Writing Meditation: Letting a character live life, and grow

I have this thing about writing where I just really want it to be about working hard, and less about art. That's not to say I don't believe writing to be art, and an incredible expression of a person's soul, but when I write it feels like work. That's usually used in a negative tone by other people, but here I don't mean it that way. What I really mean is that you have to sit down, have a goal for writing, and stick to that delivery outcome or else you aren't producing. That's like my day job.

Lately, I've been describing my writing as my side hustle. I grew up with an entrepreneur as a father and it was hard. The business didn't quite thrive as much as we'd all hoped it would and it brought hard times. This turned me off from owning and running my own business. I've definitely had ideas in the past, of things I might want to do. Mostly terrible ideas. Like one where I wanted to create a site to match professors to students according to students learning style and a teachers teaching style. I called it the match.com of student and teacher relationships. This really just sounded like I was trying to hook teachers up with students, which I really wasn't trying to do. So yah, bad idea Or, I was just terrible at pitching ideas back then, a possibility.

I say all this because when the artsy stuff happens it catches me off guard. Specifically, how a character blossoms when you start writing. I like to make outlines before writing, and I do some basic structuring of character motivations and quirks. I try to keep this at a minimum so that they are just the things that I know that need to remain constant. In life, I think most people have constant character traits, no matter how much they grow. I am personally pretty darn stubborn and though I've grown more tactful, I am still very blunt.

I also identify who is central to my story and who isn't. Telwynn, in my mind, wasn't really. I thought, perhaps, she could still act as a point of view character, giving us a different perspective of the main character, and informing us how we should react to the main character through her eyes. Then, I started writing her. She came alive like no one else had, even the main protagonist. I was really surprised to see Telwynn so clearly, and love her so dearly. Jarrick, the Healer of my story, was and still really is the main character of my story, but Telwynn stood up and basically told me to look at her. What she had to offer to the story.

I truly believed it wouldn't be that way for me. I like outlines, I try to maintain a word count each day, I work and I hustle. I thought I was too structured for things to almost come alive independently of what I wished. There's basically nothing more artsy than that. And yet, it has been this amazing, beautiful experience, because where Jarrick is hard for me to understand, because I think there's so much of him in me, Telwynn on the other hand feels like a friend. Someone I am growing to know, rather than someone I already know and spent a great deal of time with already. She's new and fresh, and she wants me to better understand what she's going through in the little town of Glen. Why she is there.

She's an elf and like I said in my previous post, I have had a desire to maintain some tropes in my book to make it a little easier for me to write. Elves were supposed to be one of these, but then Telwynn basically said, nah, let's mix it up a bit. They aren't actually all that religious, they once lived for millenia but not anymore, and yes they are the hoity toity Elvish folk we see in so many stories, but Telwynn herself cares so little for any of that. She's trying to escape it.

I wanted to share this because I think it's important to discover your style and sometimes what your style is for a given story, character, or plot even. Be open to writing a story a different way than you might be used to, comfortable with, or envision yourself writing. I think my experience with Telwynn has been one of the most inspirational of my time with this book. I'm sure the more veteran writers will have already discovered this, and maybe even laugh at hw fascinated I am with it. If you are new though, like I am, well I hope you get to experience it too, a character filling in colors and becoming more than the black and white sketches you start with.