Creating Characters

I am forever creating characters for rpgs. I don’t always get the chance to play them to watch them develop. And then some of them take on a life of their own, growing into someone I never expected. Dorian, the former concubine, was one such character. She continues to grow even now, a year after the game has ended.

Creating characters is different for everyone. Some start out with an idea of what they want the character to do. Others simply start with a name. And still others will start with a picture and build a character around what they see. But there is more to creating a character, to making a believable character, than a name and description. There is the history, the idiosyncrasies that make a character tick. In Creating Characters : How to Build Story People, Swain says:

The thing that makes a character believable is his ability to care.

Well, what does the character care about? I have found that answering questions like the 365 character questions for Writers and Roleplayers by Heather Grove help immensely when it comes to finding out just what a character cares about. Who knows. You may find something out about your character that you never expected to.

Happy Writing!

Work In Progress

With Nanowrimo less than two weeks away, thousands of writers are preparing themselves for the whirlwind event. I am amongst them. I planned weeks ago what I would be writing. It took me a solid week to hammer all the details out. Five short-stories of 10,000 words each all interconnected. Each story focused on a different character. There was a Vampire, an Assassin, a former Concubine, a Rake, and a Diplomat. What do all of them have in common? They are characters that I created for various gaming systems. Each character would give an interview of sorts and that would be the connecting factor. Great idea. I had one problem. While I own the characters, I own no such rights to the worlds in which they exist. So there would be no chance of publication.

Then about four days ago I came up with a blurb intended for a project after Nanowrimo.

Meet Serenity Bishop. She’s your everyday average 20 something trying to make a name for herself in a world where humans aren’t at the top of the food chain. A witch with pre-cognitive abilities, Serenity has made a small living helping police solve some of their most difficult crimes involving non-humans. There’s just one problem. She just died.

Reads like a blurb on the back of a paperback doesn’t it? I stewed on this for a day and realized that I kept coming back to this character idea. Now, I didn’t have a plot. Just an idea for a character. My blurb gave me a starting point to work with though.

Now I find myself knee deep in the process of world-building. Something I have never really tried to do. And I must say I have great respect for anyone that has gone through this process. It is not an easy thing to do. Thankfully I have my husband, Matthew; and my cat, Henry to bounce my ideas around with.

I’ve been able to come up with the over-arching plot which I’ve come to realize will have to be covered in more than just one book, but I still lack the short term plot to move the over-arching plot along. I do however have a tentative title : Blood And Roses. It may get shortened to Blood Roses.

I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. Here’s to an exciting November!

Staying Relevant

I read a lot of books in the paranormal genre. Until a few years ago it was rather difficult to find, with the exception of Anne Rice. It is with authors such as Sherrilyn Kenyon, Kim Harrison, J.R. Ward, Mary Janice-Davidson, and Katie McAlister that the genre seems to have gained momentum. All of these authors are on the Best-Sellers list. Why do I mention this? Because it is important as a writer to know what is being read by the masses.

In Writing and Selling Your Novel by Jack M. Bickham, Bickham writes about a friend that was once a very successful writer. “She decided that she knew it all, and went into her Emily Dickinson configuration, holing up in the country, seeing few people, reading no new fiction, writing the same stuff. Times changed. Today, that immensely talented writer is unable to sell her copy. She writes like it’s 1970 and she thinks like it’s 1970 and she acts like it’s 1970.”

Bickham’s point in telling this is that we can not afford to put blinders on and ignore the world around us. We loose our relevance. As writers we must always be learning something new. Read those books that are listed on the Best-Sellers list and understand why they are there, then figure out how our own work fits into the current markets.

So sure, I read a lot of paranormal fiction, it is after all what I write; but I don’t limit myself to it.

I’ve got a funny feeling

While in college I took a novel writing class. The entire purpose of the class was to write a complete novel. That was the only assignment the entire semester. All I had to do was produce a novel using all the techniques taught during lecture. The grade we received would dictate the amount of editing needed for the manuscript to be published; A=almost perfect manuscript, B=some minor editing required, C=some major editing required, and so on. The professor for the class was Deborah Chester a successful author of over 30 books in a variety of fields, so she knows what she’s talking about. No sweat. Was I ever wrong. I failed the course miserably, producing something that was woefully lacking in every way.

