Reflections on the Week that was 13
Another fun week down. Not a lot done on the writing front this week but enough. I spent some time getting to know my new protagonist again. I already relocated her story from a complete fantasy world to a slight variation of reality and have since given her multiple character adjustments. The most recent is going to require a complete renovation of everything I’ve already written. I gave her a sister. Too much internal dialogue was just dragging the story and I decided she needed someone who knew her well to converse with and to help move things along at times. Also, just someone who would tell her outright when she was being a pain in the neck. Oh well. The story itself is still working really well and I’m more or less pleased with the supporting cast although I may have to tweak the villain a little more. I think they are playing it far too safe at the moment.
Anyway, I actually did read quite a few blogs this week and I am pleased to share some of my favourites with you though just reminding everyone that the Novel Elements Series is going to begin on February 15 and if you would like to participate I really need your response by February 10.
Recommended Read For The Week
Laura Renegar – Confessions of an Exclamation Mark Abuser – Too funny and it makes an excellent point.
My Posts for the Week
The Hero’s Journey and Other Things – Some fantasy books don’t involve a journey.
Thinking Outside the Box – Finding ways to write about things you may not know, experience or think.
Sleep Deprived Characters – Using sleep deprivation as a plot device and just being aware that characters occasionally need to sleep.
Writing Lessons From Reading Traci Harding – One of my all-time favourite authors and the lessons I have learnt from reading her work.
Sunrise or Sunset – When do you hang someone?
5 Ways to Gain Inspiration While Shopping – Plus a few suggestions from other writers who have also taken advantage of shopping times to brain storm.
Other Posts on Writing
Dee Scribe – Turn your writing upside down – create the unexpected.
Conan the Grammarian – Affect vs effect.
Kathryn Apel – Creating Believable Fantasy Worlds
Elizabeth Spann Craig – Where do your ideas come from?
Michelle Locke – 10 Ways to be a better writer.
Jody Hedlund – Does blogging really help sell books?
Plus – Just for fun and nothing really to do with writing.
The Hero’s Journey and Other Things
I’ve been thinking about a comment I received to my post on thinking outside the box about the number of fantasy books that do deal with the hero’s journey, either directly or indirectly. Largely these books are epic tales and involve a quest of some sort and our hero goes from naive and weak to brave and wise and strong, usually aided by companions and some form of mentor. And these books are great reads – though the farm boy thing has been done to death at this stage and not every wise mentor has to talk in riddles.
Anyway, I took a look through my collection of fantasy fiction and looked for examples of other stories that I’ve read. Automatically my David Eddings, Traci Harding, Ian Irvine, Terry Brooks collections were put out of mind. Ian Irvine may not deal specifically with the hero’s journey (it is kind of hard to tell at times who the hero of the story is supposed to be) but there are enough similarities that I’m putting it in this category for now. David Eddings earlier works deal with a farm boy who gets lead on a journey to save the world guided by companions and while his later works have some slight variations to the protagonist the basic quest and development remains more or less the same. So, who does that leave me with?
1. Barbara Hambly – Sorcerer’s Ward. I own a few of Hambly’s novels but Sorcerer’s Ward is my favourite. It is kind of a romance/mystery that just happens to involve a Mage as the one trying to solve the murder of her sister (before it happens) who is being thwarted by the witch finders of her world. There is some character development (as there really needs to be for a character to be really good) but Kyra starts out in this book a fairly competent and determined person and the guidance she receives from others is minimal.
2. Camille Bacon-Smith (I hope I got that right I can’t find the book again right now) – Eye of the Daemon. Another more mystery oriented book, mostly because the main characters (one half daemon and two daemons) run a detective agency. Throw in crosses and double crosses, multiple dimensions and the possible end of the world and you have a very interesting story.
3. Terry Pratchett – The Discworld books. For everyone one of these that sends a character on a quest there are at least three that don’t and deal with the every day drama of living in a very strange world.
