Over three months ago, before my twenty second birthday, I came up with an idea for a story that dealt with some subjects I keep a bit close to my heart.
Initially, I wanted to create something full of dialogue in order to work on what I perceive to be a weakness of mine. In order to this I needed to populate the story with a few characters to interact with each other, as opposed to the more introspective or intimate character dramas I tend to focus on. As I created these characters and their situations I started to veer towards topics in my subconscious, bringing them out consciously to create a subtext to the story that I didn’t initially set out to create. The end result is a story focusing on a twenty one year old girl, her unorthodox living situation, and her interactions with the people around her. I specifically wrote the character from a female point of view because I’ve always felt uncomfortable doing so. That said, I didn’t want to simply write a character and make then slap her gender on. I didn’t want to create a story that focused entirely on the aspect of her either. What I wanted was simply to create a story with a dialogue around the character that would also give some insight into what it was like to live as her.
I eschewed a lot of the more detailed and poetic language that I typically use as well. It felt unnatural to do so if I was speaking from a character’s point of view. I used simple descriptions of actions, attempting to make them as direct as I could, and left out statements that I felt gave to much insight into a character’s mind or state instead opting to attempt to make that clear through the dialogue. While I’m unsure if I was able to create an illusion of personality for each character, the end result does feel much more eventful and interactive than my typical work.
The full version should be up within the day, or the next.
ashen siegarettes 