I find that that’s becoming my issue lately. I have a slew of characters, but every scenario i put them in doesn’t seem a decent fit.
The way things generally go, a character will prance into my head, and I then spend copious amounts of time prying information from said character, whether it be plot, background, relationships, anything like that. And then I try and build a story from it.
And for some reason that I can’t begin to fathom, it just isn’t working this time around.
Has this every happened to anyone? Have you ever solved it? Or are your characters still waiting for a purpose?
1 comment:
In my humble opinion, your plot may be too far from the characters to have it work. Not only must you know who the character's are, but based on their goal, desires, life style, you have to know which kind of situation to put them in in order to create the most amount of entertaining chaos.
So, I'll try on small, not super well done scale. Character 1 really, really want to get a boyfriend. C1, however, can't get a boyfriend because, well. She already has one. But she doesn't like this one anymore. So what she really wants, is a different boyfriend, someone else. Someone who happens to be the neighbor. Someone who happens to be the neighbor who is actually a girl. So she wants a girlfriend. Her current boyfriend (cross out) husband, just so happens to be the local minister of a very up tight Christian church.
C1 is his greatest supporter in the church, and is often helping out the church and seen as the second face of the church. Everyone knows her husband, and if they know her husband they know her. She loves the church community. It saved them, lets say. Her child was dying - she had a child with her husband - he had a big disease thing. The church raised money, saved her child. So she feels indebted to the church because they saved her child. They spent all their money on the child. The child died anyway. The husband and wife relationship is falling apart because of the death of the child. They have to feign continual interest to appear to be the perfect minister-and-wife couple. As the relationship falls apart, the husband becomes angry and abuse. As the abuse rages, the wife begins to make friends with the neighbor, the one she eventually falls in love with. So she needs to some how save her community, keep all the friends she's made with in her church, leave her husband, get with her new girlfriend, get over the death of her daughter...
Yeah, I just kept going in every possible crazy place I could go because I was brain storming, and I'm sure as hell thinking that'd be a very interesting, conflicting novel, and I just rolled on with the idea that "Character One wants a boyfriend" and just tried to throw as much shit at her as I could to screw that up. I also learned more about her on the way. But there's so much more I still don't know, namely: How does she feel about God, about her religion? That could be what is learned along the way.
Not sure if that helped. Essentially, your plot has to be directly related to the character. You can't be able to pull the character out of the situation and move them somewhere else entirely, otherwise, they're not tied closely enough. I mentioned this a lot in my character development podcast with Conrad.
Best of luck!
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