I took the course a second time a semester later. This time with a different professor, J. Madison Davis, who has also written many books. All the parameters were the same for this course as before. This time I passed the course with a B. I am not saying that one professor was better than the other. They approached writing differently that was the only difference. It helped tremendously that during the second go at the novel course I learned something that I had completely missed the first time. You have to write with emotion.

Dwight V. Swain wrote, “A story is like a car that runs on emotion. The author’s feeling is the gasoline in its engine. Take away its fuel, and even the shiniest, chrome-plated literary power plant is reduced to so much scrap iron.” He goes on to say, “That’s why the first real rule of successful story writing is…find a feeling. Or, if you prefer a different phrase: Get excited! Hunt until you uncover something or other to which you react. With feeling. The more intensely the better.”

No truer words have ever been written.

I was no where near excited about my first novel and it showed at every turn. The idea, a traditional coming of age story, didn’t thrill me one bit and it was difficult to write. On the other hand my second novel, a story about a vampire, felt like an amazing adventure and I couldn’t wait to see how it ended. I had found something that I felt strongly about. In later years I tried writing other things. In other genres. But I was never as excited about them as I was about the paranormal genre.

So while there are many different types of writers out there, they all have one thing in common. They feel strongly about what they write. How strongly do you feel?

Happy writing.

Quotes taken from Technique of the Selling Writer.

The many reasons we don’t write

There are many reasons folks will give for not sitting down and writing that great novel or short story idea. Most often it is that they don’t have time. There are too many things to do, too many obligations to keep. The solution: make a list. Look at the list. Is writing on there at the bottom? Flip the list so that writing is the first thing on it. Get up early if necessary to get some writing done. Make it your first priority even if it’s just for thirty minutes. If that doesn’t work for you then write for thirty minutes before going to bed. Whichever you decide to do make a habit of it.

Many find that when they sit down to write they get bogged down because they are searching for that one phrase, that one line, that one word. Or they keep going back over what they have written continuously editing and never moving forward. Our internal editor goes into overdrive and we forget that editing process should happen after we’ve finished writing the story. The solution: Learn to turn off your inner editorial voice. It’s hard but it is possible. Here is one way to do it: take part in Nanowrimo.

Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It takes place during the month of November. The goal: to write 50,000 words in a month. It sounds like a lot. It is. It averages out to a little over 1600 words per day if you write every day. By the end you have written a 157 page rough draft. Which is entirely the point. In order to meet the goal of 50,000 words one must disregard quality and focus on quantity. No one has ever said a first draft, otherwise known as a rough draft, has to be perfect. After all that is why it is called a rough draft in the first place.

Chris Baty, one of the founders of Nanowrimo, wrote a book titled No Plot? No Problem! all about writing those 50,000 words in a month. Intended to be read over the course of November, Chris offers some sage advice in how to approach writing during the duration of Nanowrimo. He even goes so far as to write a tongue in cheek “contract” for you to copy and sign. It reads as follows:

The month-long Novelist Agreement and Statement of Intent

I hereby pledge my intent to write a 50,000 word novel in one months time. By invoking an absurd, month-long deadline on such an enormous undertaking. I understand that notions of “craft,” “brilliance,” and “competency” are to be chucked right out the window, where they will remain, ignored, until they are retrieved for the editing process. I understand that I am a talented person, capable of heroic acts of creativity, and I will give myself enough time over the course of the next month to allow my innate gifts to come to the surface, unmolested by self-doubt, self-criticism, and other acts of self-bullying.

During the month ahead, I realize I will produce clunky dialogue, cliched characters, and deeply flawed plots. I agree that all these things will be left in my rough draft, to be corrected and/or excised at a later point. I understand my right to withhold my manuscript from all readers until I deem it completed. I also acknowledge my right as an author to substantially inflate both the quality of the rough draft and the rigors of the writing process should such inflation prove useful in garnering me respect and attention, or freedom from participation in onerous household chores.

