For a while I’ve been frustrated by an inability to take Star and Scribe any further. I’ve had the perfect storm of writers’ block inducing If you want some awesome advice on what NOT to do as a writer, watch Plinkett’s reviews of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. After re-watching his evisceration of Episode I, I realized that I had become that which I despised and made a George Lucas mistake: I don’t really have a true main character and I don’t think I’ve provided enough of a reason for a reader to care about the characters. Jane is too flat so far, and while I think Edmund is a bit more complex, he’s too much of a whiny man-baby and Barb and Ozzy still feel too interchangeable to me. I want to go back and change all that. The first dozen chapters will need a heavy rewrite, and in the meantime I’m diving into a very different type of project to give myself something more challenging than light comedy.

I’m not looking forward to the rewrite. Editing is a lot more work than dumping new ideas onto a page. Some writers can manage two main characters, but I don’t think I’m at that level yet and this isn’t the sort of novel that can accommodate changes of perspective, as in About a Boy, which brilliantly interwove the perspectives of Marcus and Will and came to a single conclusion. But books like that are rare, so I really need to pick who I want this story to be about and make it work. Austen was a genius at this; Pride and Prejudice was about Elizabeth and Darcy, but there’s never any question that Elizabeth is the main character. Sense and Sensibility arguably eroded the line between main and secondary protagonists, but in the end Elinor really is the lynch pin of the plot, offering a more complete view of what’s going on for the reader than any other character. Every story needs a Luke Skywalker, and I haven’t found mine yet.

Now that stuff like hand surgery, moving, and figuring out how Loki’s self-cleaning litter tray works isn’t sapping my time, I’d like to buckle down and figure out what is and isn’t working with my drafts. That means less time screwing around playing sudoku and more time thinking about building meaningful characters living in worlds that are interesting and genuine. I wish I had that guy from Project Runway standing over my shoulder telling me to make it work, because that would be incredibly motivating. Virginia Woolf wasn’t kidding; in the absence of “a room of one’s own” the stresses and hubbub of everyday life is a total creativity killer. It’s going to take some serious work to simplify things and get to the point where the business of life sucks the artistic drive right out of my brain-goo.