Changing your perceptions

I had initially began the first of a long series of books with a male main character. While listening to a writing podcast (I believe it was writing excuses), they talked about switching the sex of your main character in order to alter how you see them and to refine the core of the story.

When I did this, it completely eliminated my writers block. I have since entirely switched that main character to a female, and it has unlocked the story for me nearly entirely.

So now everytime my story starts to lag I look at how I can alter it in a fundamental way, which will so thoroughly change the way I see the story. In order to hopefully unlock the next scene which seems to allude me.

 

Pieces to the puzzle

I have had in mind a slightly different time keeping system based off the sun for my largest project. For some reason I couldn’t see the solution, so I reached out for help from a facebook group I’m in, and the help I got was exactly the piece of the puzzle I had been looking for. Although after I began to play around with using it, something seemed off to me, though I couldn’t place it. My brother in law came over one day to pick up my nieces which were visiting, and I talked to him about it, as I do due to him being interested in this type of stuff and the genre as a whole. He came up with an idea for writing the system I already had, and that’s when the last piece I needed clicked for me.

What that last piece did, was amazing to me. Suddenly things I had been struggling over for months clicked into place, old and new ideas began flowing like crazy, my drive was instantly back. All because of one little idea about a time keeping system. What i realized then, was as my story grew, I had built ideas onto ideas. The time keeping system was one of the first, and my own mental organization set priorities for things to figure out based off chronological fabrication.

I haven’t known this long enough to figure out if I can bypass this priority system that’s been automatically established, but if I figure something out, I’ll make another post about it. Although, it may just possibly be my way of working through such things and I have to adapt my system to it. Time will tell.

 

World Building vs. Writing

Being new to writing, I’m still learning how to write a full complete structured story, versus snippets of awesome ideas that pop into my head. Trying to find the balance of world building, outlining, creative writing, can be hard. I don’t want to paint myself into a mental corner world building so much so that I can’t creative write when I need to. I thought I had done a lot of world building, so I made myself stop and focus on writing to make sure I didn’t paint myself into that corner.

After trying to write for about a month, with no success, I sat back and went over my recent experiences. What I saw blocking my creative flow was a lack of substance. This confused me at first, so I began looking much more closely at why there was this lack of substance in my minds eye when I had done all the previous world building. That’s when the scope of my story really struck me.

It is going to be an expansive scifi. Epic isn’t really the right word I don’t think, as it doesn’t match the markers which constitute an epic. At least it might not, and there it hit me. I don’t know…all I know is it’s really big, with numerous rich cultures which play off each other in a massive balance.

I couldn’t write the story because I still didn’t know enough about where it takes place. Even though I had what I thought was a lot, there were far too many holes which let the creative mist escape my minds eye. Basically it wasn’t a lot of world building for the scope of the story. So now I’m back at it, making timelines, maps, filling out my wiki, figuring out how the different tech levels effect the cultures the various characters grow up in. How some types of jobs move characters from one culture to the next and how that effects those individuals and the friends they’ve made over the years.

So my lack of knowledge of my world kept my imagination from coalescing into the story I wanted to write. I will still keep an eye on myself to prevent world builders disease, but I’m going to be much less likely to force myself to stop building. I think once I get enough world built I will have so much story that I have to write it. As I am adding more things to my wiki, filling out histories of key organizations, my imagination is going “Oh cool!” and making tiny stories of snippets of time. It’s not enough for me to write, what it is doing is filling those holes where my creative mists were leaking. Once they stop leaking, I’ll start writing.

 

Pricing your work

I have been listening to a lot of podcasts about the detriment of pricing your books too low. While that makes a huge amount of sense, and I can’t argue with any of it, in fact I agree with all the reasons they give, I have one that trumps it. At least it does for me. The reason is, I grew up poor, with a ravenous appetite for books. So basically I starved my mind. In fact, I got so used to starving it, when I grew up and made plenty of money, I still didn’t buy books because I had already trained myself to not want them. When you want to read as badly as I did, yet can’t, it creates a “keep away from me” attitude. Much like I have now for cigarettes. That’s right, I felt the same way for books as a child as I do for cigarettes now. Doesn’t that sound right to anyone? If it does…you have issues.