I found many more examples but the pattern was quite apparent. The big names in epic fantasy do seem to focus on the hero’s journey and I think that is because it is what most of us expect from a fantasy. However there are a lot of sub-genres of fantasy and there are a lot of different stories that can be told. The same is probably true of any genre.
Thinking Outside The Box
I’ve always hated that expression – mostly because it gets me wondering why I was put in the box to begin with. Yet most of the time our thoughts are boxed in and closed off. They follow predictable paths they’ve gone over before, never looking beyond the obvious. I don’t like boxes. I have a thought bubble but it is just as restrictive (though prettier because it shimmers all different colours when exposed to sunlight).
As writers it is important that we recognise our bubbles and boxes. If we were to write only what we know then we would never leave our bubbles. Our stories would also get very samey very quickly and we would hopefully get bored with writing it and move on. Our characters would also be very much for muchness and have similar motivations and moral values and thought processes because their writer and creator didn’t stop to think outside of their comfort zone.
How can we think outside our bubble?
- Talk to people – all sort of people and find out what they think about things and why.
- Read everything. Doesn’t matter if you are interested in it or not. You may just pick up an idea or two that you had never considered.
- Practise empathising. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes and try to really think how they might see the world. Try to put your preconceptions aside and really feel as though you had lived a different life.
- Sometimes it helps just to turn everything upside down. Whatever you think, write the opposite. You can tone it down later but just practise being the complete opposite of yourself. It helps to start you thinking about all the possibilities in-between.
How do you start thinking outside your bubble/box?
Sleep Deprived Characters
Most writers I have spoken to know exactly what it feels like to be sleep deprived. To have gone on well past your limit and to be at that stage where thought is utterly impossible. Your limbs feel heavy, your vision is blurring, sounds are too loud but not clear, and simple questions suddenly take hours to think through to answer.
How long does it take you to get to this stage? I know I am not the kind of person who can go for days without sleep. Possibly in an extreme situation with adrenaline and the like I could be on my feet for a little longer but my thinking would probably still be very cloudy and incoherent.
Which brings us to characters in stories.
We’ve all read stories where the characters have been running, hiding, fighting, etc for days and nights and snatching a few moments rest when they can. These characters are occasionally described as looking tired and they mention a need for rest but their actions seldom match. They still make good decisions and they still manage to lift their weapons and aim and to run in a straight line.
Putting your character in a situation where they can’t rest gives you the perfect opportunity to build tension. It also gives you an excellent opportunity to make a really bad situation much worse as the character muddles their way through the events and makes mistakes caused by just being too exhausted to really think things through.
Are your characters getting enough sleep?
Writing Lessons From Reading Traci Harding
I’ve finally come to Traci Harding. I would have done her first but unfortunately whenever I talk to people who read very few of them have read Traci Harding and that is a shame. She became my absolute favourite author of all time when I was in high school and even though I have not particularly liked her later work, I still think her Ancient Future Trilogy is the best fantasy trilogy I have ever read.
What did I love about the Ancient Future Trilogy?
- The protagonist. Tori Alexander is an amazing female protagonist. She is confident, strong (she’s a black belt), smart (multiple university degrees), funny, romantic and yet flawed in that she is overly emotional, stubborn and extremely proud. As a high school student she really appealed because her flaws were kind of endearing and she was just an incredible person to read about. Here is a girl who can get zapped through time (multiple times) and always lands on her feet and wins the heart of the really, really hunky guy who just happens to be a King. She’s also an Australian who just happens to be travelling around England when she goes time travelling,
- The setting – A time travel fantasy where they go back to the days of knights and kings but they don’t end up in Camelot. There are a lot of references to the kingdom, there are parallels, but this is not an Arthurian legend and it was nice to read something a little bit different because at the time it seemed like every second fantasy book I read was about Arthur and friends.
- The supporting cast – All the characters in this story are kind of interesting. The fact that you meet several incarnations of the same soul in several different time zones means you see how the soul has developed and grown overtime and you get a real insight into each of the characters by the time we reach the end of the trilogy. There are only a couple of characters who seem to get sidelined and really leave you wanting to know more about them.
