LNR has been on my mind a lot recently. That is one of the nice things about working with other people's words for a living--they stay on the page at the end of the day. I don't find myself wondering about the development of the educational system in the Renaissance or democracy in the Philippines after 5 p.m. I usually find it interesting while working on it, but then I can set it aside. With my own writing, it spends a lot of time lurking around in my brain.

Just deciding that you having some characters you want to write a story about is not enough, I have discovered. It is a little like planning a wedding: you go into it thinking it is pretty straightforward--dress, flowers, ring, church--and find out there are a ton of decisions to be made that then affect other decisions to be made. Some details flow naturally from the context and others have to be consciously decided on.

A few posts ago, I mentioned tone. Recognizing that it was something I would have to take into consideration was good. Unfortunately, it occurred to me later that I hadn't really been thinking about my character the right way before, that I hadn't gotten down her tone. And that in turn was because I hadn't thought my way through the story. All I really had was that she was there, with her own baggage, something terrible happens, and...? Not exactly the stuff of great literature. A story can't just be A happens, then B happens, then C happens, the end. There has to be a change. Static characters are boring characters.

Quest stories--popular in fantasy--are one way of doing this: character goes on a journey, faces internal and external perils, learns something about the world and himself, reaches a goal, and returns successfully, a changed person.

A character doesn't have to fight a series of (literal) monsters to change, though. Dealing with the consequences of his or her actions can change a character, too, as I discovered in Haddon's Spot. The characters are the members of a family, and most of them change over the course of the book from kind of selfish jerks to people trying to be more aware of themselves and the people around them. This happens in part because they stop trying to deceive themselves, or start trying to see what is really in front of them.

I realized that my main character sounded somewhat like me, with my background and experiences coloring how I act and perceived the world. But that is not her history. Looking at the situation I have placed her in, I have to decide how *she* would respond, and what kind of person that would turn her into. I also had an idea for a final scene, and there is no way that the person on page one, as written now, could be the person on the last page. So there is more thinking ahead of me on that point.

Another thing--and this is going to sound stupid, I know, but there it is--that had me worried was how I was going to fill up enough pages to make a novel. As I said, dumb. Now I recognize that this, too, was related to me not thinking through the story. I didn't have any idea of how long of a time-period I was looking at for the action of the story. I originally thought I would stick closely to the point of view of my main character, but then I realized there were other characters with their own stories to tell. Unfortunately, one of them is going to get the whack part way through, but that is what it is.

I'm not a very demonstrative person, so the thought of writing about other people's thoughts and feelings when I have trouble expressing my own is rather daunting. I think this aspect of writing is going to be my own personal quest.