Now, the way I feel about books is a mixture of joy and resentment. I will find a great book, and realize the rest of the series is $9.99 per book. Or I will read a great story and realize the rest of the series is $5.99 for the entire series. Writers can now make a good living off of cheaper priced books. I for one will never price my books $9.99 for an e-book. I want the cash strapped people to be able to enjoy my work too. But most importantly, I want young readers to be able to read as much as they want, to not be limited to a book every birthday or christmas.

The E-book market is a change, something that will uproot the known practices and alter the thought processes of consumers. But that will never happen if prices stay the same. E-books are a wonderful new tool, why not use it? Instead what I’m seeing quite often is the publishers from before e-books are trying to maintain the status quo. They are trying to price the e-books the same as the print books even though an e-book is much much cheaper.

I have seen Baen books putting up free e-books from some of their high selling authors, so they are learning and good for them. But the subsequent books are still the same as the print books. Many self publishers have free sales, or even perma-free books to get people reading their stuff. It’s called a funnel.

So for all you new authors out there, let’s change something for the better. Take a lesson from those high selling self publishers and price your books between the status quo and cheap. Remember those what-if kids out there who want nothing more than to get lost in your stories.

 

Prologues & Epilogues

So, what people normally do with prologues and epilogues is add depth to a story that just doesn’t seem to fit in the main story. It could be a brief excerpt of thousands of years of history to explain why things are the way they are. It could be a “they lived happily ever after” like they did in the harry potter movies. Recently I was listening to a podcast where an author was talking about putting chapter excerpts from the next book at the end of his books. That got my mind to thinking, what if.

What if, instead of sprinkling explanations throughout a new book of things that happened in a previous book or books, you just had excerpts as a prologue? What if, instead of a cliff hanger (which I hate, usually) you make the reader want more by giving them a taste of what’s to come?

So basically, the prologue catches the reader up. This can be good for new readers who are just coming into the universe, or for loyal readers who might have had to wait a long time for a sequel, and instead of needed to read the previous book all over again, they can just read the prologue and all the memories of the previous book(s) come flooding back, along with the drive to learn “what happens next!” which is built in momentum ready to go.

Sometimes I really enjoy reading the previous books in a series, like Ender’s Game. Then again, after about 7 books, you start to just read the new book and struggle to recall everything relevant. That’s why I can see the reasons for shout-outs sprinkled throughout the new books in a series, even though they bug me. A second benefit that just occurred to me is that a reader might not know about a certain book that leads up to the one they are reading. A good for instance is the books in the Liaden Universe. Often times there are short stories, or whole other series that tie in and a new reader will not know what order to read them in. As a matter of fact, the writers have made a Correct Reading Order list just so readers know to go find these other books before they dive into a series that will leave them confused in a few spots.

Now Sharon Lee and Steve Miller don’t do the shout-outs, or if they do they are so clever or talented that I haven’t noticed them. In fact reading their books has made me think about my own universe and how I can remedy issues in my own universe that  I come across as a reader of theirs. I also hope I can make stories half as interesting as theirs are.

What if, I made these book ends not only explanatory and enticing, but hyperlinked? In the prologue, you’d have “Excerpts from ____” with the name of the book hyperlinked to a buy page. That way a new reader could stop there and go pick up the previous book if they wanted, or read the excerpt and hope it explained enough, and read on. The epilogue being a chapter excerpt also having a hyperlink would allow the reader to go then and get the new book, if they were so inclined, or a link to my web site (when I get one) so they can watch for a release date.

I’m really excited about this idea, and think it could solve many issues I have come across while reading series or universes. What are your thoughts?

