I got my characters talking.
I wrote Chapter 7 earlier this week, sometime over the weekend, and I planned to write more but as usual laziness elbowed me and said "Hey, you wanna have some fun lying in this bed watching cartoons?" and I said "Hell yes" so I did that a lot.
Chapter 7 came to 2,380 words (bringing the book's total to 16,548 words), and most of what happened in it is dialogue.
I'm not sure how happy I am with it. I wasn't feeling very good about it when I wrote it, and then when I read it back I was a lot happier with it. (Maybe I was feeling awkward during the drafting because it was a pretty awkward conversation.) I'm trying to build a rapport here but my character is resisting it, and I kinda need her to stop doing that if I am going to get anywhere, but that's what she wants to do so I can't really write her out of character.
She kinda makes a good point during this whole thing, too: she's actually not a very nice person, but she's not actively mean either. It's just that when you don't really want to engage, speak bluntly and sparingly, and aren't empathetic--and (this is key) you're female--this behavior is interpreted as rude. Women and girls not going out of their way to coddle and comfort others--especially if they're boys or men who want their attention--are perceived as bitchy. I'm kind of fighting that feeling with Megan, because she's honestly not "a bitch." She just lives in a world that expects things of ladies that she is not interested in providing, and she refuses to apologize for it, but she's not making a big platform out of how proud she is to not apologize for it either.
But anyway, I got my characters talking, I got Brady and Megan to reach an understanding (even if she was kind of sour about it), and I got him to buy her a cookie, so there's that.
Let's see where they take it from here.
No comments:
Post a Comment