A common question authors get asked is “Which of your characters are most like you?” If you’re a smart author, you would’ve probably tried to avoid making a character TOO much like you and relied on your talent and skill to come up with some great, original characters (or, if you’re smarter, you would’ve used real people you know, and just not tell them. It’s a great way to exact revenge, I’m told).
I’m neither of those authors, so just about most of my characters carry some trait of me or another. The scariest ones are the ones I try to get a rational sense of. Enosh’s arrogance and desire for control; Khine’s niggling discontent with his failures; Yeshin’s ambition. I expand and distort, giving them lives of their own so that I can view them from afar.
Writers’ worst enemies are themselves.
It is a career laid with landmines every which way. To even get started, you have to get over things like perfectionism and/or low self-esteem, for example. And this shit never ends. There’s always something more terrible around the corner.
Which is why I don’t talk about things like how to market or get more views or make sales in this blog. Not that I’d know anything about these things either; but I look at being a writer as a long-term thing. It’s not about winning this contest now or making people love your book more this year or what. It has nothing to do with what’s out there, and everything to do with what’s inside.
So last week, one of our discussions in my writing group was how every book you write has to be your best. Which means you must learn to accept that you’re not perfect–that there is always something to improve. To put it into perspective then, it means that getting praise, managing to write a book that sweeps people off their feet, lucking out, getting attention–may not always be the best thing in the world. Books that stand the test of time are often produced by writers who struggled with them every step of the way. Ergo, always struggling, always placing the bar higher, is good for a writer’s growth.
Even now, a year after writing The Wolf of Oren-yaro, I can see all the things I can do better. I’ve learned a lot, and as it goes with this career, I’ve learned that there is so much I don’t know yet. So each day I tell myself to be patient. There’s so many stories I want to tell, but I have to understand that these things take time–that my storytelling methods, my defiance in the face of what’s common in this genre, isn’t an overnight affair. A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a reader who had read all of the Agartes and Bitch Queen books to date…she remarked on all the background bits, how one sympathetic character in Agartes turned grey in Bitch Queen. It only took fifteen years to get here, and I’m barely scratching the surface of what I want to do.
I want stories that work from afar, and yet also work under a microscopic lens. I want stories that are entertaining, but also have breadth and depth; characters that live and breathe off the pages and carry on to give me more stories so I can give the world more books. I’m champing at the bit and that’s a good thing. The Xiaran Mongrel is the most epic book I’ve written thus far, and is nowhere even near what I want to write. The first book in the Second War of the Wolves‘ trilogy, The Hero in the Rice Hat, has to accomplish everything the entire Bitch Queen trilogy set out to do in one book, and then expand on it. I don’t think I even have the skills to pull it off yet. So I’m building towards it, letting myself learn to be comfortable with more–doling out each novel a little bit at a time so that I learn how to handle the little things before I rush off towards the big things.
The more I want to do, the better I have to be. To me, there is no other way.
