Casting Call

So, uh. It's about to get all close and personal up in here. But, you know, it's a blog, so that's how it goes from time to time.

I don't know if you've noticed, but National Novel Writing Month is coming up. For those of you who don't know, it's a month dedicated to writing long form fiction. There's a site for it and everything, and the idea is to churn out fifty thousand words of fiction. Or non-fiction. Or five ten thousand-word stories. Or ten five thousand-word stories. The whole thing's become rather nebulous as time has gone by.

Also got bit by the 8-Bit Bug

I first heard about it when I was in college. I was reading web comics - always a good use of time in college - and one of the writers mentioned that he was going to be attempting this crazy thing where he wrote a novel in a month. I did some research and signed up on a lark.

I finished it - made it past the 50K mark. The other writer did not. That was pretty awesome.

I've done it every year since then, and every year I've made it through to fifty thousand words. Pretty cool, huh? Seven years of survival. You'd think I had seven novels just up and ready to go, and with self-publishing becoming the next big thing, I should be just raking in money hand over fist, right?

Well... not so much.

You see, a strange thing has happened to my writing. I find, as time goes by, that I settle into this cycle. I go for broke in November. I spend December as a broken writer, not able to put a single sentence down. The rest of the year is spent reclaiming my identity, slowly but surely, until I finally arrive at November, fresh and ready to blow myself to smithereens.

It's a real problem, the burn-out. And while there isn't an easy fix for it, there is a simple one: the grit and grind of a daily writing habit. I've read about Seinfeld's tactic of using a calendar and making sure he marks every day that he works on material, creating a chain of productivity that requires relatively little willpower. It's all about maintaining the habit at that point.

I suspect that I will be able to maintain my writing past November, and it's a prospect I look forward to with great eagerness.

Because Hyperbole and a Half legitimizes... everything.

But there's another problem, a new pattern emerging in my longer works. I get this idea about a world, about its quirks and the kind of story I'd like to tell in it. And I start to tell it... and it just peters out into nothing. Frustrated, I try another angle, another start. Same thing happens. I end up with fifty thousand words of beginnings and middles, but no ends, in fact, not even a decent arc to show. Seven empty promises that took seven years and 350,000 words to say that they weren't coming true.

And I've been thinking about it, really digging in to figure out what is going on, why this is so hard for me. I love writing long fiction. I love spending time with compelling characters, and watching them hit soaring heights that just don't happen in short fiction.

And that is precisely my problem. I don't know how to write compelling characters - all I ever write is myself.

That sounds depressing. Have a puppy.

93% of all sads disappear in the presence of Corgis.

All my protagonists have more than just a piece of me - they're a piece of me combined with lots of other smaller pieces. My first novel, a sort of "the Crusades, but fantasy!" piece, was about a warrior monk who went forth to have his absolute faith challenged by the horrible things he was seeing. That was me dealing with college. The next one was a young man waking up in the future to find that he's been given a badass cybernetic body and is being expected to fight in a war. That was me dealing with the fact that my brother went off to join the Marines.

Another was an inversion of Twilight, a vampire romance told from a male perspective. I actually got a real kick out of that one - who better to write a romance than someone who's never been successfully romantic, or been romanced in turn? - but the protagonist was me too. Poor, snarky, and spent a little too much time obsessing over pull ups.

True story: this image actually inspired the novel that year.

The bottom line, if I'm honest about it, is that I'm not interested in keeping up this same pattern. I need to change it, which means I need to address my lack of characters. Unfortunately, I'm a little handicapped on this. I'm too sane to have voices in my head, reacting like an entirely separate person. I dunno how the hell my friends do it. I don't really know how anyone does that.

But what I do understand are systems. And I have an idea - I'm going to start looking for prompts and writing my characters in reaction to those prompts. I've got a whole 19 days yet to figure out MC-kun sounds and if there's an MC-chan in the mix somewhere and what the hell any of it means.

Maybe it won't make a difference, and I'm just doomed again. But it's a different approach than what I used before, so there's the chance that things can be different. It's a shot I gotta take.

So, tell me. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Am I on the right track or am I lost in the woods? What about you? Do you have voices (and have you seen a doctor)? Or do you rely on systems to write out your characters?