Break for Christmas and New Years

So I'm going to take a break from posting for the next couple weeks, just to get through the craziness that accompanies Christmas and New Years.

I wish everyone a very merry and blessed Christmas and safe New Years. See you in 2011.

A Quick Post

Just wanted to put up a quick post. Work was absolutely insane today, so I didn't get the chance to write the post I was planning to write. Instead, I had to find every school in a school district in South Carolina.

So to make up, here's a link to Michael Buble singing "Baby, It's Cold Outside" instead. I love this song. :)

Names, Names, Names

So I know I talked about names in my previous post about characters. But I like them so much I wanted to do another post on them. Only I wasn't really sure what to write about them. Loving something and knowing how to write about it are two different things.

So names. Why do I think names are so important to a story? Well think about the effect a name has on your impression of a person. When you hear a name you automatically get an idea about how the owner of that name looks, acts, and even thinks sometimes. Things like your past experiences have a big influence on how you look at the owner of a name. For example, I have an (unfortunate) dislike of the name Angela because of a particular childhood acquaintance. There are other names that I dislike because of my past as well. In fact, there are whole name books dedicated to looking at how names are perceived. My favorite is The Baby Name Survey by Bruce Lansky. My friends became slightly obsessed with it when they started looking up what the book said about their names. If you're curious, you should check it out. It's pretty amusing, and sometimes, scarily close to accurate.

I talked about how I choose names in my last post. I always find that part of the naming process one of the most enjoyable and frustrating parts of the whole character creation process. Sitting down with my pile of name books (one that has lots of unusual names and spelling variations, one that I can search for names by meaning, and one that I can just skim through for the more popular names), my laptop (babynamesworld.com has an excellent search function; babynamewizard.com has some amazing tools for checking popularity of names), and paper and pencil to jot down anything that strikes my fancy is my favorite way to spend some time. There are times I've spent an hour or more looking up names, comparing how they sound or feel, whether they fit with the idea of the character I have or if they make the character take an unexpected turn. Each part of this process is so fun to me.

Why do I spend so much time on the names? I mean besides being a little obsessed with names. Well I mentioned above how they change the way people see your character. To me, they help define the character. Until the character is named, it's almost like they don't really exist yet. Once they have that name, the name that says exactly the right thing about the character and their history and their place in the story, then they seem to be real to me. They come alive, ready to play their parts in the story.

So you see, names are one of the most important parts of creating a character, at least to me. It's also one of the most satisfying.

Short post, I know. But if I keep writing, I'll just start sounding crazier than I already do. :) See you on Thursday!

Characters and Why I Love Them

On Monday I talked about where my ideas come from. Today I'm going to talk about where my characters come from.

One of my favorite authors, Tamora Pierce, talks about her characters on her website. She takes portions of people around her and bases characters on them. Other times she bases her characters on pictures of random people she collects.

I take a similar approach to creating characters. Most of my MCs start out as some reflection of myself (something you might quickly notice if you get to read more than one of my stories). Actually Alana, the MC of my WIP was me when I started writing the story as a teenager. Writing was a chance to take myself of crazy adventures I would never actually get to do in real life. As I've worked on the piece, Alana has become her own person, but there are still distinct pieces of me in her. Aspects of her personality, likes and dislikes, and even how she looks are taken largely from my own life. How are we the same? We both like to read; we both love horses; we both have a sarcastic streak. How are we different? She has an easier time speaking her mind than I do; she goes to public school; she's an only child; her parents are divorced; and most importantly, she is a mage. There's lots of other similarities (our hair color) and differences (she took riding lessons as a kid).

What about my other characters? My male MCs or supporting characters. Where do they come from? Well, as far as MCs go, I usually find some way to (at least at first) base them on a guy I know. When I was a teen it would be the guy I had a crush on. As I got older, they transformed from a single guy I knew to a more general male figure. I have to say that my male MCs are somewhat more varied than they used to be.