 

 

 

The sequel shout-out

Over the years I’ve read quite a few sequels. Mostly in series but sometimes just in the same “universe”. One thing that bugs be and has gotten bad enough that I had to put the book aside and take a break so I wouldn’t tear it in half, is the “shout-out” to events that happened in a previous book. 99% of the time I have seen this done, is the “explaining to a third-party” type. Everyone has done this, you will be telling someone a story and realize that they weren’t privy to certain information that may make what you are saying cogent. So you stop your description or story, and back fill. When should this be done and when shouldn’t it?

I’ve talked with many people about this and most don’t have the problem I have, but then they weren’t closet writers either 😉 The ones it did bother, basically considered it “the way it is” like the sun being the center of the system, and let it go. I can’t do that. Something being “the way it is, and wrong, I try to find a way to change it. Now my major issue in advocating change in this case, is many people don’t have a problem with it, they never noticed it until I said something. Some people will later call me everything but human for pointing it out cause now it annoys them too. Another convert MWAhahahaha!

Anyhoo. My idea, and feel free to use this, is to use prologues and epilogues as a catch-up and sneak peek. Basically, I want the books I will be writing in my “Mongers Universe” to be semi stand-alones. There will be character arcs over multiple books, main character back stories, side stories that eventually tie into the main thread. Secondary characters that will have spinoffs, and that’s just the ideas I have now. No telling what else I’ll get when I write all those stories, or what stories others will want to write in the universe.

I’ll let your brain stew on that for a bit. Look for the sequel to this post titled, “Prologues & Epilogues”, see what I did there?

 

Just do it!

Getting the hang of writing is a process. You basically have to teach yourself to sideline mistakes, and trust yourself to catch them later. This has been an extremely difficult thing to teach myself. I am finally getting the hang of it though, the training wheels at least.

A couple of good saying for writers of any stage, but especially new writers are, “Give yourself permission to fail”, and “Perfect is the enemy of done”. This post is talking about those two things in particular. Do you want to write a bad and/or incomplete book? Neither do I, nor does any writer worth their fingers. But part of learning to become a writer is tempering your work ethic in specific ways so that you can actually get the work done instead of hamstringing yourself with continual revision.

My current exercise is “Make a note, move on, keep going”. Here’s what happens. I sit down to write, start building the scene in my head, and words start flowing. As I write these scenes down, the story starts to flow. From time to time, the flow gets caught by a huge boulder of confusion. This boulder can be any number of things, a name I haven’t thought of, a side character or main character that I hadn’t considered needed to know a certain thing, an environment that wasn’t built as detailed as I need, a character decided to take a turn down an alley, corridor, etc. that I had not expected, a new character is suddenly needed and I never developed them.

When I first began writing, I would sit and think and brain storm on the spot, until I had figured out what I needed at that particular spot I got stuck at, often times ending up mentally writing the book and going off into tangents which weren’t needed. But what I soon realized was, I was trying to move the boulder out of the river, instead of following the current around it. Anyone who’s ever been canoeing or white water rafting knows what a fool hardy venture fighting the current can become.

This current exercise of making a note and moving on, is the equivalent of dodging a rock, submerged tree, heavy rapid, etc. It’s an obstacle which hampers the flow of the writing. When that flow is broken, the reader’s flow is also broken. But more importantly, it can stop the momentum you’ve built up. That momentum can be essential to finishing what you started. So to keep that story pouring out, recognize, and dodge those obstacles that come your way.

 

breaking promises and keeping them

Sometimes a promise shouldn’t be kept, and sometimes it must be kept. The same is true when making promises in your writing to your readers. An example from my work which spawned this lesson is what I will be using this time. I had written in the beginning of a story a suspenseful situation which I abandoned by chapter 2. I did this on purpose, the original situation was intended to set the scene which the entire series would flesh out.

The problem came when my beta reader took a gander. She was so upset that I didn’t finish telling the story, that I realized I had failed not only in my transition, which she also didn’t grasp, but also in a promise I unknowingly made to my future readers. Sometimes a promise knowingly made to be broken works well as a sudden plot twist. But there is also the trap to watch for, of making a promise and then forgetting about it.

