What is important to decide about my story as I go into revisions? 

I am both a creative writer and a screenwriter. 

Because I have two writing personalities that must coexist, I find revisions to be an agonizing, painful process. When I go into a story for revisions, I must look at it from the lens of what I am editing for. My creative writing goes through a harsh revision process because I write too much action, and just too many stage directions, all due to my screenwriting background. I’ll say things such as, “…opened the car door, and swung his left leg inside, then his right. He closed the car door, before thumping his fingers on the steering wheel…” which leads for an uninteresting creative story. I find myself removing a lot of action and directions in order to keep my narrative moving. 

On the other hand, when editing my screenplays, it’s the exact opposite, where I remove a lot of character thought that is unnecessary for the actor portraying the character. It’s a lot of balancing back and forth for myself that is incredibly tedious and difficult. 

How do I bring out life in the story and nail the ending of a correct arc? 

Amber Sparks writes stories with an interesting development that brings out the life in her stories and addresses both character development and plot. These two things drive each other hand in hand. In the first story, she uses inserts of “extra credit” to drive the plot forward – asking the audience to answer the questions that are the fear of the protagonist. The story comes to life by having the extra credit math problems make the reader think, while also leading the reader to the ending of a proper arc. 

Do I write mostly character or plot driven pieces? 

I write very character driven stories. I was taught early on in screenwriting to have internal and external struggles – and that all protagonist had to have both for a full-length screenplay, which is what Kristen Kiefer summarizes. She says that Character-driven stories, on the other hand, feature core arcs that interrogate questions of a more internal nature.When I write creatively, I spend a lot of time in character development. I love watching characters come to life, and I am an avid fanfiction writer – I love taking other people’s characters and putting them in situations and doing character studies on how they might react. I enjoy character development, and I enjoy watching somebody change over an arc.

A close friend of mine pointed out that this might come from my love of Anime, because many stories start with awful characters that twist and turn into becoming these amazing human beings with incredible character growth. Kiefer made an interesting point on character and plot arcs, when she says, “…it’s the nature of that question that defines a storyline as being either a plot arc or character arc.” In long animes, we delve up periods of time by referring to them as arcs, and an arc accomplishes one or the other – a character change or a major action to keep are overriding story going.

My screenwriter brain short circuited at the idea of character development. Character development within a screenplay is so hard because you have to be plot driven… and I’m just not. As a child, my stories would be pure description of a person and their setting and would never have anything happening. It took years to develop to the point where I would be able to have a character go into a plot.