Frequent breaks and YouTube videos
I’m finding my groove with writing and editing. And it is not how I thought it would be. I need frequent breaks. Like days-away-breaks, in order to get into it. I need to step in, and then step back out. Being too deep for too long isn’t good for me and I’m not thinking constructively. Or emotionally. The breaks are helping. I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos. Videos from shows and films of characters I admire. Situations I want to understand and replicate. I think understanding motivations is the biggest thing for me right now. Sometimes the plot wants me to do something. Or rather, I think something is cool and I want to do it. But I also need to ground myself. People react in certain ways to certain things. And understanding their motivations, and not my own, is what should be driving this.
The big lightbulb moment was when I started watching clips from video games. Video games can have such a beautiful layer of art and depth to them. Like Tess, from TLOU. Rewatching gameplay of Tess made me realise why I didn’t really like the TV series. They changed so much of her character. Tess was who she was, not only because of the way she acted around people, but because of how people acted around her. She was the front, the director. She drove the story as much as the story drove her.
This is especially important as one of my MCs is a black warrior woman. As a cis-het white male, I am not black, nor a woman, nor a warrior. And it is very easy to put MY motivations and MY reactions onto a character, without actually understanding what it is to be a black warrior woman in the world I am creating. At the core, I want to encapsulate Ys-ult’s drive, her passion, her power, and let that guide her actions and decisions. Make her active, and not RE-active. It is all much more of a balancing act that I realised. As much as I want a cool scene, or for a character to do something, I’m realisng I need to square that away with who I am setting them up to be and if they would actually do what I want them to do.