What I mean with a promise can be many things. A mystery writer has the inherent promise that the bad guy will eventually get caught. The romance author has the inherent promise that the two lovers will find each other and be happy. A science fiction writer has the inherent promise to have science. There are many promises which I will not get into, but which a writer needs to understand when they write for a particular genre especially, but also for their individual story. In my particular case, I discovered a great addition for my future stories in that particular series and learned a valuable lesson.

In closing, be sure that beta readers you use include those who regularly read the genre you are writing in, and make sure the promises you make are kept or broken appropriately.

 

Letting a rough draft “age”

OK, so you’ve finished your rough draft… now what? Send it to the editor, beta readers, alpha readers? How about leave it alone? I figured this out accidentally by being a bit ADD and jumping around from one story to the next. I’ve blogged about that before, and I’ll blog about it again soon as I’ve learned more, but for now I’m going to talk about forgetting about a story.

When I am in the midst of writing, I’m seeing multiple angles of a story at the same time. This is important for creating, but it can also be a bad thing. It’s one of the main reasons for beta readers and editors. No writer can see all the mistakes they made, no matter how vigilant they are. Part of the reason for this is the writer sees more of the story than what they write. something can seem fully explained when it isn’t at all. The more someone writes the less they do this, but it still happens.

When you let your story rest, and subsequently forget about it, when you go back to it, it’s like you are reading it for the first time. At least at first. When I did this some stories I was surprised at how good they were, as I thought they weren’t that great. Others I thought were good enough, weren’t at all. One story I was confused at, and having written it, with the full idea in my mind, that was unacceptable.

Another I thought explained itself well enough, but when a beta reader went over it, it greatly confused them. There was also a “promise” I had made in the beginning of the story that I intended to leave unfulfilled, but doing so would have upset my readers as the promise wasn’t one that was acceptable to leave hanging. That’s another blog in itself which I will post later.

So in closing, give the editor and beta readers a break, and let your rough draft rest before you send it off. Also, consider this… if an editor charges per hour (which isn’t a normal rate, but I’ve seen it) then having so many corrections which could have been caught by yourself will jack up the cost the editor will charge. Consider again, if the editor charges by the word count, having so many corrections can increase the time they will take, and might even cause your manuscript to be rejected because too many corrections were needed.

 

Separating dialog with narration

I understand the need to set a scene and describe actions well enough for the dialog written to have the proper context. What I do not understand, or agree with, is separating a sentence with narration. Let me give you an example. “I do not think,” He began considering the proper weight he wanted his words to have. “that would be a good idea.”

These separations throw speed bumps into the flow of the words. Not only that, if you throw a long narration in between a sentence, then the end of the sentence can not make sense at all, resulting in the reader going back to the beginning of the paragraph in order to get caught up, then needing to find their place again in order to continue reading.

This narration can be added before or after the dialog, or in between topics in a larger conversation. If a writer is trying to “catch up” their reader, then they have made a mistake previously in their story. If you are writing and suddenly your story goes in a place you hadn’t intended, but is perfect for the story itself, and that creates a vacuum where you need to catch your readers up, go back and add something into what you have already written that will keep the flow of your story steady and well paced. If you can’t add this new bit in, or it’s too long, write a short story and send it out to your mailing list as free bonus content, or publish it on its own.

A writer often times wants to draw their reader into the head space of a character, for good or ill. They want to make sure the reader knows what’s going on in the characters mind as the dialog unfolds. This can be superfluous or essential to a story. A writer might not know which until the editing happens as they’d re in their “creative mind” while writing and will just throw words on the page to get them out of their heads.

This is also why I “let it age”, in regards to my story, before I edit it. This allows my mind to forget about that story and get distracted by another. I’ll blog about that later.

In closing, always think about flow when you are editing. If needs be, read aloud to the extent that you are attempting an audiobook. Does your speech catch? Then so does the readers mind. The smoother flowing a story is the easier a reader slips into the world and the stronger it grips it’s readers. It can be the difference between a “That was a good book” and “Where’s the next book?!”.

 

Knowing when a side quest needs it’s own book.

