Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Just because I wasn’t writing, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t writing.

I know to some it seems like I’ve been procrastinating, putting off actually breaking through my years-long writer’s block, but it hasn’t been all “Mañana, baby.”

In fact, in the past month, I did a lot of writing. No words written, but a lot of writing, nonetheless.

It began with re-reading one of my older books, and culminated (well, so far) over this past weekend when I had a revelation about my difficulty getting to Page One.

What I learned from my re-read was that the plot was good, the premise sound, the world robustly built, and the characters fresh and interesting. The prose was quite strong in many places, and good overall, but I recognized something in my own writing that I’d never noticed before: unevenness.

Granted, this was one of my early novels, but even so it was obvious that, in some paragraphs, I was just trying too hard, while in other spots, I just wanted to get to the next good bit. It’s not a glaring fault — it took me a long time to recognize it, to be honest — but it’s there, and it got me thinking.

As a writer, I do well at the high-level stuff of plot and motivation, and I do well at the details of world-building, dialogue, and description. Where I run into trouble is in the middle ground: consistency of voice, of pacing, etc.

I took this lesson and turned to the work-in-progress. Why was I so reluctant to begin writing? Was there a flaw out there in the middle ground that I hadn’t recognized. Why, when I’ve had this story rolling around in my head for so long, unable to shake it, was I having trouble getting it off the ground? I mean, if I didn’t like the plot, I’d have dropped the whole thing. My research into the period has been ongoing, and I find it a perfect fit with the plot. So, I’ve got the high-level and the detailed stuff ready to go. I even like the names I chose for the characters.

I concentrated on the middle distance, looking for something out in my writerly no-man’s-land that kept me hunkered down, fearing the Big Push. It took about ten days for me to see it, but it was there, hiding in my writer’s blind spot.

I didn’t like my main character.

I won’t get too much into the weeds here, so suffice it to say that, while he fit perfectly with the plot and the world and the action, he had one major flaw: he was boring.

Since I wouldn’t want to read a book about a guy who was boring, I sure as bloody hell don’t want to spend months writing about him.

It’s not that his job or his history are unbelievable. It’s not that his profession is without challenges. It’s not that he is just some schlub who sits around watching television, not doing anything. In fact, when I rework him, his actions, his demeanor, his thoughts, his introspections, they’ll all remain the same as I planned out beforehand.

But while he fits the needs of the plot perfectly, as a person he’s just uninteresting. And a bit of a cliché, to boot. I mean, a cliché is a cliché because it happens a lot, but when people read a book, they don’t want to read about things that happen a lot. They want to read about someone they don’t know. They want to spend their day/week with someone interesting.

Profession. Backstory. How he met his spouse. Family issues and motivations. His basic personality. Everything about him is now under scrutiny. I have some ideas of what to change, what to keep, what to trash entirely, what to tweak, but being in my blind spot, I want to be careful.

It doesn’t have to be perfect before I start, but it has to be good enough to stoke my passion for the words.

k