Irrelevant Cheetah

I’ve been thinking a bit about this writer’s block I’ve been having, mainly because it’s annoying me pissing me off to no end. I’m tired of all of the half-baked ideas floating around my head and not knowing what to do with them. Some of them make great blog posts (see here, if you’ve forgotten) but they’re not much good for anything else. In fact, it seems blog posts are the only thing I can write lately.

Yesterday as I was driving home it finally hit me with all the subtlety of a brick wrapped in velvet: I don’t have any Plots. I can invent interesting characters, and I have some incredible concepts flowing freely, but what I don’t have is stories. What I don’t have is things to do with these incredibly awesome characters and settings and concepts. (You’ll just have to trust me that these concepts are so incredibly awesome that their awesomeness makes The Matrix and The DaVinci Code pale in comparison. Really.)

I know that stories must be character-driven, but only to a certain point. James Bond might be the coolest character in the Universe, but unless he’s starring in an awesome, globe-spanning plot involving terrorists, explosions and beautiful women, then he’s just going to the store for a box of condoms and some Cheez Whiz, isn’t he? Not the most compelling read. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that “every character must want something, even if it’s just a glass of water,” and none of my characters seem to be very needy. An admirable trait in a girlfriend, but not so much in a story character.

I also know that in order to make a story interesting, one of the easiest things to do is just start being horrid to your main character. Throw him into a pack of rabid hyenas, give him bird flu, make his girlfriend pregnant with someone else’s baby. However, when I start adding obstacles and drama, it just seems contrived somehow. It strikes me that this might mean that my characters are too one-dimensional, and thus I need better characters, but I don’t know. Which comes first? The plot or the characters?

I’d like to think I’m an intelligent fellow. I’d like to think that I’m not one of the dim bulbs in the box. Introspection is not foreign to me, after all, so when something is not working, especially in my creative pursuits, I’d prefer to believe that I can figure it out all by myself, even without the benefits of beer, should that prove necessary. But I’m having no luck here, so any writers that are reading this, please let me know: do you come up with the story first, or the people in it?

An aside: Thank you to all of you who offered your sympathies and well-wishings. It’s been difficult, but we’re getting through it slowly.