fundamental as our character’s bond. Something that a 20 second conversation sparked, lit up and made happen. And not only do we have happier characters, but somehow we have a storyline that’s starting to make sense.
That sounded bad. We’ve always had a clear idea on our storyline, but now it’s falling into place because we have our characters who have their partners – more than one in some cases. And believe me, that is as big a headache as it sounds, and complicated in so many ways. Which is probably why Charlie and I curse our characters speed dating tendencies so much!
Other than that, we’ve had a good crack at writing between enjoying our reading and our watching movies. We had a good week of watching some films that … well, honestly I’m lying. We didn’t watch them, if we spent 5 minutes actually watching them I’d be surprised because they were that awful! We had planned to watch them and landed up talking throughout all of them – as we both said, thank god we didn’t see it at the cinema! So this weekend I’m introducing Charlie to some of the dramas to come out of the UK which hopefully she’ll enjoy as much as I do, rather than sticking to the usual movies and such.
And the rest of the day … well, I’m sure there will be more characters who want to jump on the speed dating bandwagon. I doubt we’ve seen the last of this … but we can hope, right?! Even if I just am kidding myself!
~ Clara
Charlotte and Clara 