Character First

This probably won't be surprising to anyone else, but it certainly shocked me. I recently discovered that I am, in fact, not a plot-first writer. Instead, I am a character-first writer. How could I possibly not know this? I really don't know.

I made the discovery a couple of months ago when I was revisiting a few of my story ideas. I was doing a kind of inventory while processing what type of writer I was and what theme seemed prevalent in all of my writing. As I flipped through my numerous notebooks and looked at my hastily typed notes of story ideas, I started to notice a trend. Almost every idea that I had done any kind of development on started with a character I couldn't get out of my head. As I did more digging and reminiscing, I realized that much of my notebook space was taken up by various stages of character sketches and character development projects. Almost nothing existed in the way of plot sketches. As I began reviewing how these story ideas had presented themselves to me, I started noticing that pretty much all of them had started with, yup, the main character. And suddenly, I came to the realization that I was a Character-first writer.

It was rather flabergasting actually. See, I've been under the mistaken impression that I was a plot-first writer for most of my life. I always thought I struggled with creating characters. Isn't that insane? I don't know how I missed it for so long.

Of course, once I realized this, some of my writing woes seemed to make a lot more sense. See I've always had a bit of trouble with middles. Okay most people have trouble with middles, but still, I have that. I would get into writing a great story idea with all these great people that I couldn't wait to get to know, and suddenly 10 or 30 or 100 pages in, I'd lose the thread. I had no idea what the point of my story was or how the MC was going to get there. Except that I didn't realize this. I just thought it was a bad idea, or that I was being distracted by an even better idea. Now I realize that it was because I never really had much of a plot. And without a plot, my characters had nothing to do and nowhere to go. Or if they did have somewhere to go, they had no idea what to do once the got there.

After I made this astounding discovery, I was, at first, rather depressed. I thought "All this time I've been worry about the wrong things. If I'd known all of this years ago I could have gotten so much more done." It was a bit disheartening. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that making this discovery was actually one of the best things that could have happened to me. Cause now I know how to fix my petering-out-in-the-middle problem, generally speaking. I've identified the thing that was holding me back; lack of tangible plot lines. Now I can really revisit those old story lines and find the plot that those characters are meant to live out. And that makes me really excited.

So yeah, I thought I was a completely different type of writer for a while, but now I've discovered the truth and I get to start working to develop truly rounded stories. That's exciting to me.

Now an update on how my writing is going.

So far, after seven days, my stats are as follow:
Words: 17,982
Scenes: 8