A side quest is usually a smaller but still important quest that the protagonist needs to accomplish before they can face their greatest challenge. A great example of this is Luke Skywalker going to Dagobah to seek out Yoda. Luke had no idea why he was going, or what he would find, but he was driven to go. While the training Luke received was crucial to his character progression, it wasn’t the main goal of the series, to stop the Empire. Another side quest is rescuing Han from Jabba’s Palace. Without Han they may have never destroyed the shield generator, and the Empire would still dominate the galaxy. Those side quests are essential to achieving the overall goal of the series.

Side quests are essential to storytelling, even if they are very small. But sometimes a side quest is so important, or so interesting, that it demands its own storyline. Lately this has become much more acceptable and even welcomed. Origin stories for favorite characters, spinoffs for beloved side characters, just consider a Yoda origin story. Sometimes a side quest happens outside the storytelling. Past events that lead up to the action the reader is suddenly thrown into. What if we never knew what Gandolf did when he left the dwarven party? Sometimes these need to be told, and sometimes the sudden appearance of the result is best, like the sudden appearance of the dwarven kin to aid in the fight against the dark horde. Could the gathering of that reinforcement army be its own book? Absolutely. Would it have made the Hobbit better? Absolutely not. That sudden appearance brought sudden hope, which was essential in the emotional roller coaster of that part of the book.

While doing my experiment of short stories for character backgrounds, I realized that their pasts were so interesting they were begging for their own books. At first I dismissed the idea thinking that my imagination was just wanting to play and I shouldn’t allow it to run away with itself. But the more i thought about it, the more I saw these character driven quests from vastly different perspectives which lead into the books I was wanting to write. Basically my imagination made its argument and it found validation.

These stories erupted from a natural fleshing out of the idea I find so engaging for the story. Why did this happen, how did these characters get here and why, etc. What I discovered when I began outlining these stories, is that filling in these gaps in the story has explained and filled in parts of the original. Also, once I allowed myself to let go of a specific structure or trilogy, quartet, series, etc. and just tell the stories, I found the ideas started to flow once again as if I had burst a dam. I was stifling my creativity in attempting to contain it in some preconceived structure to which it didn’t belong.

So in closing, find that balance between a flowing imagination, and a structured story. Don’t assume a story has to be any certain way, let it find itself. This can be done in the outlining, world building, character development, or writing itself for those pure pantsers out there.

 

Creating tension, not just drama, or action

Tension exists in everyday things, it varies in degrees from tiny brushes we barely notice, or not at all, to life altering almost soul crushing tension that tests the health of our hearts and bowels.

Since beginning to write, my critics eye pops out far more often, though it did a lot before. But what my critics eye notices now are good and bad aspects to how the story is put together. When before it just judged the story based on my likes or dislikes.

What I have noticed is the trend to add ridiculous drama elements into a story in an attempt to ratchet the tension. The result is drawing in drama audiences that could care less about the characters and only want to see the suffering or explosions. We have action and drama genres, and subcategories for genres for this very reason. When I read a story I tend to stay away from the drama tags, but I might read a story with an action tag. But that story cannot be senseless action, I need gripping story.

So what is gripping story? For me gripping story is depth of character. Two great examples of this are Fledgling, by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller, and Wool by Hugh Howey. Both are free on amazon. Neither are overloaded with action, but both will keep you reading. They are very different books, evoking vastly different emotions and thoughts, but they are both two of my favorites. Neither have what I would consider drama, but both have great tension.

Who the characters are, makes you empathize with them. What they go through makes you want them to succeed. The pacing and description are such that you are hardly ever kicked out of the story. The tension of the story is the gravity well you are caught in. Constantly falling so you must finish the book. Drama and action are, to me, popcorn stories. Quick things you can throw away after you are done, that don’t really stick with you. But good tension holds you in orbit of the characters and their world such that when you leave the story, they stay with you. You think about them long after you have finished reading their story, you tell your friends about them hoping they will be drawn into the orbit of this wondrous world you have discovered. As you can imagine, this type of thing sells a lot of books. Want to know how big of an impact it has? Type wool into google, for me it was the top three results. That could be googles algorithms, but I also know its mainly the book’s success. When your story surpasses it’s namesake, you are successful.

