I'm normally pretty bad at practising what I preach in terms of being gentle with yourself. I very often feel like I've failed if I don't make my arbitrary deadlines or if things just aren't the way I want them to be, and it's been dragging me down for years. I have always been like this, and it's a difficult habit to change, believe me.
Something that is helping at the moment is trying to see myself through other people's eyes. There are times when I go out and I realise that I am a happy, content (the two things are slightly different) and confident individual. I have fun and can inspire others to have fun. Sometimes I forget how to let my hair down, and sometimes I wish I would realise that it would be better for me to just down a sharing bag of Skittles instead of drinking, because my drink of choice - gin and tonic - is such a downer. It tastes beautiful, but it is a depressant, and that's not a good thing when you drink a few (or more).
Last night I spent time reading a book I was enjoying. In some ways, the story line is similar to the first novel I ever wrote (just to clarify, Fairies was the first novel I published, but it was the second novel I wrote). Some bits of it really annoyed me, but that was due to bad editing and that happens to everyone. It's called Things I Want My Daughters to Know by Elizabeth Noble, and there were times where I thought I was going to end up in tears. It's well written and thoughtful, and the characters are wonderful. Don't get me wrong, it's not going to be one of my favourites that I still re-read (that list being The Fault in Our Stars, The Monsters of Gramercy Park and Captain Corelli's Mandolin) but it was pretty excellent. It's also the perfect book for a reading group, because it's already got discussion questions in the back.... (these always really confuse me. Does anyone actually ever use them? If I'm discussing a book I enjoyed with other people, I never really need a prompt or a guide to know which bits need thinking/talking about. Really don't get it.)
I just finished reading the book, and I'm in that happy sort of sated state that comes of having finished something you wanted to finish, but it's something else as well. I have written before about the advice that Nicholas Sparks gave me in that brief conversation in Foyles book store, but it feels very relevant now, because I know that it was a great book. I can see the style and the subtlety with which it was penned and the thought that has gone into the characters. It's the depth of the characters that really makes it, particularly because there is so much difference between them.
The most important thing I have to remind myself of at the moment is that in order to keep your characters human, in order to make sure that you're not writing the same thing over and over, or the sane character with a different name, you need to experience life, you need to experience people. It's all well and good to have a wonderful storyline, but if the characters are flat, or all the same, it will kill the storyline and that is painful.
Sometimes, I think of writers as liars, because we're building this elaborate world that doesn't exist, while trying to convince people that it not only can, but it does, even just inside your imagination, but that's not realy a fair assessment. I wouldn't be too surprised if some of us had a problem similar to multiple personality disorder, because sometimes it feels like you need to have in order to produce characters who are truly unique, from each other at least, but even that is not quite right. So what I'm going to go with, for now at least, is intrepid explorers of the human experience and imagination.
Catch you tomorrow...
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