I acknowledge that the month-long, 50,000-word deadline I set for myself is absolute and unchangeable, and that any failure to meet the deadline, or any effort on my part to move the deadline once the adventure has begun, will invite well-deserved mockery from friends and family. I also acknowledge that, upon successful completion of the stated noveling objective, I am entitled to a period of gleeful celebration and revelry, the duration and intensity of which may preclude me from participating fully in workplace activities for days, if not weeks, afterward.

I participated in Nanowrimo for the first time in 2006. I copied and signed the agreement then taped it to my desk. Every time my inner editor would try to come out I re-read the agreement reminding myself that it was a rough draft and it did not have to be perfect the first time around. By the end of the month I had exceeded the required goal and found the experience very rewarding. I plan on participating again this year, and have already begun the initial outlining that I will follow.

The last, and final reason, we tend to give these excuses for not writing is that we are scared. Some of us are scared of failure (or being seen as a failure) and some of us are even scared of success. The only way to combat this fear is to look at the reasons why. Come to terms with them and then continue on. If we didn’t there wouldn’t be any writers left in the world and what would we read then?

What every aspiring writer needs to know

Some bulletpoints to consider:

• In writing, more than in almost any other field, initiative is the key.
• Reality is acknowledging the complexity of fiction.
• Most writers learn by doing. Practice, trail and error, train them.
• Writing a story, any story, is a very personal, very individual business. No one else can fight the battle for you. You must win or loose all by yourself, alone in the solitude of your psyche, working out of the depth and breadth of your own feeling.
• Looking at anything in a new way takes nerve.

If any of this looks familiar you may have seen it in Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain.

I truly dislike the term aspiring writer. You are a writer or you are not. It is a term that underminds a writers ability to sit down and write without inhibition. The number of times I have heard, “This is Cheryl, she is an aspiring writer…” I can’t begin to count. It’s tantamount to hearing someone say, “Look who thinks they can write.” Or even, “Writing isn’t a real job, how are you going to support yourself?”

Notice a pattern? It’s all negative. The sad thing is, the person telling you this is usually not aware that they are being negative about something that you love doing and are inadvertantly hindering you. They are working on the assumption that in order to be a writer, you must be published. But they are wrong. Being published is the end goal of most writers, but it is just a goal. Most writers write because they have a need to communicate, to share their ideas.

The best advice to combat those negative voices? Don’t listen to them. I know it sounds way too simple. But it is true. I’m not saying that it will be easy. Far from it. It’s harder to do than you might imagine-especially when it means not listening to family or friends.

It took my mother years before she realized what she was doing everytime she told me that I should think about my future or asked if I was completely sure that getting a degree in Professional Writing was the way to go. She was always under the impression that my writing was just a hobby despite the fact that I spent hours writing every day. It wasn’t until she actually read one of my short stories that she realized her mistake and apologized. Now she sends me ideas and encourages me.

From one writer to another : Keep writing no matter what others say.

A Reason for Being

I started writing stories when I was in middle-school. Actually, I wrote one story in middle-school. I was enamoured by the then popular band New Kids on the Block and set about writing a story that had me, as well as my friends, meet the band and subsequently have various adventures with them. The more my friends read the story, the more they encouraged me to continue writing. It took me three months to write, all of it by hand on notebook paper. By the time I finished I had written 149 pages. A monumental feat for a kid in middle-school.

While writing what came to be known as “The Red Book Story” (I kept everything in red folder) I learned something about myself. I liked to write. I’m sure that it helped that everyone that read the work in progress liked it. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t like to be praised now and again. But really, it was the act of writing that I really enjoyed. Watching the lives of characters unfold on the page as I wrote, wondering where they would end up once the story ended. It was all very fascinating.

I started to take writing classes when I started high-school and didn’t stop until I graduated from college with a degree in Journalism/Professional Writing with an emphasis on the Novel. Now having learned all I can academically, it is time that I continue to learn through living the life of a writer. This is my reason for being. This is my journey.