Character First

This probably won't be surprising to anyone else, but it certainly shocked me. I recently discovered that I am, in fact, not a plot-first writer. Instead, I am a character-first writer. How could I possibly not know this? I really don't know.

I made the discovery a couple of months ago when I was revisiting a few of my story ideas. I was doing a kind of inventory while processing what type of writer I was and what theme seemed prevalent in all of my writing. As I flipped through my numerous notebooks and looked at my hastily typed notes of story ideas, I started to notice a trend. Almost every idea that I had done any kind of development on started with a character I couldn't get out of my head. As I did more digging and reminiscing, I realized that much of my notebook space was taken up by various stages of character sketches and character development projects. Almost nothing existed in the way of plot sketches. As I began reviewing how these story ideas had presented themselves to me, I started noticing that pretty much all of them had started with, yup, the main character. And suddenly, I came to the realization that I was a Character-first writer.

It was rather flabergasting actually. See, I've been under the mistaken impression that I was a plot-first writer for most of my life. I always thought I struggled with creating characters. Isn't that insane? I don't know how I missed it for so long.

Of course, once I realized this, some of my writing woes seemed to make a lot more sense. See I've always had a bit of trouble with middles. Okay most people have trouble with middles, but still, I have that. I would get into writing a great story idea with all these great people that I couldn't wait to get to know, and suddenly 10 or 30 or 100 pages in, I'd lose the thread. I had no idea what the point of my story was or how the MC was going to get there. Except that I didn't realize this. I just thought it was a bad idea, or that I was being distracted by an even better idea. Now I realize that it was because I never really had much of a plot. And without a plot, my characters had nothing to do and nowhere to go. Or if they did have somewhere to go, they had no idea what to do once the got there.

After I made this astounding discovery, I was, at first, rather depressed. I thought "All this time I've been worry about the wrong things. If I'd known all of this years ago I could have gotten so much more done." It was a bit disheartening. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that making this discovery was actually one of the best things that could have happened to me. Cause now I know how to fix my petering-out-in-the-middle problem, generally speaking. I've identified the thing that was holding me back; lack of tangible plot lines. Now I can really revisit those old story lines and find the plot that those characters are meant to live out. And that makes me really excited.

So yeah, I thought I was a completely different type of writer for a while, but now I've discovered the truth and I get to start working to develop truly rounded stories. That's exciting to me.

Now an update on how my writing is going.

So far, after seven days, my stats are as follow:
Words: 17,982
Scenes: 8

Currently

I'm writing again. And I don't just mean here on my blog. :)

I mentioned in a previous post that I've been struggling with my writing lately and just wasn't motivated to get anything done. Well, I've moved past that finally and have been writing consistently for a couple of weeks now. It makes me really happy to be writing again.

What have I been writing? Well I finally finished a second draft of Alana (the one I've been working on forever). It is officially in the hands of a couple of critiquers, getting torn to shreds again. It took me a while to get it done (see unmotivated above), but now that I've completed the draft I'm happy. I feel like I'm making progress again.

Now that the second draft is finished, I'm spending the next month to two months focusing on churning out a full first draft of First Sight. I completed scene summaries a while ago, but put working on it on hold until I got Alana done. Now that she is, I'm finally getting back to FS.

Working on a completely new story is a bit nerve-wracking for me. I'm super worried that I'm going to hate how this book turns out. Or that there won't be enough conflict. Or that the story just stinks in general. But I really want to finish it because I really need to finish something new. Plus, I really do like the story idea, and now that I know how each scene is supposed to work, I feel like I know where this is going. At least the first draft. Of course, I may wind up having to completely rewrite it later, but my goal is to get every scene fully written. And I have a plan to do just that.

My plan is this: write at least one scene a day. Pretty simple, right? But so far, it's working great. I've typed up five scenes (I started working last week) so far. Technically I already wrote those scenes, but I wrote them by hand, in a notebook, between projects at my day job. So right now I'm basically typing up what I've already written. And I'm still writing at work, so maybe I'll keep ahead of myself. (Okay probably not, since I only write for five minutes at a time and I only get about two to three of these mini-sessions in per day, but a girl can dream.)

Another part of my plan is to try and post on here how the writing is going. It worked really well when I did BIAM, so I figure, why not try it again. I'm trying to get more focused in this blog thing, especially after reading a couple books about developing an author platform.

So yeah. Writing is going well. Life is interesting. Overall, I'm good.

I'll post stats on First Sight progress another day, since I don't have them in front of me at the moment.

Time Passing

I've been meaning to write a blog for a while. I just . . . haven't. It's probably because I've been having trouble doing much writing lately. I've been slowly working through my draft of my novel, but it's so hard sometimes to motivate myself to write.

