These where the random notes/doodle from the first idea stage for my WIP 'Dead above'. Does anyone else begin brainstorming by thinking of pieces of dialogue first and then creating characters and plot around it.
kafka coded and would still read
Honestly? My main piece of advice for writing well-rounded characters is to make them a little bit lame. No real living person is 100% cool and suave 100% of the time. Everyone's a little awkward sometimes, or gets too excited about something goofy, or has a silly fear, or laughs about stupid things. Being a bit of a loser is an incurable part of the human condition. Utilize that in your writing.
I went to an all girls secondary school, I remember my mother telling my primary school teacher that there would be no boys to distract me there. That it was better and it's true that there where no boys, well no cis boys. But there where men. Men who walked up the stairs too slowly behind when you wore a skirt, men that leaned over you to correct math mistakes that didn't exist, men that made girls loudly spell out why when they needed to use the bathroom. Men that shouldn't have been anywhere near a school. There wasn't many boys to distract us, but there where men that betrayed us.
Let hope wrap you up in its gentle arms, let it never let you go.
I know I don't say it enough and we joke about depression and how loneliness is eating up our lives, but it will be okay. I promise you it will.
I know right now, with everything that's going on in the world, it feels like the night will last forever, it's darkness stretching out for years and years ahead. But I have to say that one day, the soft pull of life will tug at you. You'll find yourself sitting quietly in the summer months enjoying the warm rays and the birdsongs, maybe you plant some flowers or berrys. You'll laugh till your sides ache and your heart lightens. You'll make art and get paint on your clothes and on your carpet. You'll read books your friend recommend and gush over your favourite characters together, maybe you'll write your own. That's what's getting me through, that one day it will be summer, the days soft and I'll have my book finished in my hands and maybe someone will read it. Maybe they won't. But it's things like this, the soft things, that make everything worth it.
Each year I have a new resolution and I can't help but have another. For the past four years it was to have enough food to eat, for a bed to sleep on instead of the hard floor, for my mother( where ever she may be) to be okay. This year I want to feel like a bird let out a cage, I want to shed the apathy from me, I want to peel back a layer and expose myself to all sorts of possibilities, I want to feel the heat of it on new skin. I want to live, not just survive, here's to 2025.
Have I become addicted
to the sadness,
has it evolved into a hybrid
of apathy
of melancholy.
Will it stitch itself to my eyelids.
Will it clog up my narrow veins.
Is this the type of pain,
that drives my buried hope insane.
They say write what you know so I will. I want to tell the story of loss and hope. How quickly everything can fall apart , how you can be looking at misery and then suddenly living inside it. How hopes and dreams are a shield against dirty looks but they don't protect your cold hands or feet in the winter months.
I want to tell the story of the forgotten, the ignored. The people sitting against storefronts that are always asked to move move where?
I want to tell the story of the tired, the burdened. The children raising their siblings while their parents buy more scratch cards because maybe this time we'll win some money will they snap out of it then?
I want to tell the story of the desperate, the lost. The young person that left everything behind , that sits in cafes but never orders. That uses the free WiFi to check social media accounts of old friends, but can never bring themselves to do so, afraid that they realise they've been forgotten how much longer can I can they hide?
What story do you want to tell?
I want to write about the pain of it all, I want to write about the people I qued with outside of food banks; there was an old man who looked like a wise wizard with his long white hair, he waited for a small portion of pasta most days and offered me advice on the best times to turn up, there was a group of polish men with cans of alcohol shared between them, who at first assumed I was polish aswell and tried to talk to me, but all I could say was Przepraszam, nie wiem Polski the old man told me to stand next to him after that, there was also a brother and sister who where both addicted to heroine, most days they seemed to be going through intense withdrawals. We would all wait in a old medieval churchyard, some sat on toppled headstones while others leaned against stone angels with their faces covered. I want to write about what complete isolation and poverty does to you, how eyes don't meet yours and voices talk over you. But when I do, the room goes quiet and people look away, suddenly i feel the need to awkwardly laugh and say so yeah anyway.