November, 2007

I’ve always played games, and somewhere there has always been a role play game of some sort.  I’ve mentioned before that I lean toward ranger/hunter classes, mainly because they’re fun to play.  I belonged to a fantasy/sci-fi writing site many years ago, and there was a small group of us that actually wanted to go beyond the stupidity of comic bs that occurs in the inn boards and such, and move into something a bit more serious.  I will admit here that I’m a bit OCD when it comes to creating characters.  I go through the process of working out a past, likes and dislikes, all the basic stuff, and I used to get comments all the time from people that they had no idea how to start on putting that type of information together.

There are quite a few good books on character development, and more than a few sites on the web that have similar information.  I went another route and created a character who collected stories from other characters.  That was her original purpose. Somewhere down the line she became a lot more complex and more independent than I had ever intended.  It’s always interesting for me to write fiction, because I just let characters go where they want.  Unfortunately, that is also the reason that I rarely finish anything, because the idgets won’t listen to me and they write themselves into a corner.

The whole reason I’m bringing this up is that I bought an actual paper journal about six months ago, and it’s been sitting on my desk.  The character who I mentioned has started writing there.  I think it’s interesting that I can’t get her to come across in the same way on the computer.  There’s something about the writing process, paper and ink, that makes it more of a deliberate task.  There’s less room for error, you can’t just go and delete it when you make a mistake.  For me, it forces the careful choice of words.

She’s stuck her head out of the corner where she stays occasionally, but she always retreats back to it when the idea of putting things in some tangible form come about.  Perhaps I will get something out of it this time.  I can never tell.