My last post back in November (?) seems to have been deleted.  How strange.  In any case, it has again been a long time.  A difficult time, one might say.  But what to say right now?

Back in high school, I started writing a story from the first person POV of a guy who was beating his girlfriend.  I’ve been trying to find it again (so far, no luck) because I had the sudden urge to continue it.  In creative writing, we often discuss the use of first person vs. third person in a work of fiction.  For longer works, I tend to prefer first person.  It’s not because I’m more comfortable writing first person or because what I’m writing is autobiographical.  It’s because when I was a child, I wanted to act before I wanted to write.  I enjoy being other people, not just observing them.  That makes all the difference for me.  And when I write a certain character, it’s because I want to understand him/her.  I wrote The Butterfly Collector because I wanted to understand a girl who steals and lies and sleeps around, who misses this idea of her father so much that she would do anything to get closer to him.  It was a difficult character to write, in the sense that I had very little personal experience to feed off of, and also in the sense that it was hard for me to be so close to someone, fictional or not.  In the end, I think I came away with a much richer understanding of the character, however.  Right now, I’m very interested in the mindset and past of an abusive person.