Summer feels like it’s finally on its way, as spring is well and truly here! Which is great for us, because we’ve finally got ourselves into gear. We have turned our world on its head, re-written our characters and our realms and our world and it finally feels as though we have everything where it needs to be.
For the past two years, we’ve been trying to build a world that hasn’t felt quite … right, having abandoned a previous model we’d been working on. Turns out the reason why things didn’t feel quite right is because we needed to go back to that former model. Now? Well, now we have chatty characters, we have plots and history and pasts and all sorts of other things coming out of the woodwork! I’ll admit that it’s a little frustrating to think that the past two years we’ve been going around in circles, but it hasn’t been entirely wasted because we’ve learned a lot.
We’ve learned that we are the biggest obstacle in the way of our characters, that whilst we thought our characters were calling the shots we weren’t letting them … and most of all, that we were trying to force a story to happen when that wasn’t the story they wanted to tell. What it boils down to is that Charlotte and I are clearly control freaks, who don’t like feeling that we’re not in control of things … which has to change.
And change it has! We’ve let our characters go, we’ve let them write our setting, our world, our culture and all of that and suddenly the story has come to life. We have our heroes and our villains back again – and those that can be taken either way (which it’s probably fair to say is all of our characters). We have those characters back that we thought we’d lost, they’ve remembered what they’re fighting for and more than that we’ve given them what they need to have their story told. Whether that’s a story of love or redemption or villinary or justice to meet the end and ultimate goal of what our story has always been about.
So! We have a new lease of life and a spring in our step and we have learned a valuable lesson. That we have to let go. That we need to let our characters live their lives … no matter how much we might curse them and wonder why we’re doing this. It has to be their story and not ours – they’re the ones who are living it after all.
And you know what? I think Charlotte and I both feel much better about this all, we have our enthusiasm and our love of writing back … and who knows, maybe, just maybe … we’ve found those last links to get this story told.
Wish us luck!
Clara
Charlotte and Clara 