Quote: Write, Write, and Write Some More

Word Nerd: What piece of advice helped you out the most as a writer?

FFORDE: Do it for fun. Do it for yourself. Do it because you want to write. Writers write because they can’t stop. They scribble notes in books, write poetry, jot down good snippets of dialogue and generally exist in their own little world. Write, write and write some more. Write what you want to write, no matter how daft it seems. Don’t be frightened of dumping a sentence, character, chapter or book and starting again. When you’ve finished one book, write another. You’ll be surprised how much better the second one is to the first. Above all, enjoy it. Even if you never find a publisher, you’ll still have been on a wonderful adventure.

Taken from Word Nerd’s interview with Jasper Fforde (one of my favorite authors!)

On Writing Romance

Here is an interesting essay about writing romance that I found at the BBC – Get Writing website.

Writing Romantic Fiction
by Katie Fforde

A Broad Genre
The Brontës, Sophie Kinsella, Phillippa Gregory, Helen Fielding and Jane Austen – they all write or wrote romantic fiction. It’s a large and generous genre but while many books have a romantic element, they can’t all be classed as romantic fiction. For example, The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk has a wonderful thread of romance running through it, but the romantic aspect isn’t what the book is about.

Romantic novels are mostly aimed at and written by women, but not exclusively so – some books are also written by men. Some men found it expedient to write under women’s names, but nowadays I don’t think it’s necessary. Alan Titchmarsh, Tony Parsons and Mike Gale, for example, all fit comfortably under the umbrella. Books with a male protagonist have all the same elements but from a different angle, because men and women share many of the same doubts and uncertainties.

But think very hard about writing from a woman’s point of view if you’re a man – your readers will notice instantly if you get it wrong. Women writing from a male perspective are more likely to get away with it simply because most of their readers are women themselves and so are less likely to notice mistakes.

The romance in a romantic novel doesn’t need to be traditional, but there has to be some element of sexual desire. The relationship between a mother and son, however touching, would not qualify. The protagonists certainly don’t have to be a man and a woman, the man being older, cleverer and richer than the woman. Same sex relationships, older women with younger men, people of different races and religions can all work very well if you really know your background.

Creating Convincing Characters

Happy Labor Day!

Today is a list from The Writer (July 2006) that quickly describes how to create convincing characters by Corey Blake. Blake begins the article, Creating believable characters takes time and discipline. Creating dynamically real individuals and not imposing your own thoughts and impressions on them is not easy to do, and is often the difference between a novel or screenplay that sits in a closet and one that finds its way into the hands of audiences.

1. Label the desire essences of your main characters. Come up with lists of desires, fifty of them, and slowly condense them into twenty. Focus on the ones that feel right for each of your main characters, considering their religious beliefs, major life events, appearance, intelligence, siblings, education, parents, music, sex, etc, anything and everything a person in real life faces.
2. Label the fear essences of your main characters. This is a little easier now that you’ve come up with the desire essences. The fear essences are the “polar opposites” of the desires. They battle the desires, and at each decision, either the desire or the fear will win. Make the pairs, and discard the pairs the character doesn’t feel strongly about. Keep doing this until you have 10 pairs that excite you.
3. Get specific in the backstory to understand how these essences came to be. As Blake says, “A character’s current behavior is a battle between fear adn desire, and his or her immediate choices are made based on very specific (yet unconscious) experiences from the past–experiences that leave imprints.” Write as much as you can about each half of each pair, so you have pages and pages on the character describing how they think or would think in a given situation because you know the history behind that certain essence.
4. Describe their current behaviors. Take the essences and specific examples and determined the kinds of behavior your character has because of it.
5. Raise the stakes. Don’t be afraid to throw horrible obstacles at your characters! Watching them deal with obstacles is what makes a story interesting; no one wants to read about a girl who sails through life.
6. Don’t meddle. A “truthful story is going to grow from your willingness to let your characters make their own decisions based on how you defined them. As their parent, you have to let your children go.”
7. Let your characters play. At this point, your characters will be writing themselves.

Four Writing Tips

I found these tips amusing and true, from imaginarycircus. Go to her post to see a couple humorous comments too:

1. By withholding information from your reader you do not create mystery and suspense. i.e. by saying that your character is hiding a heavy object in her skirt and then revealing it is a gun later–you probably are just annoying your reader. If you had simply said she had a gun in her skirt and was following a man that would create tension and pique curiosity. Vague is not interesting. Concrete details are. (There are always exceptions to these rules, I know.)

2. Adverbs stand out and look amateurish. Think long and hard about using an adverb, and use them with a light hand–if you must. Sparingly indeed.

3. Dialog is the most valuable real estate in fiction. Use it wisely. Do not put anything in dialog that can be said in the narrative. Attribute dialog, because long pages of unattributed dialog are annoying and hard to read. When you attribute dialog refrain from things like: he yelled, he laughed maniacally, he said with a grimace, he yodeled, etc. Those sorts of attributes come off as cliche, and also remind the reader that they are reading. Either a simple “he said.” or “name said” works, but you can also add a beat to show what is going on, where the character is, or what he is doing and leave out the “said” all together.

