Great blog post, and meme question #11

This blog post really resonated with me today.  I think that my recent writer’s block is less a failure of inspiration than a failure of courage.  After all, if you don’t say anything, people can’t hate you – except of course how they can and will, whether you speak or don’t speak, act or don’t act.  Anyway, this spoke to me today:

Whoever told you that courage wasn’t necessary to write was either lying, or…well—no, they were simply lying….

Every word we write, every world we craft, every essay we conjure the courage to post, everything that we allow to cross over from that tenuous, indescribable place and into the real world, leaves us vulnerable….

It’s personal in that we’re letting loose a little bit of our madness.

From “Welcome to the Asylum” http://jschancellor.wordpress.com/

Meme question #11

11. Who is your favorite character to write? Least favorite?

That’s really hard.  I think it must be a fanfiction question, because it would be a lot easier to answer if I was still in fanfiction.  With my own characters I tend to love best the character I haven’t written for a while.  IE, I’ll write a chapter in one character’s POV and at the beginning of the chapter I’ll be really enjoying his outlook and voice, but by the end I’ll be fed up of him and eager to start a new chapter from someone else’s POV.  Having said that, I loved writing Garnet Littleton in Blessed Isle because he is completely different from me – he loves the sound of his own voice, he’s arrogant, he thinks he’s God’s gift to mankind, he’s a flippant, funny, charismatic, confident extrovert, and totally a holiday for me from my own neurotic state of self doubt.

I hated writing Tancred in The Witch’s Boy, Captain Edwards in Captain’s Surrender, and Mr. Stokes (Darren’s father) in Shining in the Sun.  My villains all have in common that they are mean – in the sense of small-minded as well as in the sense of malicious.  They’re closed in around themselves and their own obsessions, and they feel claustrophobic and toxic to write.  I don’t like writing villains.

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