asd;golkasgndsa it's just going so terribly that I honestly think I have more chance of getting it complete if I start a new story, from scratch, 20k words behind than if I continue grinding away at something that I'm quite honestly not enjoying.
Characters tend to carry stories for me. And the characters of my previous idea seemed great in planning, but right now none of them are really coming to life, and it's frustrating.
(cue ranting about characters no one but me knows about yet *WEEPS FOREVER*)
Neo - Mr Existential Crisis, and I don't know why I didn't see this coming earlier because I had enough gosh-darn trouble writing Hamlet for my major work. Neo has 24601 issues and I'm not able to get them across subtly enough.
Sheva - Ridiculously hard to express her personality without revealing why she's so angry and revenge-fuelled, and that would mean letting out her whole backstory straight away.
Konnor + Cady - TOO SIMILAR TO EACH OTHER and don't have distinct enough character voices.
Damon and Morrigan are the only two characters I have a handle on - and guess what? Damon's not in the story yet (he's about 5-7k words away from entry and I'm already 3k words behind and unsure if I can bring myself to write up to him) and Morrigan made an appearance at the start, but is a good 15-20k words from returning. Ack.
In any case, CHARACTER VOICE IS KILLING ME because no one is distinct enough and I had this trouble with Sci Fi Oth already and managed to push through it, but it's just not happening here.
If anything the problem is that I planned too much. Seems counter-intuitive, I know, but in all my other stories the characters that have flowed most freely sprang from no planning at all. Damar wasn't even meant to be in his story. Taspir and Hush started with two very basic character ideas and grew as I wrote them. I genuinely made up Arkab as I went along and by the time hedied he had gone through a roller coaster of mood swings and I still felt like I had managed to keep him in his own, very distinctive character the whole time.
And Creed quite literally appeared out of nowhere and has become the only character who I can confidently write at a moment's notice (probably because almost anything can come out of Creed's mouth and not be OOC; dude has no limits).
In any case, I worked out that
- my original idea is not working; plot wasn't solid enough from the start and I thought characters would carry it but they didn't
- there isn't enough humour in my story because of the limits of the characters I'm using
- a lack of modern-day slang and profanity is making it hard for me to write filler like I normally do
- I'm not in a fantasy-genre mood right now, which really isn't helping
- subject matter is too serious + heavy for something like NaNo which requires a lot of blather
- I'm genuinely not happy with what I've written so far and it's putting me off writing more
I'm not having fun and for something like NaNo it's enough of a problem that I'm going to start again, from scratch, do a couple hours planning and give up some fanfiction-reading time over the next few days to catch up on those 20k words, and GET THIS THING WRITTEN
I'm going to draw off existing characters (Wyth, Creed, Damon, anyone) to put together a new cast quickly. I have had a couple of vague ideas swimming around in my head since playing Assassin's Creed III and catching up on The Walking Dead; combined with some old story ideas I had on the backburner, it should be enough to get a working plot together.
As far as how confident I am in my ability to catch up on 20 000 missed words?
I wrote over half my major work draft in one day (albeit after a week of angsting and procrastinating). When desperation calls I SHALL DELIVER or something like that
speaking of delivering
last night as I lay in bed contemplating, I came up with a monologue for Iago in the next installment of the Sci Fi Othello AU that I was really happy with. It was only a few sentences but I really, really liked the exact wording that I had worked out.
Being me, I did not write it down, and come today I cannot remember it.
I remember what it was about, and what he was getting at, but the exact wording I had is gone. And it is frustrating me beyond measure.
Hopefully it returns to me or I will not be amused :(
Anyway. Off to listen to music and plan out the basic skeleton of new story now. I'll reset the word counter on the side bar once I've made a new start.
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