How well do you know your characters?  Do you get to know them before you write or do they grow on you as you work out their situations?  What do you do if you’ve written an entire book, maybe even gone through an edit, and you can’t get through to your characters?

I set up a sort of companion site for my fanfiction writing as a way for me to delve into the canon characters and my own a bit better.  Flesh them out.  Make them even more real.  Really get inside their heads.  That’s only for fun because, well, it is fanfiction after all and I don’t have to worry about marketability or age range or even what it is I’m even writing.  It’s my de-stress writing.

But now I have Diamond Crier and the more I think of it, the more it kind of saddens me that there’s this barrier between me and my own characters.  Sabina is inaccesible to me, for the most part anyway.  I feel like I’m there with her but the relationship is superficial.  I only know what she tells me, what she allows me to see.  If I pry, it’s a blank.  This brings me to two conclusions – 1) DC really is going to be a trunk novel and 2) I’m writing the wrong MC.  Or even the wrong story.

I have confidence in the writing, as much as I can as I near the end of the second draft.  But it’s lost me.  I scratched a good 80% of the novel and rewrote it.  It bears next to no resemblance to the first draft (which isn’t a bad thing) but the more I write and the more I try to stay in Sabina’s head, the more disenchanted I become, the less interested.  I’ve tried to morph her.  She won’t change.  I’ve tried to urge her to do more.  It’s nothing great.  I can’t force her but, at the end of the day, she’s not an exciting main character.

Ketin, who’s going bat shitty because her boyfriend’s possessed but doesn’t know it and thinks he’s turning into a manwhore is much more interesting.  Mic (Mike) who’s, for lack of better words, getting tear-raped on a weekly basis and whose brain is slowly sucking away into nothingness is more interesting.  Cab, whose mother is the only person that can pronounce his real name and comes from South Fair, where people hold earthen magic and outsiders lose themselves, literally, is more interesting.

Layla from Coney Island Psychic is right.  She’s actually been yelling at me this last week or so to write and I haven’t touched that story in over a year.  Michael from Earth Shatterer is right.  My as yet unnamed characters from my other story ideas are right.  My fanfiction world is right.  Diamond Crier isn’t and that sucks.  It’s a son-of-a-bitch moment, as in ‘Son of a bitch, I’m writing the wrong MC!”  That’s not something even heavy editing can fix.  That’s start from scratch material right there.

I’m determined to finish DC but I think I’m going to skip the Beta process and just put it up on the web in a rather raw form.  At this point I’m consigned to the fact that DC was/is practice.  And I’m ok with that.  Or I will be.  It’s a lot of invested time just to have it stay where it is.  But it’s definitely not wasted.  Not at all.  I’ve grown so much writing Diamond Crier and I wouldn’t take any of it back.  I will finish it, this book and the next one because I want the story told.  I’ll save my “right” ones for the publishers.