When the shelter-in-place order came out, I decided to journal every day. I thought I would be doing my part to help future historians. What I discovered was that I was learning a valuable lesson in character development. While reading through the journal, I noticed that although I miss my friends, I’m not suffering from withdrawal. To be honest, I’m doing fine. That was a shock. I’m the one the family pegged as the extrovert.
What if I’m not?
The notion that I might be an introvert with good coping skills floored me for a couple of days. What other things about me might I not know? That got me thinking about character development. I love to watch characters change, learn, and grow; how best to portray that in my own work has been an issue. What if I wrote a scene for my latest protagonist where she is forced to confront the image she has built of herself and see that she has missed quite a bit? This is different from the “everything you know about yourself is a lie” scene, where it is revealed that the protagonist is adopted, or the father of a child he never knew existed, or the long-lost heir to a magical kingdom. The scene I want to write would be more internal, have more subtle consequences, and could even be ignored (temporarily) by the character if I needed another two thousand words in the manuscript.
I’m nowhere near the part in my latest novel where this scene would fit, but thinking about it now will help me sow the clues I’ll need later. I am looking forward to the experiment as a writer, but I also consider it another gift to future readers. It’s a look into the mind of someone in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, and a hint as to how literature of the era might change because of COVID-19.