Life hasn't been much help. Some really . . . heavy stuff has gone down of late and I'm trying to deal with it all.

I'm also trying to figure out how this blog and my faith fit together. Cause I want to be more open about my beliefs, but I'm not completely sure how to do that. Being a Christian and wanting to publish in the secular market seems to be a tricky thing. Plus, I'm just not good at opening up in general.

So yeah, I'm working through a few things right now. But I have a few ides for some blog posts, and I'm going to try and write them, and publish them. Because the only way I'm going to get anything written if I don't sit down and write it.

What's New or Where I Talk about what I've been Writing Lately

So I thought I'd tell y'all how the writing is going. Ya know, since that's kind of what this blog is supposed to be about.

For the past few months, I've been slowly writing up drafts of each scene in First Sight, my second novel length project. I made myself a promise last October that I would finish some kind of draft of it before I went back and starting editing the latest draft of Alana. I thought I'd get done a bit quicker than I did (clearly I was wrong). But the good news is that I finally finished up the first draft of all of the scenes. Well, all of the scenes that I thought of at this moment. I already know that I need to go back and add in a few more scenes exploring the development of the relationship between my two main characters. And between my main character and her family. And I may need to rework some of the events because the plot points may need some tweaking. But the point is, I finished drafting the first draft of the novel. I at least have the skeleton worked out and an idea of how most of the major scenes are going to work. At this point I need to go back and actually write out the action and description and dialogue, but I know the framework that all has to fall around.

And the best part is, I actually have an ending for the silly thing. See, for a really long time, I had no idea exactly how the story would end. I had vague musings about where I wanted it to end up, but I had no clue what the actual events of the climax and resolution were going be or how they'd work or how I was going to maybe set up for another book, just in case this isn't a one off idea after all (that's how it started. I really have no idea what I would do with the characters next, but maybe that'll come to me later).

Not having an ending was actually kind of a complete switch from Alana's story (my first, and still title-less, novel). With Alana's story, even way back when I first got the idea, I knew how it had to end. I knew that two big things had to happen and I knew pretty much how they were going to happen. It was just the way the story was set up even at the premise stage. The hard part with Alana's story was the middle, the events that got her from the beginning to the end. I only had a vague notion of what those would be. Well, the beginning was also tricky just because getting someone to another world from our world takes a bit of setting up and finessing to make work. But the end, the end was always solid.

Not so with First Sight. I had a really good handle on the beginning of First Sight. It was some of the middle and all of the end that gave me the trouble with that one.

But now I have the end figured out. Which means I may actually be able to put together a coherent story with this idea after all.

The other thing finishing the scene drafts mean is that I get to start making edits to Alana again. I haven't worked on Alana since last August when I did BIAM and rewrote the entire story in first person and moved several major plot points around. Now, after getting feedback from a few critique partners, I get to start tearing into it and hopefully improving it. I'm actually really excited about it because I got really good feedback from the people who read it for me. Good feedback is the best. :)

So that's what's been up with my writing lately. Good things all around.

Degrees of Literature

When I started college, I had no intention of getting a degree in literature. Actually my first choice was youth ministry. Then it changed to early childhood education. Finally, I settled on English, though I thought I was going to get a creative writing degree. When a rather impressive bout of inattention on the part of my advisor resulted in me having taken all the prerequisite classes for a lit degree instead of a creative writing degree, you can understand why I might have been a bit upset. (To be fair, I probably should have seen it myself, but I have a nasty habit of trying to give people the benefit of the doubt. I have since learned to stop doing that.) With this lovely mishap, I wound up making the choice to get a degree in literature instead of a degree in creative writing. I didn't know it at the time, but this would wind up being quite helpful to my writing career. It's only been in the past few years that I've begun to realize just how helpful all those literature classes were.

The most obvious benefit is that getting a literature degree exposed me to large amounts of classic and varied writings that I would never have read on my own. I had the chance to study writers like Shakespeare and Chaucer in depth, giving me an appreciation of their work that I didn't have before those classes. I took multiple classes on American, English, and world literature.

These classes exposed me to some things that most people read in high school, but I had not because I was homeschooled. I also got the chance to take more specialized classes, like an entire class about fairy tales and folk lore, or the class I took that was all about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (can you say awesome?). I also took classes on plays, poetry, research methods, the history of the English language, and the history of the English novel.

Overall, I was exposed to more great literature than I ever would have had the inclination to read had I studied strictly creative writing or any other subject. And every writer knows that one of the keys to being a good writer is being a good reader (okay, I did just use that cliche. But it is true).

The second, and probably less obvious benefit is that having a degree in literature gave me the ability to look past my own feelings about a piece of writing and simply look at its strengths and weaknesses.

