An Abundance of Awesome

It's no secret that I'm in brain love with John Green. He's one of my favorite authors, but if I was judging on the basis of everything an author ever says and not just what he or she publishes in books, then John is by far my number one. As is he's like 3rd favorite, and the first five are pretty much a tie, so yeah. *shrug*

Today's video from John about math and literature and education and figuring out what it means to exist reminded me of something I was thinking about the other day. But before I get to that, here is John's video.



My number one belief in writing is that plot should be character driven. Thus, to figure out plot I have to develop my characters. I was trying to do this the other day, and I kept getting bogged down by all the emotionalness of all these characters. (It's like a freaking love quadrangle.) I decided to simplify it. I listed off Character A, B, C, and so on, stuck an equals sign on it and then wrote who each person was. Then I set about trying to write an equation to explain what each character wanted to happen, how what other characters wanted counteracted or complimented their own desires, and then document the results. Simple A+B=C was not cutting it and I had no clue how to make it all work.

I sat back in utter frustration. "I just don't know the correct expressions or formulas or whatever," I told myself, but I couldn't really blame math. I wasn't illiterate in math, I was illiterate in experience. Which was even more vexing.

John Green's second book, An Abundance of Katherines, is about a child prodigy named Colin who has been dumped by eighteen Katherines. After Katherine XVIII (Gosh, now I say that I'm like "WAIT WAS IT NINETEEN?? Must reread. Sorry.) dumps him, Colin sets out to predict the track of a relationship with a mathematical expression. He comes close, but eventually he realizes relationships and love can't be predicted. (Basically. Seriously, you should read it. It's like the red-headed stepchild of John's books, but that makes me just love it more.)

So I gave up trying to predict and map what was going to happen to these characters. All I can do is get to know them, keep my ears and mind open to who they want to be, and hope I can type fast enough once they get going. So far so good. I started their story today, and I'm about eight hundred words in.

Later!
~Em~