Carolyn's Blog

Thursday, July 05, 2001

For a while I've felt I was wasting some serious time on critiques (wasting more in the sense of critiquing instead of writing) but something interesting has happened. And that is, as I was trying to explain my critcisms to these other writers, I ended up explaining myself to myself (no real surprise there, of course) but I got an answer to something I've long wondered about. Why were the novels in between Stolen Love and Lord Ruin so riddled with problems? They were all well written because I can write. This has never been at issue. I kept asking myself what I was doing differently from the first two that it wasn't working any more. For me, it comes down to what I told another writer, you need to listen to what the characters are telling you about themselves. It comes out in tiny little glimmers of, gee, isn't that interesting? Or "I didn't know he was like that." but you listen to it and build on it and keep coaxing it out and as the characters take shape and change so does the novel. And this is what I didn't do with A Stranger's Heart or Betrayed (in its previous incarnation). I thought too much about making ASH different from Stolen Love or about making the plot be XYZ and not enough on what the characters were telling me. I kept changing the characters to suit the plot I wanted instead of changing the plot to suit the characters as they became real. And for me, with the way I write, it's the difference between a book I love and one that stinks up the bottom of the metaphysical drawer. The reason LR is so different is I got desperate and ruthless. I cut everything that didn't work. Gone and no remorse, either. And, anyway, through the magic of computers, I can save it for later. And I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote from instinct, the kind that isn't sitting there in the back of my head saying "not that word again!" but the kind that comes out the tip of my fingers. And I stopped making my characters do what I wanted them to do and let them do what they wanted to do. And, of course, not a bit of it was easy. But LR is good. With Betrayed essentially scrapped and begun anew, I find I am listening again to my characters. I start out leading the way and then they tell me where to probe next. Plus, I'm getting lots of great writing/resource material to post on my site. Stay tuned for advice.

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