focus, Daniel-san

I was reading back through all the posts and I must apologize. It appears that I forgot to fill you all in. The story I've been working on is a supernatural mystery one, not the fun orphanage one I last mentioned.

The orphanage one started with a lot of gusto and it was very fluid and fun, but the story and some of the secondary and tertiary characters were very underdeveloped. And that made it hard. After that, I began working on another fun book with high school kids as the main characters and I found the reverse to be the case: I had good characters, but the story was very underdeveloped. It was easy to put them in a scene and let them drive it, but without goals in mind, those scene will go nowhere.

I fell back to a character and story idea I had while back and I decided to give it a go. But learning what I did (as mentioned above), I knew that I had some development to do. I thought about each character, the story, the motivations, the scenes and the overall feel of the book.

After doing this, I set out and began writing. And before I knew it I was about halfway done with the story. I'm still plowing through it and I have hurdles, but this one should be completed (I'm hoping) this month.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is: Don't start out prematurely on a story based on either a good character or a good story alone. You need both and you need them both developed.