Today was great. Wrote five new pages without going off of a hand-written first draft! Veeery close to the end of this section and that means only two to go until the book is done! Glad I decided to stick with it instead of quitting.
If I thought motivating myself to write was difficult, motivating myself to actually sit down and read/research specific history of specific places upon which I wish to loosely base stuff in my WIP is like being tortured.
Moscow and Saint Petersburg during the modernising enlightenment periods of tsarist Russia under Peter the Great and later Catherine the Great.Is it somewhere you could go, rather than read about? Just pretend the year is different?
Research is great, if I haven't got booze and need an excuse to not write, other than avoiding housework, I research.
I had a good writing day today despite my depression. I made it over 2,000 words. It probably would have been a lot better if I'd been in a better mood, but that's still pretty good. Maybe I'm finally learning how to power through my depression and still get words down.
And if you come up with an answer, I hope you'll let me knowHey Simpson, I was wondering about that recently. I always get confused whether we can reference things like Coke and Pepsi without infringing on copyright?
What's your process for coming up with all of that for your other characters?Still struggling with my MC's personality and motives. Its not that they aren't there. They just seem flat.
And if you come up with an answer, I hope you'll let me know
What's your process for coming up with all of that for your other characters?
What's your process for coming up with all of that for your other characters?
Hey Simpson, I was wondering about that recently. I always get confused whether we can reference things like Coke and Pepsi without infringing on copyright?
Nice.My process is largely organic. I usually begin without thinking about the plot, but a person on the street or TV will say or doing something interesting, and I'll extrapolate that out in to a long daydream that may or may not be worthy of a story. The personality grows from that along with other characters that pop up during what I call the skinny draft (like an outline, but with scenes and dialogue).
OK, you lost me there I've tried to base my characters on other people, and it rarely if ever goes anywhere.Most of my characters are based on real people, not that they'd know, so I have no trouble visualising their mannerisms.
Maybe instead of doing that by accident, have you considered maybe doing that on purpose? I believe the word that you're looking for is First-Person Peripheral Narrator – the POV character is not the Main character – and I'm actually doing that too (albeit with Villain Protagonists and a side of SJW trolling) : my first-person narrator is a straight white guy, and for the first two chapters, he looks like the main character because he's the only protagonist we see doing anything. Then his black lesbian friend shows up at the end of chapter 2, and it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that she's the one driving the action against the antagonists.I think the issue with this MC is that he was conceived at the point I spotted the story potential for another character, so the story isn't about them, and because the original observer was me, that character is intertwined with me.
I can change the hair, give them soccer skills and super strength, sexual disfunction, a traumatic childhood and a personal quest for vengeance, but they keep reverting to plain me, passively watching the remarkable characters carry the plot.
It is a silly problem, but it is a problem nonetheless.
Okay, dumb question here: If I were to be writing something that, while being a fantasy setting, had a larger plot going on around the central characters that was about the interlocking political situations and conflicts of various developing or developed nation states, would it be as massively beneficial to me as I think it would to really research into the history of Europe or some such, as a decent way of gaining insight into how such situations would work in pre-industrial nations?
Because the main kingdom at play is leaning towards being modelled largely on the Russian Empire in the 1700s and even basic research into that has gotten me interested in stuff like the history of nations like Prussia, or in France during the revolutionary period and later the Napoleonic Wars.
Basically, give me a writing-based excuse to binge-read about European history so I can pretend it's in aid of something and not just out of random sudden obsession.