my characters are crazy.

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Seriously, my characters really are crazy. I don't understand them. How could they do this to me? They're putting me through so much torture, turning my brain into mush, and tying my hands behind my back while they do somersaults and cartwheels and backflips.
Hold on. Sorry, let me back up.
I was writing. It was a great day, my characters were being awesome and surprisingly cooperative, and then BAM! They do something crazy. Insane. Stupid.
The worst part? I have no idea where it came from. Literally. They just decided to sneak out in the middle of the night to find the bad guys. Yeah. They went looking for the bad guys. And (accidentally, but they were being stupid so not really) get kidnapped. Seriously—this was not my doing. It was theirs. I don't know where it came from.

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So now I'm trying to deal with their craziness, wondering what's going to happen to them. Are they going to die? (I hope not.) Get tortured? (Now, that would be appropriate punishment for being disobedient characters.) Maybe they should get rescued...but not yet. There's plot development that I guess has to happen before that. They can't get kidnapped for no reason, right?

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There's so much I want to do with this book. There's even more that, as I take my Novel in a Year class online, I realize I'm doing wrong. And that sucks. It really, really sucks.

One of those realizations: when I started out writing a few years ago, I was too nice. Nothing bad could happen. Then I realized that there has to be conflict. If there isn't, the story would be really boring. So then I was too mean. It got to the point where my cruelness was pointless. And (I think) being too mean is probably just as bad as being too nice.

So now I'm trying to find the balance. The in between, with the right kind—and amount—of conflict.

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So, we'll see how this goes. Now I need to go try to figure out what the heck I'm supposed to do with these curiously crazy characters of mine. It's so much fun when they take over the story.

♥

Bekah Joan