Thanks to some helpful readers, I think I’m starting to put a finger on the problem with my main characters. By and large, they lack self-reflection. The reader never gets a chance to connect with the main character, and therefore never gets the chance to develop any sort of sympathy for her.
What’s odd about this is that I am a very self-reflective person, almost to the point of crippling myself sometimes. I thought I might have addressed it somewhat with the manga script, but in looking back over it, the self-reflective character isn’t Satchiko, the main character who is telling the story. It’s Kazuki, an important character who isn’t telling the story.
I’m not sure why I’m afraid to allow the readers to crawl inside my main character’s head. It’s something I’ve enjoyed as a reader, and it seems like it should be a natural part of the story’s development.
If nothing else, it’s something to be mindful of as I continue writing and editing.
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 8:00 AM EDT
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There is an axiom in writing (usually referring to plays and screenplays) that if you show the audience a gun in the first act, you must fire it in the third act.
I’d never really given it much thought until I was watching something last week. I guess I’ve become more of a critical viewer/reader, because I noticed something that eventually became the “gun” of sorts later on. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it makes sense that the “gun” doesn’t have to be a gun in the actual sense. It just has to be an object that part of the tension hinges on.
Perhaps the axiom needs to be changed to say, “If you show the audience a critical item, you must bring that object to its resolution by the end of the third act.”
I’m pretty sure I haven’t done this properly throughout any of my work (even if I’m finally hearing that I’m getting better at unfolding my stories.), but I can definitely think of examples where an object has followed this formula. A vial of holy water. A doll. An oddly-shaped, unidentifiable object.
So…along with tracking characters, I guess I now need to start tracking critical items, too.
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 7:43 AM EDT
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I have this recurring problem with my writing. I can’t write a main character. I’ve been told this repeatedly. My supporting cast is great, while my main character does little more than drive people to wonder why I bothered telling their story.
I got to thinking about this the other night. What are my main characters lacking? I try to create “human” characters- ones who are just average people trying to live out their normal lives, and we’re supposed to see a moment in their life. That doesn’t really work where writing is concerned. You have to be very specific in the moment you pick. Very few people want to read about someone eating breakfast in their normal routine. They want to read something that tells them who this person is without having it all laid out for them.
I then got to thinking about one of my favorite manga/anime- Yu-Gi-Oh. Honestly, it’s not a cartoon a thirty-one year old should be watching. It’s just not. It’s a teenager story that was (heavily) watered down for tweens. People look at me a bit funny when I admit to enjoying the show, though. At first, I couldn’t explain the attraction, either.
After a lot of reading and watching and trying to figure out why I refused to walk away, it occurred to me that what initially pulled me in was why I stayed. I started watching, quite by accident, because I was completely intrigued by one of the characters. He was arrogant and fairly transparent…except he wasn’t. He had this depth that caused his character to do some very human things that forced the story line to keep moving along. In time, I realized that he wasn’t the only character with this hold on the story.
Yu-Gi-Oh is by and large driven by characters who follow a character-goal-obstacle format. When one goal is met, another is quickly assumed because of the story line, and there’s no real disconnect moving between the goals. All of these characters pursuing their goals through various (or sometimes the same) obstacles weave together to create this story. You feel badly walking away because you want to see a character reach his goal, and you’re grateful to see a character complete their goal and move on. In some ways, it’s really how life out here in the real world works.
I’ve never put much stock in character guides because they often want me to explore aspects of a character I wouldn’t be interested in as a reader. I do, however, need to figure out who my characters are and what they want, and then throw obstacles at them that actually test whether or not the character really wants the goal and what they’re willing to do to reach it.
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 7:49 AM EDT
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I’m doing a lot of housecleaning and laying out a plan of attack to condense and revamp my web presence. Too many people have told me that it’s difficult, even with most of my sites offering RSS, to keep track of me. One of the sites that’s going to end up really hit by this concern is Dead Bunny Educational, which is currently focused on math lessons, but I’d intended for it to eventually pick up my grammar and composition lessons, too.
I’m starting to think, though, that since I have this great, established, writing blog already, maybe I should just weave those into the fabric here at WritingNiche. I’m already debating moving the math lessons to EducaitonNIche, and everything would then be in one site.
What do you think? Would you be willing to go over to Dead Bunny, or would you prefer I weave those lessons in here next to my challenges and resources? (It really does seem like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?)
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:43 AM EDT
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When I was a middle school student, one of my teachers gave me the best piece of writing advice ever. He was preparing us for a test where he had many short-answer and essay questions, and he told the class to approach each question as if he, the person who would be grading it, knew absolutely nothing about the subject. It taught us to write down everything we knew about the subject.
Even if you know you’re presenting to an audience who knows more than you, you should follow this advice, too. Write as if you’re the expert and your audience knows nothing. It brings a thoroughness and an authority to your writing. (Despite the fact you’re writing as the expert, you should still use an appropriate voice. No one wants to read advice from an insufferable know-it-all.)
I frequently encourage my students to take this approach when they’re working on their essays. They balk, realizing it means a lot of work for them to figure out how to get what they know out of their head and onto the paper, but in the end it always produces a great, informative essay.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:22 AM EDT
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(Clever, huh?)
Apostrophes are that one little punctuation mark that everyone believes strongly that they know how to use, and yet most people get it very, very wrong.