As for supporting characters, those are usually just people who pop up when needed. I need a best friend for an MC and suddenly I see the perfect person. There are two best friends for Alana in my WIP (well actually three.) One of them is actually based on my brother to a point, but only slightly. The other, the girl, is completely made up. I realized Alana needed a female friend and she just presented herself to me, fully formed. The same with the third friend. I needed a character to perform a particular part and this character just stepped up, ready to be put into action. That's how most of my supporting characters are. They seem to show up where I need them in the exact form that I need them to take. It's like they're real people raising their hand and saying, "Over here. I'm the one you need." And surprisingly they are a pretty varied group.

Names are another thing altogether though. They are probably the hardest thing for me to come up with for a character. My MC was pretty easy. It was her name that gave me the idea for the story in the first place, but it took me quite a while to come up with names for the rest of the cast.

I have found that it seems a little easier to make up a name for a character in my fantasy world than it is to find the right name for characters in my "real life" stories. Making up names seems second nature to me, perhaps because I've been doing it for most of my life. My brother and I would make up whole worlds, and I came up with the various names for the races and people we created. So coming up with the perfect fantasy name is usually pretty straightforward. When I have to look up names for my non-fantasy characters (and some of the fantasy ones too) it gets harder.

See I'm a little obsessed with names. I own ten or more baby name books and have for years. My friends thought I was crazy. So did my family. The reason I have the name book is because I'm also obsessed with name meanings. If I'm going to use a name, it needs to really mean something and that meaning usually relates to my story somehow. I have used names for the way they sound before, but not often. One example of that rare occasion is when I needed names for five sisters. I chose names that went well together and fit the girls' personalities more than anything else.

So that's my character creation process. Sometimes it starts with a name. Other times it starts with a need. On occasion it starts with a physical description. But in the end, they all turn into the characters that are just right for their stories.

Where Ideas Come From

Lots of writers talk about where their ideas come from, or even just where ideas come from in general. It's something they're asked about constantly. "Where'd you get the idea for that?" "How did you come up with this?" How writers come up with they're ideas seem to be something everyone is obsessed with. Famous authors often tell us. Stephanie Meyer got the idea for Twilight from a dream. (Not that I like Twilight. I'm just using it as an example.) So where have I gotten the ideas for the stories I write? Today I tell you.

My current WIP is probably my oldest idea. I have to say it's also probably one of the oddest. It started with a name. My MC's name actually. I stumbled across the name somewhere and saw that it (supposedly) meant "from a distant place." (Of course, now when I look up that name, it doesn't mean that, but I swear it did on that day. Weird huh?) From that name's meaning came this idea that has over the past ten years (I was 15 when inspiration struck :) turned into a novel somehow (still not totally sure how it happened. But it did, and I love it.)

Some of my other ideas for stories came from a random phrase, just one line or another. Out of them sprang entire story lines and characters. I haven't gotten a chance to flesh out some of them, but others certainly show potential. Others came from games that my brother and I came up with when we were kids. A couple others (only two) came from dreams that I had (yeah I know. It's a little nuts, but hey, it happened). Still others came from watching movies, reading books, and lots of other places.

I'm hoping that a few of these ideas will turn into more novels. With a lot of work, some of them might. Others I know are destined to stay the little snippets they started out as. If you

re lucky, maybe you'll get to see some of them when I get them published.

Now it's time to go back to resting (I got sick this morning, so I've been resting all day, per the better half). I plan to post another blog on Thursday. See y'all then.

The Scary Truth

So I've been reading Natalie Whipple's blog lately, and a couple of her recent posts about being on submission have kind of, well I don't really know. I suppose the right word might be 'unsettled'. I think they've unsettled me. Or maybe shaken me and my faith in my writing career.

She's been talking about how long she's been on submission (15 months) and how this is affecting her. And something about what she said struck a chord with my very insecure self. You see, I have this massive fear (which I'm sure I share with most would-be writers) that I will get my current WIP all shiny and polished and send it off to agents and no one will pick it up. Or the agents will like it and then not be able to sell it. I've been working on this novel off and on for about ten years now. Granted, I took some long breaks, but has basically been my life for the past two to three years. Finishing it, editing it, having it critiqued, editing it again. And the idea that I might not sell it is down right terrifying. When you've poured so long into something, the idea of it never seeing light is unimaginable and too much of a reality at the same time.

