void where something should be

In order for a character to get rewritten, they have to be written first. Original characters are the bane of this author's existence, the ongoing struggle that he fails to find mastery over because half the time he struggles to start, to let the characters from fantasy recede so some voice other than his own can speak inside him. Sometimes he wonders why he started writing at all, if he was really was seeking connection or community or if he just wanted to watch numbers go up and so he kept publishing works so that the number of works under his name would continue to rise.

He was writing to cope with the loneliness of being stuck, of searching and never quite being able to find what he was searching for, and not even being able to properly articulate what he wanted anymore. Knowing what you want is the most important aspect of character creation: characters ought to have an internal goal they often unconsciously are using to direct all of their external behaviors. How could he create something like that when he wasn't enough of a character to have one of those himself? His characters often ended up just as muddled and unsure of themselves as he was, or worse.

What the actual hell are you doing? Trying to write a short story? You can't even get yourself to write cover letters half the time, and you don't know what human interaction looks like half the time either. Human interaction requires not just one character but two. You really want to create two human beings out of nothing? You really think you can do this?

The writer stared at the words he had taken from his inner critic. It was right. He was trash at this entire creative process, but maybe being trash at a creative process could still in itself be creative? Maybe, or maybe he would just end up contributing to fan creations, like the consumer he is, all efforts at original creative work sidelined because if he never tried, he would never have to face not being good enough for anyone to want to read. Besides, people prefer reading already existing characters as is.

Original fiction would require making people want him, a feature he had a hard enough time doing when all he was trying to lure towards him was employment, nevermind whatever it was that made people genuinely interested in who someone was psychologically, whatever the secret sauce might be to make people want to hang around inside his thoughts. Or his characters' thoughts. Actions, probably. People liked dynamic characters, meaning characters who did shit.

But then again, there was the concept of the psychological novel, where instead of a character acting and reacting to other people, the drama was all interior, internal, inside his head. But he doesn't even really have a character in there? Why is he writing at all? Can someone write themself into a personality? Into a life worth living?

In theory, sure. The writer had read about people who met their best friends or even life partners via role-playing, although role playing was somewhere between writing and theater. But that was collaborating, was actively interacting with another human being. Writing just plain old fiction was far from interacting with other humans. Except in the indirect way reading was communicating and therefore writing was commucating, just at a remove of time and physicality.

Remove time and physicality, there's no real relationship between a writer and their readers until after whatever the writer aims to write has been written and published. Meaning again he is just a man alone in his head trying to create more people inside of him so as to not continue being so alone. Real great motivation for writing, that. That was sarcasm, another mode of communication dependent on being interpreted.

All fiction requires interpretation, even the fiction of a man trying to create fiction, an ourosboros of writer's block. They also ought to require plot, which this current one did not. Just reaching a wordcount would be enough, provided he address the prompt. Have a character argue with the author. Was he the character or the author? well, he was both, but in being both, he was also neither. He was the author trying to argue himself into creating some sort of character other than himself. He was a character arguing with God, wondering whether that almighty goal all characters were supposed to have was somehow left off his character creation sheet. If his purpose was simply to lack a purpose, to show every other creative how not to build a character - having him sit around navel-gazing, unsure what a plot in his life would even look like, let alone be the person active enough to start setting that in motion.

Maybe in order to write characters with lives, the writer would have to do the borderline unthinkable: formulate a life for himself. Leave the house. He had these group chats with strangers who lived in the nearest big city to him, but they regularly cancelled plans since they had lives that included actual jobs. The writer didn't have an actual job, nor did he have much in terms of anything else. Ideas, concepts, real friends... even his efforts to make online friends felt as thin as the paper cutouts he called characters in that one science fiction story he had written about time travel.

Ideas are cool, but specifics make stories stick in people's heads. The writer knew that, even as he was acutely aware that the specifics of his life were not ones worth writing any sort of story about. They were the waiting periods, the montage between action scenes, only the montage was his life, lying on his bed in various outfits typing words and wishing he had a more active imagination. Or a more active social life. One or the other, they were in many ways meant to fill similar voids in his soul.