Finishing Off Mr. Poisson...

[idiosyncreant]

I'm going to see if liveblogging is as much fun as it sounds....

First off all, by "finishing off" I don't mean killing the character. Just the rough draft. Like a dog snapping a snake's head off, you know? Tough going, that...
Anyway. As of now, 12:48 p.m., I am in dire need of complications, despite the fact that the sequence that was supposed to serve as a climax is over.
These things do happen.

I passed up watching Casablanca to write this ending, two days in a row. Last night I refreshed on Monsters, Inc. What this says about the literary quality of my manuscript does not interest me. [/blatant lying]

***

Molly is very clever. I like making up what she would do, because it's always interesting, and in-the-moment. There are certain characters that steal the show, and you can always put your best into creating them, but the ones that go just GO.

***

1:56:
I have been working on this story since 9:30. I think this is as good a climax as I'm going to get. It's rather too neat and unworrisome, but that can be fixed.
I think it's time to be done with this draft.

Sprint! Sprint for the epilogue!
    {hint: there will be no epilogue}
Molly will finally get to ride on her train.
Poisson's double will be revealed for more than her imagination.
There will be wistful glances, maybe, preferably staged in the reflection of a train-window.
NOT.

***

2:53

We are heading closer...
And Mr. Poisson has finally used the phrase "Shock your friends! Amuse your enemies!" Which I realized I had to shoehorn in somehow after I realized the phrase was just like him, and fit the show...

Comments

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

I put horseloads of work into a setting once, and for plot purposes I needed these two particular characters to be there and serve a particular function, like cogs in clockwork, and so I made them exactly as detailed as I needed to, and no more. They wound up running away with the show, and are still with me, pestering me.

You can't predict that kind of thing, which is a pity because that's the energy you always want behind your main characters, and when a bit player takes off there's not always a lot you can do within the scope of that particular narrative without letting them take over the story. I managed to shift one around so that he was a supporting actor, not a bit player, but the other remained more set dressing than active participant.

I love it when it happens, though. There's something quite magical about it.

[idiosyncreant.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I like to mull over the ones in stories I've written, and guess at what characters did that to their writers.
I have money on Han Solo, for one; obviously by the time Harrison Ford played him he was an important character, but he has that unexpected vibe for me. The only good character in Paolini's series (on her own, anyway) was the one he wrote his sister into, the herbalist. Much the same thing, though that's been said, not my guess.

I had this one cocky little junior statesman who was to get my Wolf-shifting pack of characters into the courtroom, but I might as well do it right, right? And then...he was a main character for the next fourth of the story. Talathyn was cute, anyhow. It was bound to happen. ^_^

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, that is fun, picking characters who seem like surprise! characters. I must now ponder!

[idiosyncreant.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to think myself...I know I had some others at one point or other.

Luna Lovegood?
Though I have a feeling that Rowling was always falling in love with characters as she wrote them and tying them into the monstrous plot, so that hardly counts...

Faramir, likewise author complications...

Olaf's girlfriend in The Series of Unfortunate Events
The tailor in Skulduggery Pleasant
The Goddess-Child who becomes Mildred or something in Chrestomanci