My protagonist is an asshole.

Day 8
Today's word count: 4,495
Overall word count: 17,197

EDIT, ALMOST A MONTH LATER: Holy fucking shit, I wrote 4,500 words today?! Did I really think this was going to be normal?!

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Another good day. I wrote a ton of stuff this morning before work, did editing and rewrite throughout lunch, and wrote a bunch more this evening. I guess, when you have a lot to say, 2000 words is not an unattainable goal. I think I'm a pretty fast writer (even with my thumbs) when my brain is going.

The biggest chunk of today's writing has been a lengthy conversation between two of my primary characters. It involves a ton of exposition. Because this story is introducing a new and (I think, I hope) unique world, quite a bit of exposition is needed. As one of the participants in this long conversation is new to this world, I'm using it as an opportunity to bring the reader up to speed as well. But I'm leery of making the exposition too obvious; I'm reminded of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn novels (which I love; don't get me wrong), where one of my biggest annoyances is that in any dialogue, the characters appear to be speaking half to each other and half to me, the reader. Crummy dialogue pulls me out of a story faster than almost anything else, and because of that, I'm hyper-conscious of my own. So I plan to reread these passages for my second draft, and I intend to ask myself at every turn whether the dialogue feels like two real people talking.

Next...not even issue, but observation: my protagonist is an asshole.

He's fairly likable, in the way of most protagonists*, but he's an asshole. I couldn't be his friend in real life. Womanizer. Pathological liar. Misogynist. Douchebag in general. I'm trying not to force him to do anything, instead just trying to have him react realistically to the situations in which he finds himself, but I do wonder if he's going to grow or change at all.

Another note: I have no idea how to do this, how to write a book, except for what I've picked up from Stephen King in On Writing. Going into this with his ideas as gospel, it's interesting to see the ways in which his ideas work for me, and the ways in which I am defying his wisdom and advice.

His philosophy (and this is condensed; you should read his very excellent book if you are curious) seems to be: Move fast. Write fast. Keep your confidence up. Don't plot things in advance; just come up with your basic situation and setting and let things play out. Don't show your work to anyone else until your first draft is completely done. Don't rewrite as you go; just get it all done, then let it sit in a drawer for a month or two before pulling it back out to rewrite for coherence and flow.

In contrast, I have been working fast, but only because I've had tons to say. I haven't done anything resembling freewriting, or improvising on the fly. My usual pattern has become:

- Spend the late evening in bed, thinking about what is going to happen next
- Write in the morning before work, disgorging sentences as best I can between feeding the dogs and getting myself ready for work
- Rewrite and edit that mess during my lunch break
- Daydream throughout the day about what's going to happen next
- Write a ton more in the evening, going back to my earlier writings to adjust them to flow better with what's going on
- Go to bed, rinse and repeat

I never sit down to write without a pretty good idea of what's going to happen. The only thing that gets decided at the keyboard (or phone) is how fast or slow it's going to move, the exact word choices, and some of the dialogue. Dialogue is really the only area where I ever surprise myself, because I try to role-play the people against each other, and sometimes I realize they aren't going to say what I thought they were going to say.

Anyway, I feel as though I'm doing a lot of rewriting and editing as I go, both for mechanics and for story. As far as mechanics go, I'd be willing to bet there are zero typos in my manuscript so far. That's unsurprising; I'm a professional proofreader, after all. But the constant on-the-fly readjusting of the story is something that King seems to recommend against, yet feels good to me. I fully plan to let the finished first draft sit for a while, then re-approach it for a second draft, but I feel as though it will be pretty polished already.

Until later, thanks for reading. Even though there's nobody reading yet.





* There must be something in our psychology that makes us want to identify with the POV character in any story, justifying or ignoring his or her faults and sharing in the triumphs. Hence the popularity of weenie or jerkwad protagonists such as Victor Frankenstein and Harry Potter, and the instant sympathy for former villains like Jaime Lannister as soon as they take center stage.