So, how do you replicate this in your books? In short and simple terms, explore the everyday. What do you worry about? What creates tension in your life? Paying the bills is boring? What about if you were paying the bills on a space station…to a pirate king? You can take the mundane and make it interesting by simply changing the setting. Case in point, in Fledgling, The main character is clumsy, now that might only appeal to a certain group of people normally, but what about when the government considers clumsiness a public health hazard? Then the tension raises from embarrassing and slightly dangerous, to possibly being locked away for your entire life.

Or what if going outside was so dangerous, that anyone who says they want to go outside is considered insane? That exploration of the everyday turned on its head is an aspect of wool. But these can’t be all a story is about. In fledgling and wool both, there are secrets of their worlds that we are allowed to know, so our imaginations grab ahold of these and want to explore, causing us to read more of the story. Wool and Fledgling both have sequels which reveal some of those secrets, but with Fledgling, some of those secrets are in other books set in the overarching universe. But in both there are also secrets that we never know, they aren’t essential to the story, they are just curiosities, but it leaves a mystery hanging in the back of your mind somewhere, and that makes the story feel more real. Now you don’t want to leave a big mystery hanging, that would be akin to a mystery writer never telling whodunit. The reader will revolt against that and hate the story.

So, in closing, think in terms of tension, instead of drama or suffering for your characters. Tension comes in many shapes and sizes, find the one that fits into your story.

 

Personal Wikis

I first heard about personal wikis on the SPP. Granted this isn’t a new idea, nor is the program Sean spoke about using, but it was new to me. The guys on SPP were talking about a program called wikidpad which I subsequently downloaded and started trying to use. I will be honest, I sabotaged myself with this program at first. I thought it was HTML heavy and because of that initial misconception, I mentally blocked myself. So I downloaded two other applications for my mac, scribbleton & voodoopad. Both seemed to be great wiki programs, and I tried both thoroughly.

Voodoopad is only a trial, and at 15 links you don’t really get a good idea of what the full program will be like, so I passed on it.

Scribbleton was free all the way and was a great wiki, easy to use and as far as I could tell unlimited. The problem with scribbleton for me was the lack of allowing multiple wikis (more in a minute) and suddenly deleting my entire wiki.

Now… there were glitches with scribbleton when I used it, which could be it’s interaction with my OSX 10.6.8. Any time I tried to start a new wiki for a different book, it froze entirely, requiring me to restart my macbook pro in order to open it again. Now the sickening part. One day I woke up, started up my laptop, opened scribbleton and my wiki was gone. There were no traces of any of the wiki files. I restarted and they were still gone. So that was the end of my experience with scribbleton.

After a few days to eliminate my depression over weeks of work gone, I decided to give wikidpad a chance again even if I had to learn HTML. Opening it again I went back into the ‘getting started’ files, and suddenly realized how foolish I had been. There was no need to write in HTML, all your data is stored in plain text.

So I started building my little corner of the galaxy which my universe sits in. It was all downhill from there.Hours and hours of typing and I had rebuilt what I had lost in scribbleton and doubled the information in my wiki.

Now…the reason for a wiki is to keep your thoughts in order. Just like a fan wiki, a personal wiki allows for any information you deem important in your universe at your fingertips. Whether it makes it into the book you are currently writing or one you will write in the future, or never makes it into a book but helps you build the scenes in your mind, it’s easily accessible.

I was working on outlining my book and I could not for the life of me picture a scene where I wanted my story to go. Once I started building my wiki, that changed. Linking aspects of my universe together to make a whole picture helped immensely to construct scenes. Suddenly entire subcultures I had never envisioned sprouted into existence. I may never use them more than window dressing on a scene, but knowing the culture allowed my mind to make connections it couldn’t before.

