Snarky Characters . . .
So, remember yesterday I told you I had a character become more important than I expected? Remember I said that I really liked her? That was at least in part because she’s snarky. Which was fine when she was being snarky to other characters. When she started being smart with me when I was interviewing her yesterday, it wasn’t so likable anymore. I tried her two or three times yesterday and getting information out of her was like pulling teeth.
A particularly tricky thing about writing characters for fantasy (or sci-fi) is that you’re inventing most, if not all, of your proper nouns. There are times when characters will just tell you all the words you need to know, but more often than not it’s like playing Twenty Questions, and all your characters will tell you is ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Yesterday was ‘no’ for a solid twenty minutes on a single word I was trying to coin.
Ergo, in frustration, I did a lot of not-writing things last night. Which weren’t terribly productive. I saw The Notebook finally. OMG! People kept telling me how much I would really like that movie. And I kept thinking, yeah, yeah, another romantic drama. But, wow! I loved it. And then I tried for the third time to figure out what the heck to do with the ‘Tower of the gods’ castle in Zelda: Wind Waker for Gamecube. Which was even more frustrating than trying to get snarky characters to tell me about themselves.
A particularly tricky thing about writing characters for fantasy (or sci-fi) is that you’re inventing most, if not all, of your proper nouns. There are times when characters will just tell you all the words you need to know, but more often than not it’s like playing Twenty Questions, and all your characters will tell you is ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Yesterday was ‘no’ for a solid twenty minutes on a single word I was trying to coin.
Ergo, in frustration, I did a lot of not-writing things last night. Which weren’t terribly productive. I saw The Notebook finally. OMG! People kept telling me how much I would really like that movie. And I kept thinking, yeah, yeah, another romantic drama. But, wow! I loved it. And then I tried for the third time to figure out what the heck to do with the ‘Tower of the gods’ castle in Zelda: Wind Waker for Gamecube. Which was even more frustrating than trying to get snarky characters to tell me about themselves.