IWSG – Another New Year

Ugh, I’ve seen too many of them, you know?

Well, anyway, I’ve come to realize that a lot of the problems with my writing stem from my poor characterization.  Or rather, that no matter how hard I try, my characters very soon slip into the same two or three characters I’ve been writing for the last umpty years.  Even if I’m using someone else’s characters, who absolutely should not be acting like that.  It’s a very frustrating realization, to say the least.

I’m going to be applying myself during the coming year to overcome this flaw…

…though I’m not 100% sure how I’m going to go about it.

First step will probably be a lot of re-writes, unfortunately.  I think I managed to improve the characterizations in the second draft of last year’s — uh, sorry, year before last’s — NaNo novel and separate them a bit.  But that type of re-writing is long and tedious, so I hope I manage to fix the problem in the first drafts in the future.

I’d probably do better at thinking of possible solutions if I wasn’t sick as a dog and really tired because it’s late at night.  (I know, I know, I probably shouldn’t be pre-writing in that case, but if I don’t, it won’t go out at all!)