More and more is being written to help make this little mark’s usage clear, but most of it can be boiled down to this:
- Apostrophes denote ownership, but never a word’s plural form.
- That girl’s ribbon
- Those girls’ dolls (Note that because the dolls don’t own anything, they have no apostrophe.)
Apostrophes show that letters have been taken out of a word or phrase, and where those letters have been taken from
- y’all (The contracted form of “you all”. The apostrophe notes the location of the displaced “ou”.)
- ten o’clock (”ten of the clock”. The apostrophe shows where “f the” was removed from.)
Everybody clear on that? Good.
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 8:12 AM EDT
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I was thumbing through a writing book last summer that had a worksheet on creating characters. Basically, it stated that you start with a character and give him a problem.
For example, Tadian has lost his two-dollar bill.
We now have a character with a motivation. Anything Tadian does will somehow be related to his attempts to find his missing bill. As we write scenes involving Tadian, we now have a frame for deciding how Tadian is going to move, react to situations and other characters, and what decisions he’s going to make. We weigh them all against his basic motivation.
Establishing a character can really be that simple at the beginning.
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 8:25 AM EDT
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I finally finished playing Hotel Dusk last weekend. For being hailed as an interactive novel, it was far too singular a story line. I’ve seen more interactive children’s CYOAs. But I’m not going to get on that soapbox at the moment, because something else about the game caught my attention.
A few summers ago, my mother handed me a Host-a-Murder-Mystery she’d bought from a local thrift shop. Since I wasn’t going to be playing in the game, she wanted me to go through, make sure all of the material was there, and create something to replace any material that was missing. Fortunately, all of the materials were there, but it was my first look at one of these games.
Host-a-Murder-Mystery games are inherently character driven. Everyone is assigned a character and given a booklet with information about that character, generally revealed round by round to the character’s player, who can then decide how much information to share with whom. Now what makes the situation truly interesting is that there are generally anywhere from eight to twelve characters in these games, each critical to the plot. If any player can’t make the game, the game is pretty well lost.
The reason for this is that these eight to twelve characters are interrelated, and at least one or two other characters will need that missing character to react to and build on. Think about your own contacts for the moment. Think about friends, coworkers, people you encounter through outside activities. Could you create a corresponding map of contacts like this? It makes you think, doesn’t it?
But think about all of these characters with seemingly unrelated goals coming together at the same place at the same time. It stretches credibility and becomes the realm of fiction. Hotel Dusk really suffered from this as the story unfolded. Ten different characters could be connected under nearly ten different story threads. By the time you hit the fourth unbelievable connection that holds four characters together, you start losing your suspension of disbelief.
In stories where the group is connected by being friends, classmates, or coworkers, you can get away with this. But outside of that, it’s hard to construct a believable coincidence of interrelated characters in large numbers.
It’s something to keep in mind in working on a couple of my character-driven projects.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:09 AM EDT
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Late last week as I was catching up on reading my aggregator, I found myself removing a blog I’d been waffling on for some time. What put me over the edge is that this writer (Nope, that’s seriously her profession.) went off on a LiveJournal user for scraping her blog to a LiveJournal and attributing it back to the writer. When everything shook out, it turned out that the LiveJournal user had created a syndication account at LiveJournal for the writer’s blog and was reading it through the feed. The way LiveJournal handles feed syndication is that the feed is given a public account. The feed’s page itself contains dates and headlines of posts, but when the feed shows up on the user’s Friends page, it shows as much of the feed as the originating blog syndicates out.
The writer was completely incensed that her blog was available in this public feed that anyone could read. As far as she is concerned, only the person who subscribes should be able to read the feed. All right, fine. That’s a valid complaint. She could just ask LiveJournal to remove the feed. They’re fairly good about that sort of thing. But she was screaming because people could learn about her blog from somewhere. That just flies in the face of the blog as conversational media, as a means of getting your ideas out there.
Needless to say, this self-proclaimed expert on blogging lost a lot of credibility.
It made me wonder why she even blogs at all, except that she feels she’s doing the web a great service. Of course, that then forced me to think about why I blog, or write at all for that matter.
The simple answer to that is: because I simply can’t stop myself. I’ve always written. I’ve only found one writing form I don’t enjoy writing, and that is poetry. (That’s not true. I’m not terribly wild about memoir or essay writing, either.)
I write fiction because I have fun weaving stories, experimenting with characters and situations. I write fan fiction for the exact same reason, except I want to explore putting established characters into unexpected situations. I write flash fiction and graphic novel scripts because I want to explore the challenge those art forms provide.
I write nonfiction because I’m a teacher at my core. I blog to record my own thoughts on things, or to record links. Occasionally, I even blog to make others aware of something. Other people find this information useful, so I’m glad to share it. I write how-to articles to help people when I can’t physically teach it to them, and now I share them online to make them available to a wider audience. I write statements of procedure or technical pieces for my work because I want my coworkers to have access to what I know, even if I’m at home with a major stomach flu.
I write to entertain, to share information. Sometimes, I write for myself, but if someone asks, I’ll share it with them. I write to reach out, to make new friends. For me, writing isn’t about the props. It’s about the resulting community, the chance to meet others who just can’t stop themselves from writing.
Why do you write?
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:13 AM EDT
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