Missing the Mark

I've got Mrs. Weatherspoon, Han Soe, Amelia, A Chancellor, and a couple of other characters crawling around my room like failed abortions. In every one of these drafts I've aimed at tension, at the sense of something cataclysmic about to happen, and I don't know why I'm doing this. Its not so much intention as "what happens" when I pick up a pen. I'm investigating characters that could support a mystery, mostly old people, people with links to the past - but its because I want my main character to be the reverse of this, a young person who doesn't know where they're from. I guess in the back of my mind I'm working with a novel that starts with a mystery - a stranger appearing, a Chancellor being murdered, a news paper clipping that changes everything for an old man - and then carries on with a young person essentially clueless about who they are and how they got where they are, fractured and disenfranchised and distant from his family. Someone who doesn't even know his family. These last few issues are important, and I think I may be guilty of glossing over them. Its easier to focus on some pulp mystery, easier to create some action, than to address these things.

Probably, when it comes to writing a novel, I will have several characters (I like the idea of a relationship that breaks up, with the gf's friends telling her watch a dick her bf was, and the bf's friend telling him what a cunt his gf was, but only as an idea - don't think i'll develop it, at least not right now). For some reason I'm drawn to mystery, to speculation - it seems the most obvious way of capturing my sense of intrigue and of making use of the strange things I notice on a daily basis.

My ideal would be to capture this mystery, this whodunit format, and make it about more than simply discovering whodunit - its a whoami: the biggest mystery is who we are, what we are capable of becoming. It seems like a trope that would marry well with the detective/thriller/espionage genre, and I'm sure its been done before (i.e. Borne Identity).

Is it enough just to focus on creating suspense and mystery right now, and not on the real grit of contemporary characters, inspired by myself, my brother, my mother? The real difference between something like the Bourne Identity and what I want to write is that Bourne is completely removed from the every day world. I want to show an ordinary person having as much of an adventure - which could happen, the deeper they dig into the past.

What I'm creating is minor characters. I havn't got the a good enough feel for a protagonist yet. Maybe thats ok.

Overall, though, I feel like I've missed the mark and failed miserably at merging character and scene. It seems like a really complex thing to do, and I can't even succeed at a simple effort. I've got about four times the amount of drafts I had for the first project, but I can tell i'm going to create something specifically for the assignment as nothing I've written will do. What the fuck am I supposed to do?

What a fucking waste of a day. Nothing I've written merges character and scene. Its all bullshit. I started off with two poems about people I knew, and I couldn't turn them into a fucking thing. I might as well go back to the beginning of the project and do the whole damned thing again. Its all at odds and contradictory, and maybe thats who i am. I should have just settle for a normal career, and fuck this writing thing. One guy tells me to write a novel and I believe him? Where is he now? Nowhere, its me alone against the world. I'm a fearful, insecure and lonely man, unsure of everything he writes and unable to build a simple bridge between character and scene; i've lost my job, I can't afford the rent, I've dropped out of every form of easily education, I've lost my friends, and what do I have to show for it? Purile attempts at fiction that suck donkey cock. And tomorrow - I'm going to get up and do the whole fucking thing again.