I guess you could view it as the universe’s character. I didn’t have the universe’s character profile filled out extensively enough yet. Building a wiki allowed me to do that. It also showed me reasons why certain characters were doing things I pictured them doing. I’m not even writing yet, and the characters already have a mind of their own. So in closing thank you Jason Horman for making wikidpad open source and free for everyone, including us struggling writers.

 

Character short stories & character profiles

My last post I mentioned an experiment involving character short stories as a means to better understand the characters. While the characters I selected had far too interesting lives to make just one story, I have come to discover that this idea isn’t limited to myself alone.

About two months after I had the idea to make these short stories, I heard on an episode of writing excuses, I believe it was Brandon Sanderson,  that did this often. Wrote short stories of the main character’s life to better understand the character. If I recall correctly, he said that many times these stories were never even published.

So… while my experiment didn’t lead anywhere for me at this time, I did find positive results from a well established author. What my experiment did find was the expanse of the universe I had in my mind. The back story of my main character worked very well as a world building story in a section of the universe I am creating entirely separate from where I had intended in the novel i was working on.

The area where the back story was set will be referred to in many occasions in the original novel, and in doing so I saw the benefit of increasing the understanding of the universe as a whole. So I came to another decision… how to fit these new stories into the series that I had originally intended. I couldn’t do it.

I considered using the back story I was developing in my mind as flashbacks throughout the series, but they would have been too numerous and would have detracted from the flow of the original story. So then I considered a stand alone novel for each character’s backstory, and then it hit me. Make every book a stand alone novel in the wider universe.

This idea wasn’t my own, I was reading Fledgling for the first time in many many years and since I enjoyed it as a much older person and the author’s writing was excellent, I decided to look them up. I also noticed on my copy an mention of book X in the Liaden Universe. That set my curiosity going and I needed to learn what they meant by ‘Universe’. I imagined it was the collection the book was in, by was this a series, or series of series? In fact it was something else entirely.

What it was, was something that would lead to my understand my own ideas better. The Liaden Universe is a collection of books. Some stand alone, some series, all connected in some way, obscure or obvious, and all in one “universe” of the author’s making. This realization that I was “allowed” to do such a thing, that many “rules” in writing are not set in stone and the only barrier to changing any set rule is success. If it works…use it.

For Lee and Miller, it works very well. Once the allowance was made in my mind, the barriers I had set in my own imagination fell away, resulting in so many ideas for novels that it has taken me months to get them all down and in a semblance of order.

Now that I have that all out of my conscious mind I can focus once again on the characters that began the wonderful quest of mine. While the original idea that started this whole thing is going to be put on the back burner for awhile, the backstory turned stand alone novel, set in my Mongers Universe, has become the focus of my time. Even the other backstory I was planning to make a short story out of originally is on the back burner and as of now is still only in the idea stage.

So in closing, don’t be afraid to experiment, or let the story lead you to the place it needs to go. Also beware of the walls you put on your imagination.

 

Experiments pt 2

I have been intently focusing on learning what I am doing wrong and how to fix it. One thing that I have been having extreme trouble sometimes is characters, and how they all fit together.

So what I have decided to do is to take each character and write a short story about their main motivation. When you write characters, you need to know who they are so you can know how they react to the world you put them in.

I’ve got these characters in my head and I see so much of them and the world that I sometimes get lost. What these short stories will do, is put in black and white what is currently fluid in my mind. Not just allowing my mind to relax its hold on them, but also to make them more concrete to keep me from changing them constantly.

I’m aiming for these to only be a few thousand words, two or three is my goal, but that might change. This exercise will also be purely discovery writing, no outlining other than what I have already done in my head. I’ll post again with the results.

 

Coming back/ Character profiles

I would like to start this post by apologizing to all my readers. Life reared it’s sometimes ugly head, and I had to set priorities. Unfortunately for this blog writing in many forms took a back seat.

Besides me stopping smoking, my grandmother died, my sister discovered she had  a serious heart condition, and both of my vehicles started breaking down.

But I got my Macbook Pro fixed so life is livable again. It never ceases to amaze me how the smallest thing can bring so much joy as to counter so many bad things.

