Is it a good sign that I want to blow up everyone in my NaNoWriMo novel? I’m thinking a nice gas explosion would come in handy right about now. Unfortunately that would mean killing off the narrator. I doubt that would go over well in most literary circles.
I think the most creative way I’ve written for anyone to die has to be my story of the unluckiest man alive:
http://neverendingstorydepository.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/unluckiest-man-alive-dies/
What’s yours?
Twins. Part of the plot in my NaNoWriMo project required a case of mistaken identity, so instead of having one protagonist, I’m writing one and a half. I call the twins “one and a half” protagonists because I’m writing in the first person – so I’m getting all of what one of them thinks and only half of what the other does. They’re both good guys, Marcel and Max are. Decent men from a good family – very much the same in many ways.
As usual, something happened in real life which made me contemplate the differences between siblings. In this case it was a conversation with the lady who manages the dry cleaner on my paper route. She has two granddaughters who she loves to talk about. She was telling me how unalike they are, even though they’re very close in age. This is a subject (among many) that has always fascinated me, being an only child. My own children didn’t grow up as siblings usually do, since they all have such physical differences, so it’s something I must study from a distance.
The difficulty I’m experiencing in my novel is that the twins, Marcel and Max, sound the same when they speak. It makes sense to me that they should, but they end up coming out like these guys:
Not all that polite mind you, but they speak exactly alike.
Once NaNo is done and I can put some thought into it, I’ll work on finding something unique about the two, which will come out in their speech. But in the meantime, I’m wondering what about their natures, and not their nurture, can help my readers to tell them apart.
Have you ever written siblings and come across this problem? Let’s learn from each other!
I’ve been seriously thinking about how much my own tastes influence my fiction. The other day, my characters were in a restaurant and I purposely made them order something I, personally, wouldn’t eat.
It occurred to me that maybe I’m thinking about this too much – micromanaging my story. But the fact is, they’ve gotta eat. And I find it boring and not really credible that they’d like ALL the same things I do. If for no other reason than every character in every story I ever write always eats the same group of foods, I feel like I have to change it up once in a while.
Is this something you’ve put any thought to? If you’re a vegetarian, do you ever have your characters eating a nice juicy steak?
How else do your characters not reflect your tastes? (Human characters, that is.)
Write what you know; write what you know; yes, yes, okay we get it already. But have you ever wanted to write who you know? Fictionally that is.
When I write, I write characters. Plots in my stories, are secondary. I take, for instance, a scenario, ask ‘what if?’ and off I go. Once I have a character in place, they decide what happens in the circumstance I put them in.
I know a few people very well. Family, friends – I can’t help but know them. The people I don’t know very well, I study. I watch the way their expressions change when they talk about certain topics that they love or which scare them… you get the picture, right?
But there’s that saying again. That rule. Write what you know.
Now say, for instance, I was to write about someone I adore. They probably wouldn’t mind. They’d be able to hold my bestseller up high and say, ‘This is about me!’ and they’d be proud to do it. But what if I wrote about someone who I don’t respect? Or someone whose personality is less than scrupulous? I wouldn’t use their real name, of course. And the story would not be the one they lived in real life. But they’d know. And I’d know that they knew. And then I’d have to wonder; are they planning to do something devious to smite me? After all, they aren’t the most the most pleasant person to deal with in the first place. How far will they go?
Write what you know. I know very little about ‘things,’ but I know a lot about people. About characters and what makes people tick.
Have you ever ‘written’ someone you know, fictionally? How would you feel if someone ‘wrote’ you?
Tick tick tick… boom!
Has anyone else noticed that their view count has gone down? I’m blaming it on the new pop-up window in the reader that allows people to read a post without going to the site.
While this new feature is sometimes handy, it discourages other WordPress users from clicking on the actual post. When they don’t look at the post, they don’t see our site, and when they don’t go to our site, they don’t see what else is on our site.
Just think about it this way: One of the people you follow may have found the cure for the clap yesterday, but if you only read about how his or her cat looked cute rifling through the cantankerous neighbours trash bin today, you’ll never know! That’s valuable information there you’ve missed out on!
So tell me, is it just me? Or has your view count gone down too?
Do you ever have one of those days when you want to write – you really do – but everything that comes out of you is sheer crap? I’m having one of those today.
On a happier note, I handed in what I consider another eight pages of utter drivel for my short story course today. Well, okay, maybe it’s not that bad. I hope it’s not. But I wasn’t allowed to polish it since it had to be a rough draft, so I certainly wasn’t happy with it.
It’ll at least be interesting to see if my professor sees the same things wrong with it as I do.
So unless I get a reprieve from this creative brain fart I’m having today, my NaNo wordcount is going to pot. I am so due for a weekend off – it’s been five weeks.
Maybe after 48 hours of solid sleep this weekend I’ll be back into the swing of things. Back in the saddle.
Back to being creative enough not to keep falling back on proverbs.
Or maybe I’ll feel better after a good night’s rest tonight. After all, tomorrow is another day.
So yesterday I was sitting in an unnamed coffee shop
with my friend John, and we were chatting over lunch. A couple of twentysomethings sat at the table next to us and proceeded to scratch their lottery tickets.
