(no subject)
“They said it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as the world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.”
- Junot Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Is this the best opening to book ever? Trick question; the answer is always yes.
Been poking at my writing all day (loooooool not really it's been a lot of watching movies from my almighty couch bed and doing laundry and waiting for my broken fridge to faith heal itself so I can start eating again) and have decided to take some time out of my busy busy life to gush a little about my protagonist.
I love her. I really do. She’s a fucking moron, but I love her. I came up with her a million years ago as a counterpoint to who I thought the story was really about and lolwtf here we are. I used to think that she didn’t need any sort of development other than plucky first person POV comic relief so she could act as a mirror to the male protagonist I’d originally cooked the story up for. That lasted right up until the point where I started actually giving her a history and a family and motivations other than crushing guilt and that’s the story of how Mr. Male Protagonist didn’t show up again until I was at least eighty thousand words in, and at that point, my redneck villain and his goonsquad had already hijacked the entire story and it took everything I had to wrench things back over to Romantic Road Comedy where they belonged.
Anyway. It’s made me realize that it’s going to be impossible for me to write anything in the future that doesn’t feature a protagonist that I don’t completely and utterly adore. Because I adore mine, I really do, and I suppose I adore her male counterpart as well, but like my fabulous and overwhelmingly amazing beta reader said, it’s her story and she’s the one we want to see make it through all this crap.
Gonna watch Spirited Away and poke at it some more.