Fighting With My Main Character

Why must she be so frustrating?

I mean, I named the book after her. The whole story is about her. It's for her. Everyone loves her. The other characters love her. My beta readers love her. Everyone thinks she's so so great.

Everyone but me.

I can't explain it. She just feels so...flat. I'm begging her to be more interesting. She won't do it.

I do this weird thing sometimes where I write letters back and forth with my characters. (Maybe that's a subject for a future blog.) In one such letter to me, my main character wrote:

"And although I regret that there was conflict, I can’t say I’m sorry for not being more cooperative. I do not desire to exist for your entertainment; I simply wish to live my life."

And, ugh! That's one of the frustrating things about her. Not only is she boring, but she's stubbornly boring!

So, what is an author to do? The exact thing I avoid doing with people I can't stand in real life.

I spent more time with her.

In Lyra the Fairy Princess, I've long felt that even though I've had my manuscript fully drafted, it felt...incomplete. Something felt like it was missing. The story was told, but not all of its soul was there.

Lyra's personality was missing. Her former relationship with her father was missing. Her bond with her powers was missing. Any explanation of the magical world around her was missing.

I looked at my word count – just about 100k. Hmm... Well, seemed to me that there was room for a little bit more.

The story contains a lot of jumping around the timeline. I like that structure for a lot of reasons, and it helps here because it allows me to slip in some more scenes from several years before the events of the main story in a fairly natural way.

I wrote eight new scenes, all of them centering around high-school-aged Lyra and her father. In some of these scenes, she learns about magic; in others, she's just spending time with her father. And I love every single one.

I love Lyra in every single one.