How Easy Is It To Compromise?

It's 5 AM and I've come up against a wall. I think I need to get this out there or maybe I need validation. I have a major problem when it comes to this story I just started. I can't decide if my original idea is all that good or not. 

My ideal process is to create characters and build the world around them so that they are the perfect fit and the environment compliments my characters. That isn't what usually happens when I try and write though. I usually come up with an idea of the world, or the plot, or what I know I want the major conflict to be and then while I am building my characters they end up screwing around with my original idea. I usually keep it pretty close to the original and I expect I that ideas should evolve and change but this time it's crazy different. Well, after I had my idea, I started with two characters, Artemis and Michael. 

Artemis is an artist and only after I had decided on the name did I realize that Artemis shortens to "Arty." It was a horrible coincidence but now I'm stuck on Artemis. If anyone has suggestions, I'm warily open to hearing them. She almost obsessively draws pictures of this guy that she thinks is make believe. To her, he doesn't have a name or a voice but she knows him completely through images that stream through her mind.

Michael is a musician, a singer mainly, who has dreams about this girl whose face he can't remember. He remembers everything she says and her actions but he wouldn't recognize her on the subway if she sat on him. He gets really worked up over her because he thinks she is horribly annoying but he can't stop thinking about her. He writes all of his songs about this bothersome, imaginary girl.

Both of them change and develop as people because of these imaginary people in their heads. Artemis is a shut in and bad at social interactions but through her drawings and paintings of her mystery boy, she feels less lonely and finds friends the longer she draws him. Michael is an incredibly talented musician but he never had any experiences that really provided him with any great material to write about. The imaginary girl in his head caused such emotions in him that he was able to write phenomenal songs that got him discovered. He becomes pretty successful because of this girl that doesn't even exist.

Obviously they are thinking about each other but they have never met in real life. This is where my problem comes from. How should they know each other without ever meeting in real life? 

My original idea was super fantastical and really out there but then as I was trying to write it, I kind of started to freak out that my idea was too corny and not that well developed to fit these two characters that are rich and complex in my head.

Now don't laugh, it sounds stupid when I say it out loud (one of the reasons I started to question myself). The original idea was that Artemis was special because she could be summoned to the past as some sort of blood monster. People could perform this magic to summon what they thought was a demon by a few human sacrifices and a ton of blood. The demon then would have he ability to control others with its power over blood. The demon though was simple, plain Artemis who hated violence and war and hurting anyone. I assume she was summoned for this reason, because if anyone could just call up a demon that had the ability to control anyone through their blood then what could possibly stop that creature unless it was the creature itself that refused to do it. 

Michael comes in because Artemis uses her blood powers to reach out and take him with her. He wakes up sometime in the past with her because she needed someone to be on her side of things. She needed someone like a protector because, of course, the kind of people who would perform a blood sacrifice for a demon are going to be a little mad with the demon refuses to use her powers.

They don't actually travel back in time physically, just spiritually? And they don't have the clearest memories of the times they were summoned so it mostly just comes across as memories of each other. That's why she draws him and it makes her feel better and that's why he writes music about her and it has so much emotion and meaning behind it.

See. I told you it sounded stupid when I said it out loud. I encountered this problem because I had these two characters that were just way too grounded and normal for this sort of thing to happen to them. Artemis was too quite and meek to have such an intense ability and Michael was too happy and carefree to go through the horrible experiences that he would have to if called back in time to fight wars and murder people. 

But then the whole reason that I created these characters was so they could fit this time travel, blood monster idea that I dreamed of. (Can you imagine dreaming of waking up naked and covered in blood with a bunch of dead bodies around you and then being able to accidentally kill people with you mind? I did.) 

If I made this story fit the characters then they actually wouldn't have ever met and it would be some sweet story about how they just have accidentally made up or dreamed about each other for years and how that changed them as people. There might be a time when they accidentally end up running into each other but because he never knew what she looked like and she never knew anything but what he looked like, they would just continue on their way and never interact in the real world. That's the story that I would buildup around these two characters. It would also depress me terribly because if I wrote the story to the characters, it would have to end kind of depressing. (Not that being a blood demon summoned to kill thousands of people over and over again wouldn't be depressing, it would just be a much more exciting depressing.)

I ran into this same problem with another one of my stories, Nutter Butters and Star Thrones. In that one, a girl illustrates sci-fi novel covers and works at a grocery store where she meets a teenage boy who she starts thinking about all the time. They become friends and he inspires her to have the confidence to love what she does and pursue it full time. Nothing happens between them and it is a really slow, sad story that originally started out as a true sci-fi novel. There was supposed to be aliens and traveling through space and laser battles but then the characters made me change the whole world around them. 

Is that going to happen with this one I'm writing right now? Will they not get to travel through time and fight epic battles because they are just so normal on paper? Is it okay to give up on my original idea if it doesn't fit what I've been able to get down on paper? Have I just not worked on making the characters fit my story enough or have my characters further developed my idea into a much more mature and rich story?

Another problem I have is that I love stupid, ridiculous teenager fiction like what this started out as but I seem to only be able to write these depressing adult stories. I hate reading the kind of writing that I do best. Argh.

I don't know what to do...

KB

Snippet of something I'm working on

I was doing some writing and I thought, "What's the point of writing this if I don't share it?" Also, I need to post something else new on this stupid blog.  Now this is a super rough snippet that I was writing to really get an idea for the character. This is a new idea that came to me in a dream and hopefully I can make this one come out fully fleshed out and ready to get out in the world.

Here's the writing bit:

__________

He had curly hair that was long enough to run your hands through. It was a deep brown that could look red in the light or gold in the sun or black at night. It floated around his head in a mess that perfectly suited the sharp planes of his face. Sharp nose, sharp jaw, sharp chin. Artemis was drawing her dream man again.

Every since she was a teenager she had been drawing this same man over and over again. His mouth was a bit too wide, his eyes were too large as well, his thick long lashes made him look like a girl. She knew every curve of his long body and all of his many facial expressions. She knew the way he carried himself and the way he held his hands. She was fascinated by his lips and the way the hair grew down his stomach. She loved to take the images from her mind and put them down on paper because she wanted him to be with her all the time.

There were sketchbooks full of him. Paintings stacked in the corners of her room. An enormous canvas hung in the living room of him. Artemis didn’t know why she had to draw him, she didn’t even know who he was. He wasn’t real, he was just a boy who appeared in her dreams.

Artemis had been trying to sell her paintings of him for a few years and never made much money at it.

Those were her hands in the drawing, pressed up against his stomach. He was holding them there and looking out of the painting at her with that sort of smirk that he had when he was feeling clever or frisky.  He was so tall and thin that he looked stretched out. This was an intimate picture she was drawing. He was smiling and inviting, unlike a lot of the work that was hidden under her bed. That’s where the scary drawings of him went. 

 

__________

I'll post the picture that she is drawing as soon as I make it. It shouldn't take me too long.  just first have to find a boy that looks just like this to take his shirt off and let me take pictures of him looking all sexual...

KB

Edit: Picture posted 6/8/13