Please Don’t Feed the Writer

It’s been there for about a year now.  Over that time it’s changed, mutated, grown, evolved.  But I haven’t got any of it down on “paper” yet.  It’s still just “there” changing over time, becoming longer, shorter, more mature.  I haven’t written a single word of it, but it still grows.

“Why aren’t you writing it down?” you ask.

“I’m not sure.” would be my answer.

Perhaps I’m worried that once I start, it will lose some of its magic, or that I’ll lose sight of why I wanted to write this tale in the first place.  You see, it’s a very personal story.  Based on my life and the life of my stepson, though neither of us will be mentioned.

It’s the story of someone who would like nothing more than to fit in, to belong in a society that has a certain idea of who and what you are supposed to be, how you should act, and a very critical view of anyone different.  this may seem strange to another writer.  All of us tend to be a little “different”.  We were never what the world expected of us, no matter what that happened to be. But when I’ve been this way all my life.  the loner, the dreamer, that kid in the corner who could never stop fidgeting, who spoke out of turn, whose enthusiasm was unbridled and out of place in a nice idyllic school setting.

S o goes the life of the main character of the tale in my head.  An elf in Santa’s workshop that just can’t quite fit in.  that is until the big guy steps in and finds a place for him.  A story for every kid out there who lives on the outside of his friends, his class or his family.

A story for kids like I was.

What do you think?  Should I write it,or just let it continue to grow?

One of the most common mistakes I see writers make when writing historical pieces or fantasy stories is a simple and glaring lack of research into the common day-to-day existence of people living in tymes of olde. It’s easy to overlook the little things, and to simply assume that “they did it every day, so the characters don’t take note of it.”

While that may be true, there is no more certain way to immerse your reader in a story than to describe some of the minutiae of daily life as seen through the eyes of your characters. If you are setting a story in the highlands of Scotland in the 14th century, you’ll need an understanding of everything from how they cooked and ate, to the clothes they wore. I doubt I need to mention that Celtic clothing of the period differ wildly from the clothes you are most likely wearing today, or that the roles people played in their society bears little or no resemblance to what you would find in your daily life.

A great resource for clothing research comes in the way of renstore.com.  not only can you order actual reproduction clothing, but they offer lessons on topics that your characters might run into on their journeys, like Viking embroidery.

You might just want to order your very own suit of armor…  Hey, I know I’ve been wnting s good formal for a while.

Take a look at renstore.com and get inspired!

You’ve created the perfect character, or so you thought. You’ve done your homework. You’ve given her a past, an outlook on life and you know what drives her. You’ve got her physiological details down so well that you can rattle off her height, weight, body type and exact location of any scars without referring back to your notes. But no matter what you try, when you’re writing her, she comes of as flat and a bit two dimensional.

I’m not talking about a character who keeps baffling you with trying to do her own thing. That is an entirely different (and very good) thing to have happen. This character follows along with what you tell her to do complacently. She blindly follows orders and emotes and interacts with characters like a low paid extra on a television serial. She’s got no soul.

In How to Write a Damned Good Novel James N Frey describes his method for getting to know your characters. His method is to write a journal entry. From the way I understood it, he was asking the character to introduce themselves and then tell their own story in their own way.

Not a bad thing at all… Too bad it doesn’t work for me. the rest of his advice is priceless, and I’m sure that method of character building works for other people, but it hasn’t for me. (more…)

I wrote a chapter of “Fae Death”, a work I’m collaborating on, the other night. It wasn’t very lengthy, only around 2,000 words, but by the closing sentence I was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. I couldn’t bring myself to do so much as look over what I’d written until the next morning.

Was I forcing the story? No. The dialogue very nearly wrote itself. My characters had veered slightly from my original road map, but that’s almost never a bad thing, it’s what gives them character after all. All that was needed was a slight nudge on my part to move them back in the direction they needed to go. The chapter ended well. Very well. So why was I so tired by the end of it?

The simple answer is that my characters were having a fairly heated discussion through most of the chapter. Their emotions were high, and their level of emotion forced me to pour a lot of my own into their conversation. If I hadn’t poured that level of intensity into them, the whole situation would have read as flat. By the time their conversation had ended neither they, nor I, had anything left to give. It was only by sheer coincidence that the scene was set at night so both my characters and their writer headed off to bed.

It’s this level of emotional involvement with your characters that makes them jump off the page and into the hearts of the reader. If you find that you’re writing what is supposed to be a deeply emotional scene, but you’re not feeling the emotions yourself, then you might want to try to put yourself a little farther into the minds of your characters. If you aren’t feeling what they are, how is your reader supposed to feel it?

And in the end, it’s the reader that we all write for, isn’t it?