There’s a game my kids liked the play when they were little. It’s a double-sided board that stands vertically; on each side are rows of individual characters, some of whom share similar traits, such as glasses or hats or blonde hair or brown eyes. Each player chooses one character that the other must guess by asking questions about the characteristics. The answers will either help identify or eliminate the characters.
“Guess Who?”: many individual characters; shared characteristics.
My writing process: the exact opposite.
Looking over drafts, trying to determine how best to proceed, I realize I’ve flipped the game. I seem to have opposing characteristics for one individual. How, I ask myself now, is it possible for my protagonist to be such a vastly different character from draft 1 (whenever that was) to now?
My original (after may failed attempts) first lines:
Bastard. Arrogant, cowardly, cheating, fucking bastard.
I slide down my locker to the cold hard floor, cellphone in hand, staring at the text. The words blur in front of my hot, stinging eyes, but they don’t disappear like I hope they will.
My current draft:
God
God?
Lyra slides down her locker to the cold hard floor, cell phone in hand, staring at the text from her boyfriend Jonah. Staring at the text from, it seems, her now ex-boyfriend Jonah.
“Is she an angry bitter, resentful girl?” my opponent may have asked in our inverted game of “Guess Who?”
No, I respond, meaning only my latest version.
Old draft:
A group of seniors—friends, I guess, if I liked them—mill about the parking lot, but I don’t care. In fact, it’s good they’re here; I want witnesses to tell Jonah who vandalized his precious baby. I want him to appreciate the high cost of screwing me over.
I don’t hesitate when I reach the bumblebee Camero. I scrape my sharp key along the yellow driver’s door, savouring the satisfying screech. I slink, slowly, deliberately around the car, relishing the squeal of metal on metal.
New draft:
It’s Monday afternoon in mid-June, the last week of Lyra’s last year of high school. The day’s final shrill bell has rung and kids spill into the hall. It’s an unusually warm spring day in Thorin Hill, a normally temperate northeastern Atlantic coastal town, and the students are impatient to surge outside. They shout, and slam lockers and stampede toward the door.
Lyra, by contrast, does not move. She sits still, a rock around which the swell of students swirls.
God.
Lyra doesn’t understand. No one invokes God these days. Any mention of God or religion is an archaic throwback to the Conflicts, the period of time decades ago before their world evolved into a post-religious society.
“Is she a hurt, confused, quiet girl who holds in her emotions?” my opponent may ask.
Yes, I say and when my opponent guesses correctly that my character was Lyra Harmon, she’ll ask, out of curiosity, to see the other incorrect characters on my side of the board.
I turn it around.
“How is that possible?” my dumbfounded opponent asks. “They’re all Lyra Harmon.”
I wish I knew.
I started out with the idea that Lyra was an angry, rebellious, grunge chick.
We’re grunge kids. We dress in ripped jeans, metal-head t-shirts and combat boots. We listen to real music—raw, throaty, unrefined sounds instead of the synthetic auto-tune pop that passes for songs today; we talk about real issues—the environment and homelessness and racial injustice, not celebrity worship and fashion tips. We believe in true, authentic, genuine expression and we don’t give a shit about other people’s opinions.
I thought an edgy heroine would work; that she could be out for revenge on her boyfriend could indicate she was willing to take revenge on the bad guy who nuked their city (first draft: a nuclear bomb by a rogue nation, not a lonely, confused kid bombing a high school). It spoke to motivation, I thought.
Result: I didn’t like her.
Correction: I didn’t like the way I portrayed her. I still like the idea of an angry, rebellious, grunge chick, but I was unsuccessful in creating an authentic one.
Once I dropped my fictional African setting of Taifa and created my First World/Second World setting, I dropped Lyra’s bitterness.
Lyra again thinks of Ivy, again feels the hot whips of panic, but she does not succumb. Instead, Lyra lies still. Stillness is her specialty, her dad teases. A calm soul, he calls her, serene and composed. Ivy often accuses her of being cold, unfeeling, unexpressive, but it’s the opposite. Lyra’s well of emotions runs so deep that it can never overflow.
I like her better. Little did I realize that Lyra would undergo a complete personality transplant.
One character; opposite character traits.
Angry, bitter, rebellious, vengeful.
Still, clam, serene, composed.
Guess who?