IWSG: Word of 2023

 

        So, for once I'm answering the monthly question, because it coincides with what I wanted to talk about anyway. 😄

January 4 question - Do you have a word of the year? Is there one word that sums up what you need to work on or change in the coming year? [snip] What is your word for 2023? Why?

     My word for 2023 is "Improve" because that's something I need desperately to do.  (Obviously, or why else would I pick it as my word, right?)

    Though there's a lot of stuff I need to work on, I plan to start with characterization.  Usually when I'm writing, I have a very firm idea in my head of who a character is and what they're like, but that doesn't always come through on the page.  I once had a beta reader tell me that all three of the lead characters of the novel they'd read over seemed to have the same personality.  I thought I'd made them radically different, because they were so different in my head, but when I looked over his comments about how they were behaving, I could see that yeah, I really hadn't made them reflect my perception of them.

    So, that's where I want to start.  Though I'll be working on other projects in the meantime--I just finished up with a redraft of a novel on New Year's Day, which still needs a bit more work, so I might get back to that around the end of the month, and in the meantime I'll probably work on fanfic to keep my juices flowing--I've joined a game jam that's going to run for two months, starting in March.  I've already started planning what the characters are going to be like, and I want to get them really well defined before I start, then focus on making sure their personalities are properly expressed.  Also I want to make sure they have distinct voices; failing to give characters their own voices has been one of my biggest stumbling blocks as a writer.  (I have to admit, that's one of the things I like in the novel series I've been rewriting:  one of the characters actually has a distinct voice!  Also something I like about the fandom I've been obsessed with lately, because one of the two leads has a voice so distinctive that even I can more or less replicate it.)

    I'd also like to improve my pacing and plotting.  (Which sounds like I mean something else entirely when I say it like that. 🤣)  I often feel like not much actually happens in the stuff I write.  Like the characters spend so long talking about whatever's happening that there's no time for anything to actually happen.  If that makes any sense.

    It's a weird problem, really, for my characters to always turn out so chatty, considering that I practically never speak.  (That's why I'm really grateful to shows like Komi Can't Communicate and Bocchi the Rock; even though my social anxiety is nowhere near that bad, it still makes me feel seen and acknowledged, you know?  Now if someone would just do an anime about aroace people, or about overweight people who aren't offensive stereotypes...)  I suppose it means I should only write super-light slice-of-life stories where people talking is literally the only thing that's supposed to happen, but somehow I never really manage that...?

    (Although, honestly, on the characterization front, I think I did kinda manage to write a unique character in my latest game.  I can't really brag about the two characters having different voices, of course, since I decided to make one of them only speak in emojis, but the one who did speak was really pretty different from any other character I've written.  I'm kind of proud of it, even though it's not much of a muchness.)

    If possible, I'd also like to improve the speed of my writing.  At this rate, it's going to take me another four or five years to finish rewriting those novels--the one I just finished a draft of is book 3 of 7!--and I really don't want to have to wait that long before moving on to try and rehabilitate some of my other unfinished/abandoned novel projects.  (Admittedly, book three was rather stymied by me spending some six months or so working on researching and then writing someone else's visual novel, but...that's still no excuse!  (Besides, I want to write the sequel to that visual novel, because a lot of what we originally planned ended up being left for the sequel, and I'm really attached to some of the characters that ended up not showing up yet!))  I'm not sure if that's possible, though.  I already write pretty fast--though not as fast as I used to, I'm sorry to say--so it's like...ugh, I don't know.

    I probably shouldn't be trying to write this post at like one in the morning... 😴