The Fear Of The Blank Page.

I’ve always found it hard to start writing things.

With each book I write, it gets easier, but I still feel incompetent when it comes to beginning things. I can end books just fine. Endings are good, they’re dramatic, they’re important. But beginnings? Holy crap, they’re hard to write. You have to set the scene, you have to interest people. Oh, and when you begin something, you have no idea how it’s going to turn out.

Today, I had to write a description for the back of AMEND. I can not describe my books in one paragraph.

I can write books easily enough, but I can’t describe them.

And so I sat at the computer, staring at the blankness on the screen, trying to figure out how to describe 52, 700 and something words in just a paragraph.

And just when I thought I was done, I had to write a paragraph or so about myself.

You’d think I’d know myself pretty well, seeing as I’ve spent the last fifteen years being myself. But it turns out; describing myself is ten times worse than describing my book.

I mean, how do you sum up a whole person in a few words? And how do you know you’re not writing about who you want to be, rather than who you are?

So for the second time today, I found myself staring at a blank page.

I’m fascinated by words and letters and writing. When I write, I form the letters without thinking. When I type, my fingers find the keys without looking.

For about half my life, I have been able to create words by putting letters together. And it’s completely subconscious. It’s a miracle really, that words just form.

But when the words don’t come…then I can’t write without thinking.

And the truth is, I’m scared of the blank page. I hate that I can’t find words to fill it up.

Yesterday, I was working on the third draft of TRANSCEND. Most of what I was doing was trying to add some emotion to it. In the kind of books I write, there has to be emotion. I write horrible storylines, and the characters have to react to that.

But sometimes, I just can’t find the words. And the page wasn’t even blank. It was filled with the little black symbols that form together to make our language. It was completely filled with words, and I was still unable to write.

When I wrote the first draft of TRANSCEND, I felt like I had forgotten how to write. I was so sick of that book, and I just wanted it to be finished. So I hurried it, and it was pretty crap. The feeling of not being able to write…let’s just say it’s not a good thing for writers to feel.

I express myself through my books, so if I can’t write, then I can’t express myself.

On the 1^st of February, I started writing another book.

It’s set in the same world as The Three Stages trilogy, but set it’s about fifteen years after the end of TRANSCEND.

My current plans are to have a trilogy of trilogies. So nine books all set in the same world.

The book I am currently writing feels very different from The Three Stages trilogy. For a start, I don’t have a lot of main characters; I have a lot of secondary main characters, and then one main one. Her name’s Yanne, and she is a very interesting character to write. Why? Because she doesn’t tell lies. Ever.

I have never read a book where the main character doesn’t lie at least a few times. I now see why. It is really hard to write, cos you have to think about every single word that character says.

When I started writing this book, I was going to have three main characters. Then I realized that I didn’t really like one of them, and one of them was kind of boring. So now I just have Yanne.

But the first few chapters will have to be changed, because they’re from the perspective of other characters. So I have to rewrite the beginning, and face the blank page yet again.

Epilogue-y Stuff.

Last night (or ~ more accurately ~ in the very early hours of this morning) I wrote the epilogue of AMEND.

Originally, it was the one book in the trilogy that was without an epilogue. I didn’t have any particular reason for this, other than the fact that less than 24 hours pass by between the end of AMEND and the beginning of TRANSCEND.

 I tend to use the epilogue as a place for characters to reflect. Reflection needs time to pass; otherwise it’s not quite reflective enough.

I had just finished fixing up the edits for the third draft of AMEND, when I realized the book didn’t feel quite…finished.

And so I thought why not write an epilogue? If it sucks, it can be removed. If it doesn’t, I’ve got a slightly longer book. It took me between half an hour and forty-five minutes to write it.

If it had been from the perspective of any other character, it wouldn’t have taken so long to write.

Although my books are written in the third person, I write the epilogue in the first person. That way, at the end of the book, you can really get into the character’s mind, see what they’re thinking and feeling.

In CONSEQUENCE, the epilogue was in the first person of Phoenix. 

Writing it was incredibly easy, because it was easy to get into her head. Out of all my characters, Phoenix is the one who’s most like me. That makes her the easiest to write, but also the one that annoys me most, because she has a lot of aspects of me that I don’t like.

My main character in AMEND is called Melinoe. She is horrible. I hated her for most of the book, until I realized that it was actually quite fun writing a character like her. I could push the boundaries of what a character could do or say, I wanted to see how far she had to go before people hated her.

In CONSEQUENCE, I had two main characters. For reasons to do with the last chapter, I couldn’t use Persephone for the epilogue, so I used Phoenix.

But in AMEND; although I have another sort-of-main character, Melinoe is the main one. So the epilogue had to be from her perspective. I didn’t realize how hard this was until I started writing it.

Most characters evolve over the course of a book, but Melinoe didn’t evolve very much.

She had learnt a few life lessons, but she was still Melinoe.

I don’t think anything could change her, because she’s very…confined to a certain way of thinking and being.

Yet I had to get into her mind ~ which, by the way, isn’t always that great a place to be.

When I was done, I was happy with what I had written.

But I think that in the process of writing the epilogue, I was trying so hard to write it, that I didn’t realize that I shouldn’t be writing it ~ Melinoe should. 

Every so often I would find a sentence that was completely Melinoe, and those were the sentences I kept. I removed everything that sounded too like me, and I made it all her.