Thanks to school holidays and a healthy dose of busy, this week’s update is later than intended, but as they say in the classics, better late than never!
Last week, we finished Chapter 5 of our story and headed into Chapter 6. We ticked over 9,000 words so far and we are starting to get into the meat of the mystery.
I particularly enjoyed writing Chapter 5. It had a lot of dialogue in it, and to me this is a major part of a story. Capturing the interactions between your characters is what brings them to life and explores their personalities.
Interestingly, you may have noticed “captured” rather than “created” when mentioning their interactions. In my head, my characters each have their own personalities. I see myself simply recording what they’re saying rather than carrying on two halves of a conversation.
This might seem a bit odd, but it’s useful for preventing your characters from blending into one. We each have different speech patterns, different perspectives, and dialogue must represent that to the reader so that they also see your characters as different people.
Of course, there are frequently elements of myself in each character’s words, some parts I like about myself, other parts I don’t. Writing these, even in fiction, can be a healthy dose of therapy.
The beginning of Chapter 6 I found difficult to get going on. I feel that this is such an important turning in the story that I want to make sure that I get on to the page what I see in my head. I also need to both hold back the desire to charge into the big reveals later in the story and also not to dwell so much on mundane details that the reader gets bored.
Nobody said the life of a fiction writer was an easy one. The voices in our heads tend to speak to others too.