Now don't mistake my meaning here. I know that there are lots of authors out there that spend ten or more years on a single novel and get it sold. But from what I understand, they mostly have books already in print. Until this past week, I hadn't really considered what I was going to do if I couldn't sell my book. Now I can't think of anything else. I've been frantically trying to come up with a contingency plan for a couple days now. The question "What am I gonna do if I can't sell this," keeps swirling around in my head, and I can't seem to escape it.

Of course, all of this seems like doomsaying since I haven't actually started querying agents. What can I say. I've always liked to be ahead of the curve. But kidding aside, I do want to have a backup plan. So I've decided to start working on a second, unrelated novel in hopes that by the time I get ready to start submitting I will have a second option should I run into trouble.

On a slightly unrelated note, I am up to over 68,000 words on my WIP. This is pretty big considering earlier this year I was just hoping to get to 50,000 words. Now, I might (hopefully) hit 70,000 words. That's kind of incredible to me. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to get that many. And sometimes if I'll ever have enough.

Well, I'm off now.

Why I write what I write

So I really am attempting to get better at this whole blog thing. Granted it’s been two months since I last posted, but hey, at least it hasn’t been three.

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out what to focus on in this blog. I’m having trouble with that. I figure it should be about my writing, but what about it? I’m still writing my book, so what should I tell you about that? Well, now I’m just going to tell you everything. On days that I don’t have much to say about the actual drafts or (when I get to that point) the querying, rejections, and (hopefully) requests for partials or fulls, I’m going to tell about why I write, what I write, and maybe a little about my life outside writing (yes I have one of those, and unfortunately, it often takes over). I’m going to try and start out each post with an update on where the latest draft is. Perhaps this will motivate me to write more, just so I can tell people about it. So here goes.

Draft Status: I have made it to the fifth chapter in my sixth draft. At the moment I’m adding details, something I actually find a little hard to do. My perfectionism gets in the way a lot because I constantly have to stop and figure out the exact right word to describe a color or a saddle or a dress. I keep getting bogged down, but I’m trying to get through it.

So in the another post I wrote (yeah that one two months ago. I know it was a long time, but bear with me) I talked about why I write. I think I’m going to talk about what I write now, and how I wound up choosing that, or rather how it chose me.

I write fantasy. Not just any fantasy though, I write fantasy for young adults. What on earth possessed me to do this? Did I see the market was good and just decided to jump on board? Nope. Actually, when I started writing my WIP I had no clue that the YA market was going to explode about four years later. I just knew I wanted to read a story like what I was writing.

See I read voraciously. I am almost never without a book (it’s closer to never, but the rare occasion has struck when I do lack a book. Not often, but it does). And when I was a kid I discovered this amazing little tome by a pretty famous author. I opened it and started reading and couldn’t stop. I reread that book so many times I had it memorized almost word for word. Actually I still remember most of the lines of that book, all these years later because I read it so often. It opened this incredible world to me, a world created by someone else, separate from our own. Something about that captured me and my imagination.

I spent the majority of my childhood and even some of my teen years making up my own worlds with my brother. We would weave many stories into and out of these stories. We made new cultures and races, new magics and power, places and societies, all before we were 15.

And while we did this, I kept reading. I discovered more made up worlds so different from our own. This world building and people building utterly ensnared me. But one thing always seemed to be lacking. There were no girls. All the classic books I read, and many of the science fiction and fantasy books I was allowed to read (I say allowed because there were many rules about appropriate reading material in my parents’ house) focused on boys, always boys. And I wanted to read about girls like me. So when my first story ideas (well not first, but the ones I actually began writing down) started going onto the page, I think it was only natural that I wrote fantasy, created my own worlds and made them about strong girls, like me.

I started writing when I was a teenager. It’s actually when I started my WIP. But it wasn’t until much later (third year in college) that I realized that writing and world-making were where my true passions lay.

