Tonight, I am thinking about what your main character means to you while writing, or reading!!
Do you need a character that inspires you and has all kinds of qualities, or even just one important one, you wish you had? Or is it a flawed one that has a long journey of development ahead which you like to follow?
Do you feel emotionally close to your main characters? Do you need them to make it through the day?
I certainly do.
I come up with people that inspire me, that make me get myself together and start another day.
Things I wrote before the witching novel may have made this more clear, but also in this one, I see this.
I write defiant, persistent, a little bit difficult and hard to take kind of people, while I am an extremely shy and fearful person.
I cannot tell how much this shyness resonates with my style of writing. Since as writers/bloggers etc. we like to sit alone somewhere to outline our thoughts for people far away from us, this may not be that special after all, but still I find it worth mentioning. I often have the problem that my voice is too thin, or that I cannot from one moment to the other find the right voice to speak and am often overheard, or even asked again what kind of coffee I just ordered … Funnily enough, I work with people and especially children a lot, since I am a museum guide (and even worked as a teacher once!), and I myself am often not sure how I manage to get these big and not always cooperative groups under control. Even among co-workers it is often noticed what a quiet and silent person I am, although not as a negative thing, usually.
That I need my characters for their strength does not necessarily mean that they are all extremely extroverted and tough. It‘s more the thing they face.
My characters face things I am scared of.
They face things I would not know how to, and that‘s why I need them. I came up with them in a moment of deep despair. In a moment in which I seemed to have lost my voice for good, or at least I thought I had.
The point I originally wanted to make with this writing update was that for the exact same reason I am too hesitant and keeping up writing at the moment!
At least the novel writing.
My witch faces things I was and still am terrified by. Some of them were a part of my own reality for a long while, while others were just a fear resulting from them which I carried around with me.
I actually love the scenario I came up with for her.
I love where her journey leads, which people she will be meeting on future pages and the defiance and elegance with which she is going to survive some tough stuff!
But before I can enjoy this part of her tale, I have to work myself through my deepest fears.
In the past weeks, in which I reached a novel milestone and really found my tone and feeling for writing this story, it got pretty intense. I have had a serious problem with anxiety for almost all my life, and thinking in the lines the novel asks of me at the moment has triggered weird reactions I thought I had buried in my past. It included sudden panic attacks because of every mole I have ever found on my body, and some similar things.
What my witch now has to go through brings me back into the darkest moments of my life.
I fear falling apart. Physically as well as mentally.
But I want to explore and write it all as brutally honest as possible!
Through writing, I sometimes gather strength. I feel a new tone my voice can have, a way in which I can smile. I can find a new way to handle the world when I get so close to my main character as I at the moment try to get to my witch.
I just really have to get there.
This just shows me some more how I summoned my witch as reminder that survival always has a trace of defiance in it, because it happens despite all the possible worth case scenarios.
Writing the witching novel is a hopeful endeavor, and just therefor it means confronting so much darkness.
What is your relation to your main characters fate like? Or, the main characters of the books you love?
Mistress witch writes 