- The time travel – I usually really dislike time travel stories because they tie themselves in knots and you are always left wondering how it works its way out. Traci Harding create a time travel story that for once kind of makes sense though by the third book she’s kind of skating over the details very quickly and her explanations may not hold up under scientific analysis but there aren’t any glaring inconsistencies just jumping out and hitting you in the face and disrupting the storyline.
- The ending – and I will not ruin the end of the trilogy for anyone but if you want to experience an end of the world scenario that is truly incredible, this is the trilogy for you.
Now, even though it is my favourite trilogy of all time and I fully recommend reading it to anyone who likes fantasy, adventure, romance, spirituality, strong female characters, etc, etc, I do have to acknowledge some of the issues with the trilogy.
- The language – I do not care what Tori Alexander studied at university you are never going to convince me that anyone living in modern Australia can speak ancient Welsh proficiently enough to communicate with people when travelling back in time. Admittedly, the story would kind of be awful if Tori couldn’t speak to anyone (mostly because she would have been killed within minutes of arriving back in time) but with so much magic and spells flying around later in the story, I would have bought translation spell as an explanation before linguistic genius.
- Repetition – The reader understands fairly quickly that underpinning this relatively simple story about a girl travelling in time there is this deep spiritual story about mastering your soul and acceptance of others view points and natural energy flows and all of these other ideas which are working well together to create a rich and interesting story. However the same concepts are explained multiple ways throughout the trilogy and at times you want to cut the character off and tell them “I already got that in the last book”. Actually, you don’t notice the repetition so much the first time you read the trilogy but the sixth or seventh time it starts to become a bit more obvious.
- The second book – It is always the second book of a trilogy that feels like it is marking time and filling in details and the second book of this trilogy is no different. Tori gets to visit Atlantis, which is kind of cool, except that the people in Atlantis are so spiritual and sweet and dull you are kind of happy when everything starts falling apart.
So, writing lessons learned from reading Traci Harding:
- Have an incredible protagonist – one that really draws people into the story. They don’t have to be perfect and they don’t always have to make the right decision but they need to be interesting and appealing.
- Put the extra work into the supporting characters. The reader will appreciate it.
- If writing a trilogy, spend the extra time on the second book and figure out how to avoid the curse of the middle book. It may not be possible but try anyway.
Sunrise or sunset?
A while back I was writing a short story just to get myself back into writing and I had one of my characters hung (poor guy). However the hanging was held at sunset and that didn’t sit really well with me.
Maybe I’ve just watched too many movies or embraced too many clichés but it seems like hangings should take place at dawn. That didn’t really work because the point was for the guy to die at sunset with the end of the day, end of his life, kind of feel because the next dawn then brought about a new sense of awakening.
So I scrapped the idea of sunrise or sunset and hung the guy at noon but then I started wondering what sort of person would stand out in the sun in the middle of the day just to watch someone die?
As you can imagine I managed to um and ah and change the story so many times I ended up putting the entire mess to the side in a file of other abandoned stories that I’ve managed to talk myself out of writing.
However, I started thinking about different time of day and events I associate with them.
Sunrise: People wake up, roosters crow, things wash up on beaches.
Noon – People fight, people sleep, villains appear.
Sunset – People die, people have romantic dinners on the beach, bugs attack, evil begins moving.
What do you associate with the different times of day and do you ever go against that when writing?
Reflections on the Week That Was 12
Another week and this one has been hectic. It could have been less hectic if I developed even a single little bit of common sense but clearly I lack the facility for it. See, I went back to work this week. Which means I have lessons to plan and resources to find and all manner of things to prepare and suddenly, I am struck by pure and brilliant inspiration to write not the story I planned but the story I should have been planning.
That said, my work is more or less under control, and I’ve been working in time slots of writing after my set work is done for the day and my draft is rolling along nicely. I think I’m going to need to trim some of the dialogue from the first few chapters. Today I wrote an entire page of pretty much just dialogue and I’m pretty sure it isn’t needed. But the story is working and moving forward and the characters feel right and so I’m going with it.
