Writing sex scenes, for some authors, can be most intimidating. I’ve seen this mentioned time and again when reading other people’s blogs. Whether you enjoy reading about hot sex or not has little bearing; for one thing, you probably don’t know the intimate details of the novelists life, and so you can pretend or not that they did or didn’t actually experience what you’re reading. When you’re the one writing it, however, I suppose it depends how self-conscious you are.
Take the scenario where you’re sitting down to watch a movie with your parents and a graphic sex scene comes on the screen that you weren’t expecting. Awkward, right? If so, you probably don’t want your parents reading your steamy novel. My own mother used to get up and leave the room when I tampon commercial came on tv. I don’t think she’ll be down for reading my novel.
The question is, do you tone down your writing for fear of family and pointing fingers saying, or even thinking, I know what you’ve been doing, or do you just ignore it and omit from every conversation with your family that you’re a published author?
“How many bugs in a box?” It’s a stupid little song that has been going through my head for years. When I’ve finished writing this post (because I don’t want to stop) I’ll look it up and if I can, insert it so that everyone can be tormented by it.
It’s from an animated game for the computer that my kids used to play when they were little. The game was called “How Many Bugs in a Box” and it was a counting/math/number/pattern recognition game. Why am I writing about this? Because every time – and I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME – I try to write a blog post I think of that sentence. The question has been plaguing me now for around fifteen years. Fifteen years of wondering how many bugs are in the damned box!
Why is it that songs get stuck in our heads, anyway? There’s a name for it now: ear worm. Usually it lasts a morning, or a few hours after we either think of a song or hear it after not having heard it for a long time. It doesn’t usually happen – at least in my experience – when it’s something that’s on the radio or my playlist all the time. I think my worst ones to date have to be “C is for Cookie” by the Cookie Monster, or “The Song that Never Ends” by whatshername with the lamb puppet. (Holy crap, “whatshername” didn’t get a red squiggly line underneath it!)
Anyway, by finally writing “how many bugs in a box” in a blog post, I’m hoping to dispell the magic that keeps me wanting to come back to it. I’ll let you know if it worked in another post. Maybe in next week’s SoCS post.
Writer mode is something I never go out of. It’s the perpetual state of creating, of observing, and of learning. I don’t see and hear things going on around me as much as I absorb them.
This came to me one day about a month ago when I was in the grocery store. I reached the end of the aisle where there was a display of bleach on sale, and I thought to myself, I’m going to need some of that to get all the blood stains out. In reality, I don’t have a pool of blood anywhere in my house – so where did the thought come from?
I wonder about this a lot. The characters, plots and scenarios manifest in my mind in so many different ways. Whereas most of my fictional dilemmas are solved when I’m completely relaxed, such as when I’m in the shower and not having to concentrate too much on what I’m doing, my initial ideas often appear when I’m trying to do something else. Possibly it’s the part of me that worries, what if? It’s those moments when I’m frantically looking for something to write on, or searching for a place to pull over so I can write a note on my phone so I don’t forget.
I feel kind of blessed that I have this seemingly infinite source of thoughts and ideas coming to me. I think maybe everyone does, to some degree. Whether one puts them to use is what makes the difference between one who creates and one who lives on other’s creations – not that there’s anything wrong with that, to quote Seinfeld. We all do it.
So which is it do you think? I ask all creators: artists, photographers, musicians, and writers of fiction, blogs and poetry, is there something in the ether which those of us who create are in touch with? Or is it something that comes from inside, that we’re simply more in tune with than other people?
Hey there! Welcome once again to the Friday Prompt in anticipation for tomorrow’s big event: Stream of Consciousness Saturday! Why is it a big event? Because everyone is going to join in this week! Even YOU! Are you ready? Too bad! You’ve got to wait until tomorrow! Haha.
This week I’d like to see what you can do with a question. Ask one in the first sentence or two of your post and then answer it… or not. It’s up to you.
After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at the prompt page in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post.
Here are the rules:
1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.
2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.
3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” or “Begin with the word ‘The’.”
4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people will come and read your post! The way to ping back, is to just copy and paste the URL of my post somewhere on your post. Then your URL will show up in my comments, for everyone to see. For example, in your post you can copy and paste the following: “This post is part of SoCS: https://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-2614/ ” The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.
5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.
6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!
You’re lining up to cash out at the grocery store. There’s a guy in his mid-twenties behind you and a woman in front of you. The woman is arguing with a child who wants a chocolate bar. You think to yourself, just buy it and shut the kid up. The guy behind you says as much under his breath but loud enough for you to hear. Which one of these people do you relate to? If you actually thought, just buy it… then it’s the guy behind you. On the surface you are in cahoots. But if you’re a parent, you probably thought, that poor woman, and chances are you relate to her on a deeper level. Why? Because you probably share experiences.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the things which connect us as human beings are that which we relate to when we read a book. The more we can relate, and get into the mind of the protagonist or even the antagonist, the more we’ll enjoy the novel.
Back to my scenario at the beginning. Assuming you’re a parent, you can probably understand on some level what it’s like to have a child who, at one time or another, acted out. Yes, there are people out there with perfectly behaved children in public. Perhaps they only go out on days that the sun shines. I have no idea. But not to belabor the point, let’s go instead to the guy standing behind you. If you agreed with him then you can relate, but only to a point. His situation and his attitude aren’t as obvious as the harried mother’s. But that doesn’t mean you can’t write a book he’d be interested in reading. It probably wouldn’t have children in it. Then again, the mother’s ideal novel probably wouldn’t either. She’s looking for an escape.
So is the solution to never put kids into your novels? Maybe. Or maybe you just need to think about who is going to relate to your characters–their lives and their emotions–to find your target audience.
