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Writing Exercise Yesterday
Dec. 19th, 2011 12:11 pmI'm determined to write something every day, but yesterday I was in a fuzzy haze of packing and Japanese verbs, so I didn't get a chance to work on my story proper. So I wrote this before I went to bed, because this is what I'm most excited about writing in Tsuya's storyline:
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Tsuya can’t imagine a life that doesn’t have Nyali in it, and maybe that’s the problem. If it is a problem. Because it’s like Sambiya says: if he’s alive, he’s bailed on you. If he’s dead, you’re sitting around waiting in a rescue that ain’t coming. Tsuya looks at his two options, and he doesn’t know which one is worse. He knows that the right thing to want, the nice thing to want, I for Nyali to be alive, having deserted him. But Tsuya isn’t a nice person – people remind him daily of this fact – and he hopes that his brother is dead so that he will have died still loving him. And then he feels like a cockroach for even thinking that, and quickly changes his mind because the thought of there being no Nyali in the world at all opens up a gaping abyss in his chest that he doesn’t want to deal with ever -
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It's true - I realized that of my main characters, Meilen is probably the nicest. And when the nicest character is an abusive older sister ... well, there are low standards. It's a funny revelation because until I wrote that, I was thinking that all four of them are pretty good people. And then, looking back on it ... no, not really. Tanwen is manipulative, and she only does nice things for people who aren't family because it'll make her look good. Nyali is shamelessly power-hungry and he's the sort of clever where he knows that he's smarter than most other people, and lets it get to his head. Tsuya is a misogynistic, xenophobic, racist brat, and Meilen is verbally abusive to Tsuya and also xenophobic. But they all see themselves as good, noble, people who do things the right way, and I write them in first-person, so it's a little difficult to separate that at time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tsuya can’t imagine a life that doesn’t have Nyali in it, and maybe that’s the problem. If it is a problem. Because it’s like Sambiya says: if he’s alive, he’s bailed on you. If he’s dead, you’re sitting around waiting in a rescue that ain’t coming. Tsuya looks at his two options, and he doesn’t know which one is worse. He knows that the right thing to want, the nice thing to want, I for Nyali to be alive, having deserted him. But Tsuya isn’t a nice person – people remind him daily of this fact – and he hopes that his brother is dead so that he will have died still loving him. And then he feels like a cockroach for even thinking that, and quickly changes his mind because the thought of there being no Nyali in the world at all opens up a gaping abyss in his chest that he doesn’t want to deal with ever -
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It's true - I realized that of my main characters, Meilen is probably the nicest. And when the nicest character is an abusive older sister ... well, there are low standards. It's a funny revelation because until I wrote that, I was thinking that all four of them are pretty good people. And then, looking back on it ... no, not really. Tanwen is manipulative, and she only does nice things for people who aren't family because it'll make her look good. Nyali is shamelessly power-hungry and he's the sort of clever where he knows that he's smarter than most other people, and lets it get to his head. Tsuya is a misogynistic, xenophobic, racist brat, and Meilen is verbally abusive to Tsuya and also xenophobic. But they all see themselves as good, noble, people who do things the right way, and I write them in first-person, so it's a little difficult to separate that at time.