So, my blog reading this week has been a bit hit and miss but here are some links that I’ve found.
Recommended Read For the Week
Little Scribbler – 5 Ways to Make Time for Writing – something I definitely needed to remind myself of recently.
My Posts for the Week
5 things I love about Writing – Given the enormous amount of time writing is taking right now I figured I’d remind myself why I love it so much and let it take over at times.
Merton, is that your name? – I’ve been writing but some of my characters have been a bit difficult and at the moment the name of one individual is really starting to be a pain.
Ghosts are my least favourite plot device – I love ghosts and I love ghosts in stories, I use ghosts in stories, I just find them annoying when the entire plot hinges on a character coming back from the dead to explain the plot.
Tension through forced inactivity – Creating tension for yourself and characters.
Building Better Worlds – Looking at world building particularly for fantasy.
Quote Collections – Looking at why so many writers collect quotes.
Other Posts on Writing
Cat Woods – I’ll take one agent with a side of fries – some great advice on research to do before looking for an agent.
One Writer’s Journey – Sharing 7 More Tips on writing.
Broadsheet – Publisher Whitens Another heroine of Colour – really interesting discussion about trends in publishing and cover art.
Elspeth Antonelli – Finding your characters’ voices in the story.
Editorrent – Calls in a Medic to fix a sentence.
Okay if you have a link you think should be added to the list, please add it with your comment but please make sure the link works and it is going to a writing blog. Thanks and I hope you find some of these useful.
5 Things I Love About Writing
Just a short post today.
1. The zone – that place I go to when I’m really on a roll and the story is just unfolding around me and my fingers are flying over the keyboard and it all feels just right.
2. Reading something that I wrote awhile ago, maybe years, and just laughing at a really great moment that I had forgotten about.
3. Getting to know some very interesting characters and managing to help them through some of their trials and tribulations while heaping even more upon them.
4. Knowing that if something isn’t working today it will probably work itself out tomorrow and even if it doesn’t, I’ll think of something else.
5. The sense of accomplishment that comes when it all comes together.
What do you love about writing?
Merton, is that your name?
I finally managed to get back into writing and straight away all of the planning I did fell away as my brain decided I wanted to write something different. 2500 words later I have a really interesting opening sequence to a story that may or may not work but at the moment I’m really keen on writing it because I can see that beautiful clear path from where I am to where I want the story to go. The problem being that without a plan I will waffle through about ninety pages and introduce characters that have no purpose and I am setting myself up to have to do sixty-trillion rewrites but I would rather do that then continue to write plans and outlines that never get turned into drafts so I’ll see how things go. If I get stuck I could always start writing a plan mid-way and direct myself toward the end.
The other problem is that without a plan every time a new characters walks into the scene (or drops from the building above as the case may be) I’m wondering who they are and for me that usually starts by naming them. Once I know the name of a character the other details fill themselves in.
Jasmine is cautious but defiant in the face of danger. She’d rather sneak around things than risk direct confrontation. Jasmine is blonde and thin but she isn’t very tall. The character appeared I knew what her name was and I instantly filled in a back story for her. I could tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Jasmine. Jasmine isn’t my protagonist. She’s just someone the protagonist ran into and decided to help out.
However, Jasmine was being attacked by a thug. Who is the thug? What’s his story? He isn’t an essential character. He isn’t in the story for very long. He won’t be coming back into the story. He is there to facilitate Jasmine meeting the protagonist. What is his name? I considered quite a few options and at the moment I’ve left Merton in the space however I know he won’t still be Merton after a rewrite because there is no way I’m naming a character that. At least not a character I’m intending anyone to take seriously.
Merton means farmstead by the pool and is an old English name apparently. Jasmine is of course a flower which is why she is a bit delicate with hidden inner strength. I don’t always worry about whether my characters names are meaning appropriate but I try not to make them completely inappropriate because if the reader knows what the name means it might put them off the story.
How do your characters end up with their names?
Cassandra Jade in the Realm 