Return of the Novelist

I posted this to LJ a while back and forgot to post it here. But it's quite relevant.

I thought I should let you guys know why I've been so silent for a while. The fact is, I'm writing a novel.

It's the strangest thing. My interest in writing fiction pretty much disappeared some time ago. I hadn't written a novel since I was fifteen. I had been writing essays for my website, lots of them, and of course a few chapters for my published book. But writing for publication had gotten very, very hard for me to do. The new publisher wants to publish a book my husband and I are going to write together, about our relationship, and I'd been trying to write for that, but it always felt like a class assignment. I'd gotten almost none of it done, because I had to force myself to do it, and even then couldn't always succeed.

Then I got caught up in a project (making a lizard costume) and my husband got worried. Not at what I was doing, but how intensely I was working on it, and how snappy I got when he offered advice or tried to talk to me about anything else. We had sort of an argument, and it ended with him suggesting that I try writing fiction again. He felt that I was desperate for a project and was trying to fill that need with things that were insufficient.

I had a science fiction idea that had been sitting around in my head. At most, I imagined a short story, because I'd been pretty much unable to write anything long since years ago. But I thought I'd run with it and see what happened. My husband said he would help me with the science and some of the plot if I needed it.

It's over sixty pages already.

I'm stunned. I had no idea that ability was still in me, and I'm spending nearly every free minute writing.

But I have realized a few strange things about my writing style.

1.

I seem unable to invent an original character who is not like me. Maybe I just don't have enough theory of mind to write from the point of view of a person who doesn't think the way I do. When I create characters, either they're based on me, or based on someone I know very closely, or else they end up completely boring and one-dimensional. In this book, I have six main characters, and three of them are based on different aspects of my own personality, one of them is based on my husband, and the other two don't have much personality at all.

2.

When creating characters of my own and making them do stuff, I am lost when it comes to characterization. See, in the real world, characterization doesn't make sense to me, because I see real humans as immensely complicated and full of contradictions. Every person I know frequently does things that seem out of character to me. I can only understand those things when I realize that humans have many, many different parts to their personalities, and that any one of a huge variety of seemingly contradictory actions will be in character with one part or another. I know I myself have moods so different from each other that they seem like different people, and something that would be completely uncharacteristic of me in Mood 1 is totally typical of Mood 2, 3 or 4.

But when people read a book, they expect the characters to be simple enough that you can tell right off the bat whether an action is in character or not. So when I make my characters do wide varieties of things, some seeming contradictory, am I being more true to life than most books, or is it bad characterization?

That's all for now. Gotta go write more. Thanks for reading.