So that’s what I write (and kind of why too). My goal is to write about adventurous girls who aren’t afraid to do hard things. Or if they are, they learn how not to be.

Writing Books

I’ve been reading a lot of writing books recently. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. 

Why? you ask. Let me explain.

First the good. The good thing about reading books about the craft of writing is that I’m learning a lot. Since I’ve been reading so many lately, some things from book to book are the same, but in general, it’s been kind cool to see different author’s or editor’s opinions and ideas for good writing. They all address various things.

One I read, Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood, is, obviously, about fresh perspectives on writing various emotions. Hood covers a ton of emotions in the book, almost anything you can think of. And most of them in unexpected ways. Reading through it made me really think about how I’m showing my character’s emotions throughout my book.

I’ve always known that showing realistic emotion is something of a struggle for me. It’s not that I’m an unemotional person. I actually have all the same emotions as pretty much everybody else in the human race. My problem is that I have spent most of my life suppressing those emotions. I worked so that people wouldn’t know when I was upset, or jealous, or sad, or even happy or excited. The Hubby always complains about how I don’t act happy or excited or surprised about anything. And I don’t, generally. Oh sure, I’ll get a little giddy, or a little silly, when I’m in a good mood. But generally, I keep my emotions very controlled.

Of course, this means that I struggle with actually writing out emotions for my characters. I keep having to remind myself that they are not me. They have to get excited or mad or angry and they have to show it, somehow. Even if showing it is in a minute way. So I’ve been working on doing that and not falling into clichés. That’s where Hood’s book came in handy. It showed me new ways to think about familiar emotions. Something I am very grateful for.

Another one that I read was the Writer’s Little Helper by Jim Smith. That was an interesting read. Basically it was a bunch of little tools and ideas all put down into one book. Every couple of pages addressed something different in a writer’s craft. It was a good read, and certainly something handy to keep around, but it led to some major self doubt, and thus the bad of reading writing books.

So, I’m not a terribly confident person, especially when it comes to my writing. Don’t get me wrong. I can fake confidence in almost every other area of my life. In some areas, I actually am confident. But when it comes to my writing, I am one of the least confident, most self conscious people there is. Of course, that’s probably true of most writers. If it were I doubt there would be so many books out about writing to help writers. Part of the goals for these books has to be giving writers confidence in their writing. “If I follow all these rules, pay close attention to the conventions, and learn when to go with them or when to break away from them, who can help but love my writing?” we think (or at least I do).

But then you actually start reading those conventions, those rules, those ideals, and for me it’s almost like getting hit in the stomach with a dowel rod. (Yes, this has in fact happened to me. Ask me how I spent my childhood sometime.) I see those rules and think, “I didn’t do that,” or “Did I do that? Did I unconsciously follow this rule?” I’m overcome with the sudden need to go back to my WIP is tear it apart, shred it into the tiniest pieces, just to make sure I have followed the sage wisdom of all of these people who must know better than me. They have been published after all. They have to know what they’re talking about.

I am not saying that they don’t. Don’t think that. I am sure that they do. What I am saying though, is my natural tendency to think the worst of my writing seems to become strongest right after I read one of these books. It gets a little tiring actually. And depressing. How can I ever hope to follow all these rules? Especially because most of them seem to apply more heavily to genres that I don’t have any intention of ever writing.

So what’s a girl to do?

Keep writing and keep reading. After thinking about this for a while, I figured the best thing for me to do is to just keep writing and reading. I want to learn all that I can. I want to be the best writer and storyteller I can be. And to do that, I’ve got to keep practicing and keep reading about writing and reading the types of books I plan to write. But I also have to remember not to let the shortcomings get me down. That’s why I’m reading the books in the first place. To learn where I need to improve. And hopefully, I’ll also discover some places that I’ve actually done a few things right.

So that’s my big long spiel on my writing books.

Oh and in case you were wondering, I’m currently ready The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass. So far I really like it. It’s expand my mind, which is what I was hoping for.

I also happen to be halfway through my by-hand edits of the fifth draft of my novel. I’m really excited about how fast it’s going. I can’t wait to start the polishing again.