Writing is Hard

So apparently this has become my post-once-a-year-ranting blog. It's okay. My first Nano two years ago is documented here pretty well, then I haven't written anything about Nano 16, though I completed it successfully too. I mean, successfully in terms of word count, not so much on terms of my writing skills. And it seems I'm running into the same problem again.

Last year, I had to change main characters in the middle of the month, because my original mains started to feel flat and uninteresting and I didn't know what to do with them. This sucked, but it also opened my eyes to my greatest flaw as a writer: I'm bad at creating characters. Unfortunately, knowing it this year didn't make me put any more effort into my characters, because I'm also lazy, and I'm pretty sure that's why I'm already in the deep with my story at 10,000 words. (Also, how in the heck did I write 17,800 words in six days the first year? How?!)

Story ideas and worlds have always been fairly easy to me, and I still feel like I cope with them pretty well. When I was younger, I never faced any problems with characters, either (though that's probably because I was young and I just didn't realise all my characters were flat re-iterations of me and/or characters from books by other people). The point, however, is that because of this, I never learned to create characters. To take the time and actually find out what kind of people they are. I've always just kind of expected them to be there when I start writing, and only recently I've realised that it's not that easy.

This is the thing which I obviously have to learn the hard way, because I'm still reluctant to sit down with those "40 questions of your characters" sheets and fill them out. I can't be bothered. But I also get mad at myself for not bothering. I want to write well. I want to write characters that are deep and complicated and have questionable morals because of their tragic childhood. I've tried to learn this - to start planning a story not with the plot or the world, but with the characters. I'm still very much in the process of learning this, though, and couldn't apply it to this year's Nano, which is why my characters just sound like versions of me again. *sigh*

I know this could be easily solved by writing more plot-driven stories where all the characters don't need to be planned so in-depth. I don't want to do that, though. I want to write about people. I think people are interesting. I think people should always be in the centre of stories, because I find people infinitely more fascinating than blowing up buildings. So why can't I write people like that?

I don't really have an uplifting ending note to this post. I really just wanted to rant about my insufficient skills and the difficulty or writing.