Lessons Along the Road

Don’t base your protagonist on yourself.  This may be obvious as shit to you, but it was revelatory to me – and a painful, humbling lesson.  I was completing the characters in my outlining process, as previously described in Snowflake Outline Method Review, and digging in with my main character, Sophia, who was me; all my experiences, my history, my reactions to the story setting.  I was cocky; I knew I had found a way to best all the work this step was supposed to entail.  How hard could it be?  It was me after all.  As the questions became more intimate, calling for more detail and depth, I very quickly spluttered to a baffling, abrupt halt.  What the hell?  What was the problem?  I could not figure out why in the world I couldn’t answer these questions, and when I attempted to, they were sparse, and exceedingly boring.  I looked at what I had written and I hated my main character.  I hated her.  She was insipid, slightly melodramatic, and did I mention boring?

That was an interesting moment.

I was trying to force reality into a very fantastical tale; trying to make it fit all together, somehow holding on to the notion I had to diligently report the truth, the actual events that occurred.  I was trying to replicate those actual events

and just narrate them.  When I let go of that, it was a tremendously freeing and cathartic moment.  I got to make up whatever I wanted.  I could take those characters and make them say and do whatever I wanted them to.  I didn’t have to stay constrained by whatever the actual events were.  Again – maybe obvious in retrospect, but it was a momentous turning moment for me.

I began writing this story years ago while stuck in an insane, stressful job in the biggest bureaucracy I have ever experienced.  Seriously surreal.  Forging friendships and making fun of the truly absurd was the only way to survive, and

frankly a lot of fun.  I began writing down bizarre scenes, actual events, bizarre illogical situations, fantastic proclamations from some idiot in management.  My stashes of scenes and snippets grew and kept growing with a seemingly unending supply of raw material, until abruptly they presented themselves to me as the perfect elements for a screenplay.   

Fairly recently I decided to convert what I had into a novel instead, my true roots.  Something that is mine, all mine.  It keeps growing, expanding, adjusting.  It is no longer a ‘slice of life,’ albeit a surreal life, story.  It has morphed into something that really excites me, something completely different.  The same basic setting but on surreal steroids.  It in no way reflects reality, what really happened there at all.  That turned out to simply be the launch pad.

And my protagonist no longer, in any way, resembles me.  I discovered, the hard way, I am much better as the conductor – not the player.  As far as analyzing what I found when I looked into the viscera of that character – I

decided some things shouldn’t be perused too closely, or deeply.  I have quietly just let it go.  Maybe without being forced into such analysis, that character may learn to grow after all and do something that will one day take my breath away.