What Your Characters Take From You, and What They Give in Return.

People often ask me, "Where do your ideas come from?"

From my characters.

"And where do your characters come from?"

From parts of me.

Often, a character will enter my head before his/her story will. Long before I knew Fury's story, I knew her. She came from a part of my life that we'll just sum up with the word "awful". She suffers from all the things that I suffer from, and I hoped that by telling her story and making her overcome some of her inner issues, not only would she grow as a character, but I would grow as a person.

I'm not sure if that makes sense, but bear with me.

You would think that the writer of a story knows exactly what is going to happen, how it is going to happen, and why it is going to happen. In my case, that's not really true. Often, I just have a vague idea, and my characters drive me toward it--often making unexpected moves along the way. Since that is the case, not only do the characters learn as they go along, but I do to. 

I learn from them.

Now, in "Fury" there is a lot of emotional/moral conflict. When I wrote it, I probably didn't even realize it, but looking back I'm able to pick it all out. And I can learn from it.

"Fury" is currently going through some major revisions, and a lot of things are getting cut. A story that started out at 119,000 words in its first rough draft, is now down to 112,000. And I'm not even halfway through. My problem--which I believed stemmed from the issues I was having in my personal life at the time--is that the story is not very active. There is a lot of inner dialogue. A lot of introspection. But my characters don't DO anything very much. I'm changing that. Not only to keep the reader's interest, but because I realized that the story is not one to be told passively. That's not its message. Characters--and people--don't change through thinking about things and just sitting around waiting for stuff to happen, they go out and do something about it.

I tend to be a passive person, but I didn't realize how much it reflected in my writing and in my characters. Fury, instead of being the active, in-your-face heroine I wanted her to be, was a mopey damsel in distress who took a total of two stands in the entire book. And even afterward she went on being passive. That's not her, and that's not the story. So I'm changing it. It means A LOT of revisions, but it will be worth it.

Because she deserves more, and I can finally recognize that.