Katy's Eighth Post

My mother was going to come visit me, and now she can't. I'm sad, but it made me realize a certain yearning, longing that was missing from my character. I remember now--feel now--what it's like to yearn for something or someone, and it won't get lost in my story anymore.

I'm trying to focus on amping everything up, the longing, the tension, the vulnerability, the anger, the confusion and misguided assumptions, the way everyone gets carried away believing what they want to believe. Coming into the scenes from what they're feeling instead of what they're doing and who they are has been eye-opening. I understand the characters in a new way now, and it's become easy for me to write them again. They're fresh again, and I feel for them.

This also means a lot of major changes that I never thought I would make. I see now that the story we set out to write is rarely the story we end up telling. But it's hard to take that leap and trust that this new direction is the more powerful story to tell. I got so comfortable in what I had before--but, of course, that's a problem. I don't want to feel comfortable in my writing. I want to feel risky and tense and excited. I have to trust my instincts and let my story evolve. To do anything else would merely be laziness, and it wouldn't serve what I so desperately want to accomplish.