When John and I got up to leave, he commented that he needed his jacket cleaned soon – he works in the automotive-type industry and it is covered in grease. The man at the next table said, simply, “Baby shampoo.” We both looked at him and he explained: “You can get grease off clothes with baby shampoo. Oh and it costs $300 to ship a car from Vancouver to Toronto by train.” The latter was something John and I had been discussing earlier on in the conversation. We both thanked him for the information, like the polite Canadians we are, and left.
Since then I have thought about all the things we could have been talking about, and one conversation I had years ago with my ex sticks out in my memory.
Being a writer, sometimes I talk about my characters as though they’re real people. Just imagine what the eavesdropping couple would have made of this:
Me: So it turns out Helen is fooling around on Frank.
John: That bitch!
Me: I know, right? But I don’t want him to find out.
John: Because…
Me: Well, you know. He’s in jail. There’s just so much a guy can take.
John: True.
Me: So I’ve decided to kill her.
John: Huh. How?
Me: I can’t decide. I was hoping you’d help.
John: I’ll do what I can.
Me: I mean, I’ve thought about drowning her in the bathtub.
John: That’s a good one.
Me: Or I could just drop the hairdryer in with her.
John: And fry her…
Me: I don’t know though. It seems too convenient.
John: How about killing her in a car accident?
Me: She doesn’t drive, so that would mean killing someone else as well.
John: How about Martha!
Me: YES! Great idea.
You’ve got to wonder if the couple at the next table would have been quite as ready to make suggestions…
“Write what you know.” It’s one of those things we’re told to do, along with “show, don’t tell,” and a bunch of other guidelines we’re given as writers, that will apparently give us the tools we need to make us better writers and bring home our first million. It’s the “write what you know” thing I want to focus on today though, and I’ll tell you why.
I almost got hit by a bus today.
Don’t panic, I’m okay, but it was a close call. I’m talking inches. Millimeters even. It got me to thinking about my NaNo project, as does everything in my life – when I decide to write a novel, I live and breathe it, almost literally. Having something as dramatic as a real-life near-death experience happen to me (okay, okay, the mirror of a bus moving half a mile an hour nearly clipped my ear as I walked along the edge of a sidewalk) being worth mentioning, could happen to one of my characters, right? You can bet it will.
So back to writing what you know. I don’t think they really mean it in the strict sense of writing what you do for a living outside of writing, for instance. Or even writing about characters who write, though many writers do (I’m looking at you, Stephen King). If we did that, everything we wrote would be autobiographical. And what would the fantasy writers do? I’m thinking an elf accountant would be rather boring.
I think writing what you know can be taken in a more broad sense of feelings, emotions, and yes, little experiences like almost getting hit by a small, slow-moving school bus that’s coming to a stop beside the curb.
So my challenge, for all my fellow NaNoers who are reading this, is simple. Write into your story the next time you write, about something you’ve experienced in the last week. If your characters are in space it can be a sensation, or a sentence you remember hearing or saying.
And if you’re writing an autobiography – oh what the hell. Lie! I dare you!
P.S. Let me know how it goes!
I’m inspired – not by the article on the front page of the paper yesterday, but by its headline: Focus on those who inspire.
I can’t count how many times in the last month I’ve been asked the question, “What inspires you?” This question was my first assignment in my short story course and it continues to come up. Like here: on Opinionated Man’s blog just today.
My answer is ‘everything.’ All people, all things. There is nothing that can’t inspire me if I am in an imaginative mindset. And that leads me to a question for anyone willing to put forth an answer. If you consider the fact that you potentially inspire someone, does it make you want to be on your best behaviour?
Personally, I don’t think it should. After all, if everyone was always nice, pretty, clean, healthy and polite, we wouldn’t have antagonists. If our homes were always neat and tidy, would we be able to come up with a trash heap for a setting? If we all believed in the same things, would we be able to imagine strife?
Conflict is what a good story is made of. We NEED people to be at their worst once in a while. Misery, while not something most of us strive for, is necessary for the well being of the written word, as is sickness and death. Beauty is nothing without ugliness. Yin cannot exist without Yang and vise versa.
Think about it. What interests you? Conflict. Happiness that has overcome defeat. The struggle…
I can be inspired by a rock if it’s in the way, or if someone trips over it, because it’s all about the human interaction for me. It’s even better if, whoever trips over it swears like a sailor. Yes, I can be inspired by a scenery. But without life, it’s only a scenery.
What inspires you? Or, better yet, WHO inspires you?
In other news, the tree formerly known as Nosehair is sporting a fancy new orange eyebrow
Opinions. We all have them. As bloggers we put ours out there for the public to scrutinize every day, and scrutinized they are. Some of us know more intimately than others how harshly our opinions can be crushed by a troll. But still, the strongest of us brush it off and persist.
Is it possible to write without, in some capacity, revealing an opinion? Even in fiction there must be a part of our lives, our experiences, in what we say. So we write and we hope that people out there will find something of value in what we say. If we didn’t feel passionate about what we do, or what we have to share, we wouldn’t do it, right?
After all, we could just stick to posting pictures of flowers…
The posts in the category “Yesterday’s News” reflect inspiration found in the previous day’s edition of my local newspaper. They are not a retelling of the news. This is a challenge to post a blog entry once a day, every day until Hallowe’en, and possibly beyond.
lindaghill.com 