Of Plans

I got stuck.

I was writing on this new thing, and after a while, I just found that I was stuck. I couldn't write any more. I didn't know where to go, what to do, what to write. How was this story going to go on? Whatever transition I could think of would be long and winding and I had created myself a minor point of no return; suddenly I had a situation where I had to kill my darlings, as "darlings" represent about 500 words and my entire story so far.

 

So I decided to just erase the document and start over. I realized that some of the blog posts I had posted on the subject had more in-depth information on the storyline than my synopsis did. That needed fixing. When I start referring to a blog post to see how my characters would react, then something somewhere is obviously toppled.

And it makes me wonder just how much forward planning, just how much pencilling and drawing you have to do to get a decent result. I've always thought that I wanted to reserve a great deal to the process of writing. It was my idea of leaving some joy in the writing. Synopses and storylines have always meant to me a great aid, but not to the point where the aid is more important than the cause. I realize, however, that what story I will produce will be a haphazard jumble of half-hearted ideas.

 

But in a short story like this - I doubt it will exceed more than perhaps 3,000 words, whereas many standard texts go to about five or six thousand - do I really need a wealth of characters? The main protagonist, the Ghost, will mostly be a rather empty shell, but I still need to grant him a motive, a final objective to strive for. Why is he doing what he is doing? Without that final goal in sight, all of his conversations will be dull and uninteresting, since they will just exist for the sole purpose of being there.

In the same sense, the other characters need ideas, need beliefs and dilemmas. Otherwise, why would they ever go on? I cannot portray an empty shell, because an empty shell would do very little - and especially so as I am rather bad at portraying characters in the first place. It's quite possible that these objectives, these layers of personality that I plan in my mind never will be revealed to the reader. They might exist solely in an obscure perspective, solely in my perspective.