Unpacking. Unpacking never ends. We're still unpacking and moving stuff, but at least the old place has been sold.
I'm learning German on DuoLingo. This isn't related to any of the writing projects, but just for fun. Once I've got it down, I've got a whole host of other languages I plan to learn, also for fun.
Now, for the biggest update: I've been working on the series I mentioned in the last post and it's got a title now. All the books (well, nearly all) have titles and I'm writing out the summaries for them. Well, more like the blurbs that you would read on the back of the books if you picked them up in the store.
I'm also doing something I don't usually do when it comes to writing. I'm making an outline. So far that is helping with the first book of the series, where I know the ending but didn't know anything else. Thanks to the outline, and talking about the characters with Myrrh (my lovely wife), I now know the beginning of the book and details about the killer. Even though it isn't planned for the killer to be caught until later in the series, it is important to know these details.
I'm not going to be sharing too much about the series since things have already changed a fair bit from the last post when I mentioned it. I will say that as I've worked on writing out the blurbs/summaries, I've learned things about characters that I didn't know when I initially thought of this idea and, while that might seem to some people as though I'm just making it up as I go, I'm not. These details and information are all things that when I look back at the titles of the books and which ones were going to feature which characters, made sense. Nothing that happens, happens just for the sake of pushing the plot forward or because the plot demands it. It happens because it makes sense based on the characters' histories and personalities.
I feel that that is something that authors forget. That characters are people, with a history and personality and a level of intelligence, not just props. If a character wouldn't do something because they know it doesn't make sense, then the readers are going to realize that the author has started puppeting the character around, jerking them like a marionette, the moment the character behaves out of character for the sake of advancing the plot. It can ruin immersion and believability, and just disappoint readers in general as the plot then seems contrived even if it had been great until then.
Readers like to submerge themselves in the world of a novel and if the main character suddenly starts acting a fool when they know better because the author needs it, the author has lost the reader's trust in them. Keeping the character in character is a big deal and a necessity when it comes to writing a series. Consistency is key. That's why knowing the characters is more important than knowing the plot. If you know your characters well enough, the plot will develop on its own.
Yes, I had the basic idea for the plot in mind before I started working on the characters, but it was a nebulous idea that had nothing solid. Nothing solid until the characters began to form and introduce themselves. Once that happened, the plot became more concrete and the characters became more and more people in their own right. As the characters developed, so did the plot. Without the characters, the plot would have remained rather nebulous. Plot is secondary to characters, not the other way around.
