When I was thirteen, I wrote roughly three-quarters of a
novel. It was, well, plagiarism. It took three stories that I was in love with:
The Lord of The Rings (I was, somehow, going to marry Aragorn,
whether he was fictional or not), A
Wrinkle in Time and the animated Disney movie Atlantis. In fact, I can recall re-writing the scene from The Fellowship of The Ring, where the
Kings of Old run across a dirt path while the hobbits hide in a ditch. My story
didn’t have hobbits, but otherwise the scenes were unmistakably similar.
When I realized, a year after never finishing the book, that
it was little more than a work of fraud, I was ashamed and mortified. I
immediately deleted the file. Now that I've re-opened my writing hobby (which
I’ve done several times since then), I am regretting my disregard for what I have
grown to see as an exercise in writing. I may have been copying plot pieces
from other works, but I was practicing descriptions, action scenes, and
learning how to fit ideas into a cohesive plot. It would have been a nice
exercise to go back and look, if only to see how far I’ve come.
There were many
parts of my youthful story that were original, but I can remember struggling
quite a bit with them. I think my issue was not with the plot, but with
character development and how it relates to the overall piece. When I write
now, I usually am inspired by an event, either a real event that I've experienced
or just something that popped into my head—usually as I lay attempting to
fall asleep at night. After procuring inspiration, I think of the characters,
and instead of writing the course of action I
want them to take, I set aside time to consider the actions the characters would take.
Although I tend to write plot-driven tales, staying true to
the personality of my characters is, arguably, one of the most important skills
in any sort of story-telling. Often, when I put a character into a situation,
the plot develops purely in response to the personality of said character.
When I wrote as a girl, I never thought much about the
character’s personality other than the superficial. I may have said a character
was bold, but in order to make a scene that I wanted to write occur, I would
change the character’s personality to fit. That was a mistake, but immaturity
results in a lot of those.
Everyone has different ways of making it easier to stay true
to their characters. I tend to create character sheets before I begin writing.
This way I can flesh out the person as a whole before throwing them into
events. I can also go back and make notes on these sheets while writing to keep
track of any essential character trait that has been affected by the plot.
I’ve found that by throwing a few well-rounded characters,
especially characters I’ve grown to love, into an event, an organized plot will
form on its own. In doing this, my own manuscript nearly wrote itself.
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