Here comes a shocking revelation: I really can't stand literature, for the most part. All those classic authors and masters that we have to read as a part of our education are some of the most boring reads I've ever read. Most of the classics are depressing and or leave me feeling, well, icky after reading them. They hold little to no interest for me. (I realize that I am severely offending all of you classic literature lovers out there, but it's how I feel.)

Yet, I had to sit down and read hundreds of pieces of writing that I really didn't want to. And more than that, I had to be able to understand it and give intelligent answers to the questions my professors asked. I had to know their strengths and weaknesses, to be able to see the good in the pieces even when I couldn't stand reading them. It was incredibly frustrating at first. I've never liked being told what to read (who does?) and having to spend four years doing just that annoyed me.

But I did it. I wanted to earn my degree and I wanted decent grades. So I read, and processed, and learned to put my own dislike of the style or subject matter aside and simply evaluate the writing apart from those things. It wasn't easy. It's hard to put yourself aside and just look at things for their own value. But I got better at it. And by my last year, I was starting to actually kind of enjoy reading all that literature. Well, as much as someone who doesn't really care for literature can enjoy something like that.

So what does all this have to do with writing? Reading good writing, classic writing of master storyteller, adds depth and breadth to my own knowledge of writing. And that gave me more material to draw from for my own writing.

The other thing it gave me was the ability to critique pretty much any type of writing out there. I have particular reading tastes (most people do). I like YA fantasy, sci-fi, and an occasional contemporary story. I read very little outside of those genres. But that's reading for pleasure. What my five years in college gave me was the ability to set my preferences aside (to a point) and read other writer's stories effectively even if they don't fall into my preferred genres.

So there are advantages to that lit degree after all.

Besides, I can always get an MFA in Creative Writing. :)

Books that Have Made a Difference: Part II

Last time, I wrote about the effect C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia had on me (well, more specifically The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). Today, I thought I'd write about Tamora Pierce's books, since they were another set of books that had a somewhat profound effect on my writing.

I don't remember exactly how old I was when I first stumbled upon Ms. Pierce's books on my libraries shelves. I do know that I was in late elementary or early middle school when I finally started reading them. And when I did, I loved them. Until I read her books, I hadn't really read any fantasy that featured girls as the main characters. Until then, I'd been mostly reading those horse books that most little girls seem to love. I also read a few other things, but very little fantasy.

Not that I hadn't wanted to read fantasy. Ever since I read The Chronicles of Narnia I had wanted to read more fantasy, but I had a lot of trouble finding what I was looking for. Which was fantasy featuring girls like me having adventures. I couldn't find much.

And then I stumbled upon Ms. Pierce's books. I started with First Test and loved it. That sent me scrambling to find the other Tortall books, which I pretty much devoured. I waited somewhat impatiently for the rest of the Protector quartet to be published, rereading the books more times than I could count. I had finally found girls that I could connect with, that were having the kinds of adventures I'd always dreamed of.

Reading those books made me realize that I wanted more of those stories. It was this want of more stories that helped lead to me wanting to write. Where Narnia made me love creating worlds, Tortall showed me that girls could be heroes.

Books That Have Made a Difference: Part I

I've been talking about books a lot lately, so I thought I'd continue on that theme.

I've been thinking about the books that have made an impact on my writing. Over the years I've read a lot of books. I was trying to come up with something close to a number the other night, but after just a few minutes I realized that the number is probably over 1,000. Maybe more. (What can I say; I like to read.) Anyway, during all this thinking, I also realized that despite the ridiculous number of books I've read, there are still only a few that I know had a large impact on me and my writing.

The first of those books was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (well really, the whole Narnia series, but that one was my favorite). It was my first experience with fantasy and, because of that, I'll never forget it. Reading about the adventures of kids my age who found a secret portal to another world was the most exciting thing I'd ever heard of. I was an imaginative child, and Narnia was a whole new way to look at things.

Reading about Narnia was my first real inkling that I wanted to create worlds the way Mr. Lewis did. It was my first experience with someone creating a whole new world. After I read the Narnia books, I wanted to create worlds too. And so I did.

But the Chronicles of Narnia had another effect on my writing. After reading it, I became kind of obsessed with the idea of people finding ways to another world, somewhere fantastic. After I read it, I wanted to write about the same kinds of things, about kids like me finding their way into amazing places and having great adventures there. The idea of our ordinary world being connected to somewhere like that has stayed with me ever since then. It effected much of my imaginings, and it eventually led me to writing my first book (The untitled one listed on my Projects page).

Narnia was an eye-opening experience for me. It changed the way I looked and the world and made me start thinking about creating the same type of fantasy I'd read. But it was just the first step in my road to deciding to write fantasy. I'll talk about the others another day.

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