Finally! Chapter five is done. It’s very satisfying to see the story take shape, building momentum. The characters have well-defined problems and internal crises they want to solve. This drives the plot. The hope is that, once completed, it brings the reader into the world and really brings them into the characters’ psyches, so they can track and experience the dilemma. I do love novels where you’re going along with the character, almost synapse by synapse. I just realized now that I can drop in subtle things that the characters don’t realize their subconscious is absorbing.

It’s a good lesson: conflict drives story. We’re all pained by something on a daily basis. For the characters, they must always try to resolve something. What interests me is how those little stimuli can have big impacts on psychological strife. How little things that happen, either good or bad, frame our perception of the world right in that very moment. Maybe it’s just me, but if I do a bad job spreading some peanut butter over a piece of bread, somehow that reflects back poorly on me. And sometimes that happens without me being aware of what’s happening. How those tiny displays of performance can affect how you feel throughout the day.

Writing this book has taught me to find every possible way to “mess with the characters.” We create our characters and their precious and we don’t want anything bad to happen to them. Why? Even if they are different than our own personalities, they are extensions of it. Whether it is an emphasis on one part of us, or a reimagining of a specific character trait. Or borrowed from another person in real life, but utilizing our own interpretation of that behavior. I digress. “Messing with the characters” is vital to driving the story. Stuff has to annoy them, make their lives complicated, force them to deal with uncomfortable truths. Pure escapism where your character wins the PowerBall and lives a fulfilling and impactful life is simply… boring. I mean, personally, that life sounds amazing, but stories require the pain.