There’s something about this photo that feels chaotic to me. The tangle of branches; the dead leaves from last fall, hanging on precariously even as the new spring growth pushes out from the winter’s dormant branches. The century old brick a backdrop for yet another spring – another dawning year. Even the drops of rain suspended on delicate branches, waiting to fall, to nourish the earth from which the tree thrives add to the pandemonium.
I wonder which will outlive the other: the tree, or the house?
The first arguably most difficult thing about creating characters, is avoiding writing about yourself. This argument is based on the fact that you know no one better. Your experiences, tastes, and even your most used expressions are bound to creep in – sometimes you don’t even realize it.
The second arguably most difficult thing about creating characters is making them believable. It’s easy to write a one-dimensional character. So we write back stories, which may or may not show up in the final cut. But how detailed are those back stories? And how rounded do they make your characters?
The difficulty I find in writing a back story is that it tends to be about the big stuff. When I’m writing one, I’m looking for what motivates my characters to do what they do. Because a character with no motivation is the worst kind of cookie-cutter character. So I go back to their childhoods to discover what made them who they are. What are the huge events that shaped them into the person my readers will see when I plop them down in my story and ask them to react?
It’s not just the big things that shape who we are in real life though, is it? It might be where we were when someone else’s big event happened. It might be a piece of music we heard. Any number of trivial things make us who we are. And it’s those little things that make people care about us. Truly care. Which is another MAJOR if not the most MAJOR thing in keeping a reader reading our story.
With this in mind, I came up with an idea. What about those stupid surveys you see all over facebook and the like, which teenagers love to fill out? I looked one up. My mind was blown. This is only one of thousands: https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=50193333157 so if you don’t like the questions here, google “100 question survey facebook.” If I answered only a third of the questions on this survey, from the perspective of my characters when they were teenagers, I would know everything I could possibly want to know in order to create the best characters I can come up with. Because the problem with writing just a back story, is the lack of spontaneously coming up with your characters quirks, opinions, and thoughts. Why? Again, because your own seep in.
As soon as I have the time, I will take this survey for at least four of my novel’s characters–two main, and two supporting. I honestly believe this is the golden key to rounding out their lives, and making my readers–and myself–care about them and what happens to them.
Do it. And really put some thought into it. Remember what it was like to be a teenager, when all of these questions mattered. Then let your character’s experiences seep in to your story and not your own. I can almost guarantee that it will give you a better story.
There’s a contest going on at a local radio station at the moment to promote the concert and to give away tickets for the band Wheatus. You might remember them – they sang the song “Teenage Dirtbag.”
(great video)
To win the tickets you must write about your own experience with a dirtbag and send your story in to the station. This got me to thinking (as things do) about how one doesn’t really need to resort to watching “Criminal Minds” to find a villain for their story. Most of us, if not all, know people in real life who would make perfect villains. All that’s required is to amp up their faults either a little or a lot.
Take the jock in the video, for instance. He pisses off his girlfriend when he throws something at the nerd. Bullies like this are everywhere – not just at school.
True story: A couple of years ago, my mother was in the parking lot of the local mall when she grazed another car going around a corner. She was supposed to meet up with me inside the mall that day, and she didn’t know what to do, so she came to find me. Someone, meanwhile, witnessed the accident and wrote two notes; one they left on my mom’s windshield and the other on the windshield of the person she hit. I don’t remember exactly how it went down, but I contacted the owner of the damaged car. Luckily, I didn’t let my mother deal with the asshole.
He told me he wouldn’t put in a police report if I would agree to pay for his repairs. I said fine – it wasn’t much damage. He was going to get it fixed right away. When it was done, he called me to say it would be $300. This is how it went from there:
Me: Okay just send me the receipt for the repair.
Him: No.
Me: I’m not giving you any money unless I see the bill.
Him: Don’t you trust me?
Me: (thinking, no I don’t) It’s not that I don’t trust you, I just want it for my records.
Him: What do you need the receipt for – are you a bookkeeper or something?
Me: Yes I am.
Him: Well maybe I’ll just call the police. You don’t want this to go on your mom’s record, do you?
Me: Not really, but I still want the receipt.
Him: (getting angry) Look, I’m giving you a deal here. You should be paying me more than $300 for my inconvenience. I had to go without my car for two days. Doesn’t my time mean anything to you?
Me: No.
I hung up on him and took my mother to the police station to report the accident. Her insurance paid for her damage and his paid for his. And that was that.
Classic bully. What a villain he would make.
Have you crossed paths with a villain? Please share your experience in the comments!
I hear people say all the time, “If I just had,” this or that, then I’d be happy. Today, if I just had a moment without stress I’d be able to think about what I want to write! That’s what SoCS is for though, right? Just start writing and publish whatever comes out.
So I’m sitting here with my laptop on my lap, on the couch, while my mother tries to avoid Alex, who is bound and determined to terrorize her in any way he can.
Stress doesn’t even cover it. Doesn’t begin.
I hate whining though. Whenever I get on here and I write a blog post that sounds like I’m complaining, I delete it. But I can’t do that today. So here, you see a rare blog post from me where I’m actually bitching about things going on in my life. It’s like spotting a rare bird in a tree. Quick! Take a picture!
That happened to me the other day, actually. I heard the cardinal before I found it – I wouldn’t have been looking for it otherwise. It sat singing at the top of a tall tree, brilliantly red. I got my camera out of my pocket to take a picture, not sure I could zoom in enough to get the shot, but it flew away as I was pushing the zoom button. So, you don’t have a picture of that not-so-rare bird.
Things are quiet. This is the stupidest post I’ve ever written. I need to do my laundry.
