NaNoWriMo Day 19: Falling in Love
Image by Willgard on Pixabay
Rita Mock-Pike
You’ve been at this for 18 days now. Writing, writing, pushing, pulling, breaking, mending – drafting your NaNoWriMo 2021 novel. Well, by now, you may have come to absolutely love your main characters, or you may hate them. But if you’re not feeling that strongly about them, you might need to take a pause in the storytelling and spend some time falling in love with your lead (or falling in hate, if that villain just isn’t doing it for you).
If you don’t know them well enough to feel strongly about them, your audience won’t feel much about them either.
This probably means you need to get to know them a little better. And one of the best ways I’ve found for doing this is writing monologues. Yes, I know. You’re not (most of you) writing a script right now. You’re writing a novel.
But the internal monologues – or even shared monologues – can help you get to know your character well enough to love or hate them as you should.
If you’re not sure how to go about writing a monologue, it’s actually pretty simple. Just sit down and think about some key points you know about your character, the primary situation xe, she, or he is in. Then just start free-writing what that person might be thinking in their head. Let them ramble and wander all over the place.
Or, if that doesn’t work for you, interview your character. Ask them questions. How old were you when your first pet came home? When that pet died? When your sibling first made fun of you for crushing on someone? Who was your first crush? What motivates you?
Spend a while writing out these thoughts and answers. You’ll likely discover things you had no clue about the characters and you’ll find yourself falling in love with your lead!
And guess what? You’ve added to your word count, too. Win-win!
Editor-in-Chief of The MockingOwl Roost, Rita Mock-Pike is the granddaughter of aviatrix, Jerrie Mock, first woman to pilot an airplane solo around the world. Rita has found inspiration from her grandmother’s life and flight and pursued many of her own dreams in theatre, podcasting, novel writing, and cooking up delicious food from around the world. She now writes on food, travel, pets, faith, and the arts. She’s happily married to Matt, and faithfully serves the very fluffy kitten queen, Lady Stardust.
