You Don't Know Me

It's the first Wednesday of the month and that means it is time for another insecure writer posting.  And, boy, am I insecure right now.  I have insecurity running down the street screaming loud and long.  Whew.  It's a relief to admit that.  Thanks to Alex J. Cavanaugh and the Insecure Writer's Support Group, we can all vent once a month. His co-hosts today are Julie Flanders, Heather Gardner, Kim Van Sickler, and Elsie is Writing. Please be sure to thank them for their time and effort to make all IWSG members feel welcome.

I confess I have not been writing.

I know.  I know.  I know.

I have a friend reading my WIP and she has actually pointed out some pretty important holes.  It finally became clear that all of these problems go back to my conflicting ideas about the character.  Which begs the question: do I know my character?  If I don't, then how can I write that character???  So, I have been spending time just pondering.

It has occurred to me that I can just keep writing and fix this problem in the edits.  Some authors have revamped entire novels once they got the idea down.

Has this ever happened to you?  Did you think that you KNEW your MC and then realized that maybe you weren't as certain as you thought?  How did you resolve this issue?  Did you write your way through it or spend your time in other constructive ways?  

I DIDN'T EVEN NEED A SLINGSHOT

My high school was huge. It was more like a college campus than a high school. All of the junior high schools dumped into the public high school, so it had to be big. I can't remember how many buildings there were, but they were lettered and I think you had five minutes to change classes because sometimes you had quite a walk. The campus was really quite beautiful at certain times of year, and treacherous at others (i.e. winter when it was icy). It turns out I was also really terrible about leaving my umbrella under my chair in a class during the rainy season; it would quit raining during the day and it got left behind. Therefore, every Christmas I got something like five umbrellas. Ridiculous.

As you might imagine, the first day of school was intimidating. I was walking along looking for my homeroom building, and feeling very lost like 300+ other people, when the miracle happened. ::Wait for it:: Kellie popped up beside me. My first instinct was terror, but then she started chatting me up like we were best buddies. My next feeling was confusion. Then came understanding. My last name started with "R" and hers with "S." She, too, was lost and she believed that I was smarter, so she was sticking to me, so that I could help her get to her homeroom. That made me feel enormously better. That day I looked at Kellie for the first time with new eyes and I saw what she never wanted me to see: insecurity. The kicker was that she knew that I knew her secret. That day was the last she and I ever spoke.

I was free.


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