You may have noticed that I have not mentioned the YA Novel Challenge recently. This is not because I have not been doing it, but because it has been going poorly. And I find that talking too much about something that isn’t working well can be a bit on the depressing side. However, I said I’d blog about it, so here I am.
It is not my discipline that has been failing, although it is always more difficult to work on a project this recalcitrant. I am floundering around a lot with the present tense, which I knew going in would be challenging. The truly crippling problem, however, is that I don’t much care for my protagonist and narrator. I haven’t found her voice. I don’t understand who she is. I can’t feel the way she feels.
I decided to forge ahead to a certain point in the story to see if this problem improved. Surely, I told myself, I will grow to know her. Surely I will begin to hear her voice in my head. And then I can go back when I’ve reached the end and rewrite the first bit to match. No problem.
Only I haven’t found her. She’s still missing in her own story. And I’m far enough along by now that it has turned into a more serious issue.
I don’t know what I’m going to do with this novel. Something has to change. I have been tempted to put in on hold until (and if) I can figure out what that is. So I might do that, and work on some other projects instead. At three in the morning last week, after I’d gotten home from watching the last Harry Potter movie, I had an idea that might help things. It would necessitate starting over from the beginning, but there is at least a chance it could work. So I might try that. Or maybe I’ll come up with another solution to make the book work.
Dealing with this kind of brokenness is part of being a writer, I think. As a newer writer, I don’t always know how to fix it. And I don’t always want to talk about it because at a certain point I have to figure it out for myself. (That is my nice way of saying, please don’t deluge this post with advice.) I hope that working with the pieces gives me more insight into both why stories work and how they fail. None of my creative projects is a complete failure unless I have failed to learn from it.
So you might not hear anymore about the YA novel challenge. Or you might. I make no promises either way. But I’ll still be sitting here, learning to become a better writer. Of that, I am determined.
The Practical Free Spirit 
This is the worst. I can keep writing through plot bobbles and setting questions, but without the right character voice, the story is sunk.
At the workshop this year, Kij asked everyone what got them excited about the story they were writing, and nearly everyone talked about the setting or the worldbuilding, which I found interesting since for me it always starts with the characters. So I think it’s one of those things that may be different for every writer, but I’m definitely with you.
Yes, I get a lot more excited by the characters than by setting. In fact, I have to spend significantly more energy on setting or I skimp to the point of its nonexistence. 🙂
Painful. I hate it when I reach roadblocks. That’s why a lot of people give up.
Good thing that I’m so stubborn then! 🙂
Sometimes when I hit a similar kind of roadblock, it’s because I’m forcing the character to act, well, out of character, if that makes sense? They sometimes seem to be saying, “I’m not talking to you, or taking one more step until you fix that thing that I would never do over there.” Maybe go back over what’s going on and see if there was a moment when you made something happen instead of let something happen?
Great thought, Gigi. After attending the SCBWI conference, I have some ideas that I think might help. So hopefully I will be able to get past this particular roadblock.
[…] YA Novel Challenge last summer. I wrote the outline, banged my head against the beginning, and stopped after having written 10,000 words. In retrospect, I believe I wasn’t ready to write the book: my […]