Wrestling With My Characters

Old Friends & Other Stories has caused me to lose more sleep than I'd like to admit. As evidence, it's 4:00 A.M. as I write this.

Wendy Weller, who I picture below, is the narrator and main character. The problem is she keeps popping up in my head and arguing with me about the storyline. Like I mentioned on the main page of this website, other writers have admitted to having "conversations" with their characters as well.

Old Friends is in its third complete rewrite which is problematic because it's the first in the series of five novels, even though each one of them can be read as a stand-alone work. However, every change here affected the other four novels.

The original ending had to go after beta readers told me I couldn't kill off one of the characters. They liked him too much. I'll introduce you to this character in the next blog.

I also struggled with this character's name. Originally, he was named Danny Eberly, but I had another character named Denny Baggitt, and I was afraid readers would confuse the two. I eventually changed Danny's name to Charlie Eberly, but my feedback groups kept calling him Danny. That name stuck.

Wendy argued with me about how the crisis in the end was resolved. She and her friends should step in and save the day. Not an adult. I agreed, and rewrote the ending again.

But something was still wrong. The novel didn't have the punch it needed, and I realized that I had too many "old" friends in it. They had to go. It was, after all, a young adult novel, so I'm now replacing them with new characters.

I'll share the opening scene in the next blog. For now, I'm going to make another cup of coffee.