“I hate you.” He started to peel paint flakes from the window sill and eat them.

But you have to be careful with that sort of beat in a dialog. It would be easy to make your characters hyperactive. Beats should be used sparingly to break up dialog and really to illuminate it subtly.

4. Vary the rhythm and structure of your sentences, especially when you want to stress something. This has been a problem of mine. I am not a poet, but I seem to be able to write metered phrases easily. Prose with a consistent meter gets monotonous to read. And you want your story to have ENERGY.

Character Archetypes

I found this list here, and it’s a good starting point if you’ve somehow lost your characters, or realized that you can’t relate to your character at all. Take a step back, and decide if maybe one of these archetypes is how your character views the world:

Protagonist: Is in favor or against that issue (or maybe isn’t completely sure about his position) but he’s leading all the actions for -or against-the issue.
Antagonist: Is diametrically opposed to the Protagonist (If the protagonist is in favor, he’s against and voice-overs) and he does anything in his power to stop all the actions the protagonist’s leading.
Guardian: She tries to shed the light of conscience and show the “true way”about that issue.
Contagonist: He’s tempting everyone out of his paths. And bringing other issues -or additional information about the same issue- just to confuse.
Sidekick: She supports one side completely. Be it the protagonist’s or the antagonist’s.
Skeptic: He doubts both sides. He’s his own man.
Emotion: Basically has no reasons for or against the issue, but strong emotional conflict for or against it.
Reason: Analyzes the issue in a dispassionate way. Takes a side as long as it’s rational.

So, briefly, using an example of “The end justifies the means” in a story of, say, a nuclear power plant (the cheap energy justifies the nuclear waste) in which the protagonist is against that power plant:

The Protagonist tries to make everyone conscious of the dangers of the plant.
The Antagonist tries to stop the protagonist campaign so the town keeps agreeing about the cheap energy issue.
The Guardian agrees with the protagonist, since she has conscience about the dangers, but tries to make the protagonist seek better ways of making the people conscious.
The Contagonist tries to seduce the protagonist out of her quest, so he goes along with the”means justifies ends” issue.
The Sidekick supports the (let’s say) Antagonist, he also goes along.
The Skeptic doesn’t thinks the plant is good, but doesn’t want a raise on the electric bill either. He’s against all.
Emotion supports the protagonist in this case but makes trouble at all protests.
Reason is a scientist researching about sun energy. The protagonist tries to support her efforts.

Capturing the Setting

This is an article I found on the BBC – Get Writing website, written by Sue Chester. I took out the exercises and etc, focusing mainly on the content. If you’d like to see the original article, click here. It’s a pretty long article, so reader beware:

Setting Off
For the last few weeks I’ve been on a journey through the Caribbean. It was very cheap. Gabriel Garcia Marquez took me there personally for less than a tenner in Love in the Time of Cholera.

The setting of a novel is integral to the story. It’s the stage set where the action takes place, the unifying factor where the plot unfolds and where the characters develop. Not just the geographical backdrop, setting is also reflected in time and place. Time could mean the time of day, the season, the future, past or present. Place can mean anything from the specific geographical location to a house, kitchen, car, football stadium, a Swiss ski slope or a Norfolk beach.

Description is the first port of call when it comes to creating your setting, lifting your readers into a vivid, imaginary world that rings true and feels real – exactly why I enjoyed reading Marquez. A good descriptive passage isn’t just a random list of what was in the landscape or in the room, but has enough striking and original detail to paint an image of the scene.

So what makes description work? It’s a combination of observation, detail, imagination and creating a sensory experience for the reader; all through use of the writer’s kit – nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and figurative language.

Before you describe anything you need to really observe the world around you, just as a fine artist would when painting. If you haven’t properly looked and absorbed, how can you describe to others with enough accuracy and intensity to hold their interest?

Discussing Fiction

Haha you can tell it’s summer, because I have a lot more time to play around with the blog and write. 3,000 words written today! If you haven’t noticed, I’m somewhat of a binge writer: I don’t write for a week, and then sit down and concentrate on nothing else for five hours.

Anyway, I found this list of fiction terms online, and edited it a little, adding some of my own examples and removing some terms that I thought were redundant:

• Allegory: A complete narrative that may also be applied to a parallel set of external situations that may be political, moral, religious, or philosophical; a complete and self-contained narrative signifying another set of conditions.
• Atmosphere: The emotional aura that a work evokes; the permeating emotional texture within a work.
• Character: The verbal representation of a human being, with all the good and bad traits of being human. Character is revealed through authorial comments, interactions with other characters, dramatic statements and thoughts, and statements by other characters.
• Conflict: The essence of plot; the opposition between two forces. Man vs man, man vs nature, man vs himself
• Contextual or authorial symbol: A symbol specific to a particular work that gathers its meaning from the context of the work.