Monday, December 17, 2012

Do You Have a Mothering Complex?

A close up of Tell Me Your Happy
by Wenqing Yan
Mothering Complex- Wish to keep your characters safe from truly evil individuals. Unwillingness to allow your characters to die. No trauma of any sort befalling any main character, often causing little to no character development.

I'll admit right now this is a term I made up. If there is a real mothering complex in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders I apologize. This blog has mainly to do with writing, and since I made up the term I will admit I have a problem.

I have a mothering complex.

I like my characters to be happy, to be quick on their feet, and I don't like to see them get hurt. I don't like to see them have their friends die or experience heart ache. I like them to be safe and sound.

Part of my upcoming notes for God Syndrome will include a detailed plot chart. In there I hope to create some true hurdles for my characters. A place for them to experience life to it's fullest, including the crappy parts of it. I'll make it a personal goal for my character to experience death in some way. The reason I'm doing this is because I have a tendency to tell a story full of roses with only minor characters dying on the side. Often the deaths have gone unnoticed by the main characters. I've been analyzing some of my old writing and I've come to realize how little readers and characters get to know those who die. It's a clean cut that doesn't have you balling like when Fred Weasley or Sirius Black died in Harry Potter. 

I suppose you could say that you don't need to have those moments. However, I think it's important that on some level writing mimics life. That sometimes when shit goes down everything isn't okay. My favorite pieces of writing have always had a bit of tragedy in them. Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, Harry Potter, and from my comics The Demon Ororon are among the pieces I have read that I loved and yet made me cry. So one more writing goal for myself is to break my mother complex, and to give my character a life. One that is measured by both successes and failures. One that has that little stroke of reality to make you feel your own life in that moment.

Its one heck of a goal and I certainly haven't decided who will pass on, but in the end it is something I want to experience as a writer.

No comments:

Post a Comment