The MC in my WIP is trying to get my attention

Since I'm only on day 3 of writing my book, I do not have that kind of experience yet.

But what I have come across is that I'll come up with a couple lines of dialogue or a scene progression, but literally have no way of writing it down because I'm either: on the toilet, out walking, etc etc ... doing things in which it would be some time before I get to a pen/paper to jot it down. I don't have the best of memory for details, so I do lose much of it as time goes by. Sad really.

However, I am sorry that you are losing sleep. I wonder if you can make this into another book: an author, trying to write his next book keeps being woken up by a past book's MC ... a smart aleck that keeps bugging the heck out of the author to write another book with him as the MC again. Egotistical little sh** hehehehe

Ok, sorry for that side-track.

Best of luck to you and here's to hoping for good sleep soon! =)

I don't have that issue, but I know my characters, my world, etc, very well by memory alone. Maybe I am one of the lucky few?

I've had it happen to me on numerous occasions. The only way to stop it, for me, is to write whatever scene it is that needs to be written. Don't worry about the description not coming out right the first time. That's what edits are for. Just get the scene sketched out so that it's at least *out there* and not continuing to swirl around in your brain.

Hope this helps.

sneakysnail said:

Yup, that is what I have to do. Yup ... Yup. *In bed, with computer in lap, surfing AW* But, ya know, I'm pooped and I feel like my MC is sitting on the end of my bed, legs crossed, filing his nails while chanting a little ditty “See you at 3 am”
Pfffft.

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*laughs* Been there, done that as well. You know what I do when that happens? I unplug the modem.

Happens to me on a regular basis. In my latest story I have a bunch of them clamoring for my attention. I listen and usually drift back off to sleep.

But I have been known to drag the laptop downstairs and pound away on the keys 'til they are all satisfied.

Yep, nasty critters, them little characters we all make up.

my MC TOTALLY wakes me up ALL THE TIME!

My MC appears in my dreams all time. And different scenarios happen in those dreams and I'm seeing them from his POV. It sounds strange, but yeah he always tends to enter my subconscious trying to tell me something. ^_^

I'm a controlled schizophrenic . I pretend to be my other characters so I can brainstorm events and dialog for the future. It works, although I've been in the same predicament where I don't want to write a scene or I don't know how. In my short experience of writing, I learned that if I don't know how to write -- I don't. I skip over it and save it for later and when later comes everything comes together perfectly.

Have a notebook? Write down what you need to do in the next coming chapters. Brainstorming. ^.^ For me writing down everything helps me get my ideas together so I can continue on. Sometimes I have to go back and delete things, or rewrite things, but it makes going forwards easier.

Quentin Nokov said:

I'm a controlled schizophrenic . I pretend to be my other characters so I can brainstorm events and dialog for the future. It works, although I've been in the same predicament where I don't want to write a scene or I don't know how. In my short experience of writing, I learned that if I don't know how to write -- I don't. I skip over it and save it for later and when later comes everything comes together perfectly.

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I tend to follow this same pathline. In my case, I'm also an avid online gamer and tabletop roleplayer, so my characters have a scary tendency to develop themselves. Within a few days of working with one of them and investing just a little time, I usually have enough of her heart, mind and soul fleshed out that she'll join the others in keeping me awake.

If I can't wrap my faculties around writing at that stage, I'll fire up The Sims and whomp the character up that way until the ideas come and I have something to write about. I can always find a way to fit the notes in SOMEWHERE.

I know what you mean. Mine is only Twelve chapters so far. I'm concenred it won't be long enough. I do have a back up book though i could edit.

It's odd.

Not dreams, really, or no wake ups in the middle of the night, but after I started writing my novel, I saw bits of my character in people I know. My MC is a 14-year-old boy, and I didn't even realize that he's strikingly close in age to my nephew, who is 13. Now, their personalities aren't near the same (My nephew is an attention-seeker, crowd-follower, and my MC is a quiet, shy, reserved person), but just the way I see my nephew interact with his friends and behave in situations, I see a retrospective example of how, I'm guessing, most teenage boys behave. Of course, being one myself (18), I can remember my days as a young teen, but it's easier to observe than experience, I suppose.

Just the way my nephew interacts with his best friend has helped me understand my own MC a lot. A big theme in my novel is male friendship. I mean, it's set among a sweeping fantasy tale, but on an intimate level, it's about my MC's relationship with a friend he meets fairly early on in the tale.

But I have woken in the middle of the night with the solutions to plot problems and character dilemmas just 'come to me.' Sometimes, I'm too lazy to get up out of bed and write it down, and by the morning, I get up and am like "Oh, yeah! I came up with a freakin' sweet idea last night. Wait... what was it again? Hmm..."

One of my MCs is writing her own semi-pornographic romance novel about an infertile woman being pushed into swinging with her husband and her sister's lesbian hookup in order to have her be a surrogate mother on the condition that he get her pregnant twice, once for them and once for her. She's doing it in the same time frame of the book I'm already working on with her in it.

I have a little ADD, and she has a house full of immature fellow aliens distracting her. Good think it's been synchronized so far.

dreamer89 said:

my MC TOTALLY wakes me up ALL THE TIME!

My MC appears in my dreams all time. And different scenarios happen in those dreams and I'm seeing them from his POV. It sounds strange, but yeah he always tends to enter my subconscious trying to tell me something. ^_^

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Yeah I've had a few looks the through the eyes of my MC in dreams. It was pretty awesome. Got some great story ideas. It's good to know I'm not the only one.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you're WIP is "fresh". By that I mean that you just started it? This happens to me when I have brand new ideas. The flood gates open and your characters won't shut up. Then after a couple of months of writing it dies down. Of course, you'll have sporadic conversations and ideas that you MUST write down even though it goes against precious, precious sleep.

And if it's not a fresh story, then I envy you. If I were experiencing this currently, I'da finished my book by now. LOL.

Don't get frustrated. Think of it as a gift. If it's bothering you, then hey, take the opportunity to elaborate on it WHILE it's happening. You'll have some extensive material before you know it.

My MCs wake me up, scream from somewhere over my shoulder, totally freak me out, and more! I am beginning to think I am less of a writer and more of a head case

Wow! That's exciting & very engaging...

I feel such experience helps alot in establishing your MC as well as fitting him/her into your overall plot.

When I was writing my novel, Heaven on Earth, I think a lot of my MC (Mark Conners is his name), he's a loner, lost his family in an accident, and a little melancholic. The tricky part is to visualize how he looks like....

(Confession: While writing this novel, I was also watching NCIS, so naturally, I imagined him to look like Mark Harmon (younger version) aka Leroy Jethro Gibbs ...

Kill the sonofabitch.

caw

Yep, I've been stuck several times before and the MC always seems to come up with solutions at 2 am while I'm sleeping...