Divisions and Precisions

"And really bad eggs..."

Have you ever loved a movie so much you wanted to just pack up and move in? Just, you know, live in the middle of the movie. I do it all the time. The first time I remembered it happening was probably with Star Wars. Then again with E.T. I just loved the characters so much I wanted them around all the time. Most recently it's happened with The Lord of the Rings movies, and now? Pirates of the Caribbean.

I realized, walking out of the movie theater after seeing it for the second time yesterday, what exactly it is I want to do with my writing. I want that. I want people to want to move in to my books and live there. I want to create characters--hell, I'd be happy if I just managed ONE character--that're so memorable, so alive, that they grow beyond whatever story they're in. I think there's some potential in the novel I'm working on now. A couple of the characters are fairly leaping off the page and grabbing me by the collar.

But there's one problem. You can't just create amazingly interesting characters and toss them out on an empty stage and just let them stand there and be admired. That's where I fall short. That's my weakness. I can provide set dressing and props, but very often I run into problems giving my characters something to do. I can pick up every single nuance of a character, but miss plotholes you could drive a truck through. Even when analyzing someone else's plot, I miss it. Ask me sometime why, to use Pirates as an example, I thought that Will and Jack were brothers. (The short answer: because I ignored a major plot point and jumped to an illogical conclusion.)

It's frustrating, to say the least. And I don't know how to fix it, save through just doing it. Analyzing plot. Mine. Other people's. I can recognize when something is tight, when all the pieces fit together neatly, and I am always in awe of it. I just can't manage to DO it. It's better with this novel than the earlier ones. The outline is helping immeasurably.

I'm just frustrated. I'm at the point where I can see the weaknesses in everything I do, but not always how to fix them. And now that I realize where it is I'm trying to go, it's doubly irritating to keep having to double back and retrace my steps.