My novel begins with the main character being thrust into a pretty shiddy situation.
Some would call it “life or death.”
The circumstances of him arriving in said situation seemed plausible to me. The pacing felt right. Everything made sense.
But as I moved away from the first chapters, I started asking myself:
“HEY. Hang on. Would a normal person be acting like this after just a few days in this new, horrible reality?”
I tried to image myself being thrown into the same situation. Faced with death for the first time after decades of living a mundane, safe existence.
Something about my main character’s actions and mindset just felt too “relaxed.”
I had to take a break from writing for a few days. The pacing was wrong. I felt like I needed to write extra scenes, draw out the plot in order to get Main Character acclimated to his new life. Otherwise he’d feel too “super heroey.” Too competent.
But then I had an epiphany, triggered by a real-life problem.
The other day, my Facebook profile got perma-banned. I have no idea why, since I literally only use Facebook to login to my Business Manager account and run ads.
(Maybe that’s why. Pretty sure I’ve never even posted once…am I AI?)
Within the course of a few hours, I went from “this is horrible, how am I possibly going to run ads or grow my business now” to “I don’t even like Facebook. Screw Mark Zuckerberg. I’ll just run my ads on YouTube or MySpace or whatever’s popular these days.”
In fact, I came up with almost a dozen alternative strategies just in case my Facebook ads truly, forever-ever went away.
My point is, humans are unbelievably crafty and adaptable. You have to be.
I couldn’t just curl up into a ball and cry and send Mark Zuckerberg sad midnight text messages hoping he’d unban by Facebook account. And my main character couldn’t just curl up into a ball and hope no one shoots him.
(They probably would shoot him.)
You’re faced with an impossible situation, but the choice is very easy and binary:
Give up or deal with it.
Nobody wants to read a story that ends with “I give up.” And along the way, the story that ends with “I give up” is really a story about a lame, incompetent person who cracks under pressure and gets moved along by the plot. We hate NOT having agency and autonomy in our lives, and those aren’t fun characters to read, either.
So my main character—although he doesn’t automatically learn karate and stop bullets with his hands and get all the girls with his 40-pack abs—decides he’s going to live. He’s still scared and basically useless at first, but he’s trying his best, damn it!
That’s not super-heroey. That’s as human as it gets.
Love,Dad Nick
P.S. Right, so where we at with word count? Here’s what Daddy got done this week:
Weekly Total: 4,693
Manuscript Total: 15,496
Still averaging about 5,000 per week…right on target.