About Being Drill Sergeants

Post 794:

So it’s five months into a writing project. You’ve got characters going in all directions and the point is to bring them all back together for the big crescendo, climax and denouement, but by now these aren’t just some incorporeal phantoms that sometimes require a bit of your mental exertions.

By now they’re real. You know them, how they think and behave, the way they’d answer a question and how they feel about most things. For your main characters, you might know them better than you know yourself.

This is why I have to remind myself, and you should too, that it’s important to keep being mean to your creations. Make it a rough ride all the way home. I get a little bit fond of my peoples. I want them to be heroic and do the right thing, but they can only be heroes if the crap is piling up on their heads by the ton.

Beat them up. Make it bad, then make it worse. Make it too much. I know it’s hard. You have to be like a drill sergeant who breaks down the fresh recruits so that they can be built back up into steely versions of their former selves.

I bet there’s some really nice drill sergeants when they’re chilling at home, but it’s not nice to take it easy. That makes for weak characters and could be dangerous. Luckily, the stakes in writing aren’t as dire. The only danger here is creating characters that bore the shiz out of your audience.

Don’t do that. That sucks. Stop it with the nice.

Cheers and see you after.