You know how it goes. New Year, new start, new beginnings. We make all of those resolutions and for the first week of January (if we’re lucky!) we manage to keep them. But, from there on out over time those good intentions slowly start to go out of the window … and before we know it we’re back in our old ways, only for the next New Years to come around with those same old promises. We’re going to do this, that or the other …. and so on and so forth.
Charlotte and I weren’t any exception to this where we faithfully promised one another that we would be putting into place our resolutions. We would make sure that we would do x, y and z when it came to our writing. There were many a thing that we wanted to do and that by the end of 2018 we want to have achieved, and so long as we apply ourselves we should be able to manage it without much of an issue. But that very much depends on how much we push ourselves there!
Luckily for us, our New Year kicked off with a bang. A very unexpected bang. Where two of our most unlikely characters decided that there was a long standing relationship with one another. They have been breaking our brains with the way they work so well … and yet they shouldn’t. There is nothing in either of them that would ever have made us try them out together as a thing. We’ve been productive this week because of this one small change, because it’s given us one of the last remaining keys to our plot – I’d say last remaining key, but I know our characters well enough to know that something will come along and change it!
But it has come at a price. Our characters have become … bossy. They want to write and they want to write now. That’s not something unusual for us – we’re usually doing some form of bargaining with our teenage brain children, but this is entirely different. They’re directing us on how to write, on what we’re doing wrong, taking control of our writing in a way that is making us sit up and go … how the hell do they know to do this?!
That’s the joy of writing, though isn’t it? No matter how much we say ‘we’re in control’ we never are. We like to think that there is this control element but … it vanishes as soon as that first voice is heard saying ‘write my story’. Control over our characters, is very much like New Years Resolutions. Stays for a little while … but then vanishes off into the horizon.
Hopefully, this New Year for us is the start of things to come and 2018 will be our year to take this all to the next level!
~ Clara
Charlotte and Clara 