I would also like to send a mysterious shout out to some good friends who have been so understanding regarding my drastically lessened contact. You all are great,  true friends, you know who you are.

Now to the main topic… Character Profiles!

I’ve mentioned this before, and said I would explore this a bit, but honestly I haven’t written enough to really need a detailed profile of even a main character, I can still keep track of it in my head.

I actually have multiple stories that I am keeping track of in my head which also brings me back to the need for character sheets.

Mental fatigue is a real hazard to the creative process. Character profiles can allow your mind to take a break. They can be as simple or as in depth as you like. The forums for NaNoWriMo have a great example of a very in-depth character profile.

I tend to have an idea for a character but not a solid profile until I start building the story. So what I have begun doing is to fill out the profile as I go, if I make a change while writing the outline or rough draft, I change the profile. That way when I am writing at any later time, I have all the main points in a simple sheet.

I personally use A Novel Idea on my Ipad, but it is not extremely extensive, so eventually my character will outgrow the app.

One big issue I have been working on in creating a profile is subtleties. There are aspects to a character that I want, but I’m undecided on how the character became that way.

Part of being a writer is knowing people. How any number of happenstances can result in the exact same issue down the road. Or how the exact same happenstance can result in entirely different results, because who they happened to are so very different.

The problem with knowing people extremely well is deciding on one direction, hence why fill out the character sheet as I go.

That’s all I have time for today. Next week I will give my thoughts on turning ideas into short stories, or letting them brew into something much bigger.

 

Paragraph length

I’m currently reading a book, I don’t want to share the name as I don’t want to seem to be talking bad about it. First off I am really enjoying the story itself, I think the writing is well done, but I’m having trouble creating a flow in my mind.

I’ve been analyzing everything I could think of to try and find something wrong with the writing itself. I honestly couldn’t, which perplexed me, the only thing I found that didn’t resonate well with me was the book beginning with an action sequence. Unknown characters, facing possible death, just had a hard time getting into the action, because I didn’t know the characters. The writer made up for that though, as the story so far is evolving really well, and I’m getting really interested in it. But I’m still having trouble staying hooked.

Then it hit me. The paragraphs are too long for me, I’m losing my place in the middle of the block of words. Seems like around 6-8 lines is my max, 4-6 is a good pace generally. Which got me thinking, are others this way? What’s feels like a good paragraph length to you?

 

Stimulants and Depressants

I have been smoking for the last 11 years, give or take a few months. I have recently quit smoking, and have been struggling with the effects. I’m not having withdrawals as most people have, I’m dealing with a hyperactive mind.

The reason I quit smoking was (beyond normal health reasons) because I needed more mental processing to build more thorough environments in my imagination. The reason I started smoking in the first place was to calm my mind down. Quiet and slow things down.

There is a cliche about alcoholic writers, drug addicted artists, vices are prominent cliches for artistic types. I’m assuming they are cliches for a reason, maybe many others have issues similar to mine.

The main serious issue with vices is that creativity suffers, even if it is seemed to be helped by some drug of one sort or another.

The trick is to learn to adapt or change your environment. A crutch is only needed if something is damaged. If you need a stimulant, depressant, hallucinogen, whatever, to produce your art, you aren’t an artist. If something can bring you a better artistic ability, then you can get there on your own, you just have to find a way.

 

Show & Tell

Last week I wrote about experiments, one aspect of that experiment has shown to be a detriment to writing well. It may just be that my imagination is too restricted at the moment. Which was the entire purpose of that experiment, to get my imagination back to flowing more freely.

When writing well, you can describe in intricate detail at times the environment your characters are in. In some situations, that is the perfect aspect to add into a story. It can show a characters state of mind, explain backstory with minimal words, introduce plot threads that linger in the readers imagination begging for an answer.

As I’ve been writing this book purely off imagination, I’m realizing that I’m not showing the reader enough. I’m telling what’s going on without eluding to it.

This coming week, I will be adjusting my experiment to incorporate more showing in my writing. I’m assuming, at least at first, writing will take much longer. I’m going to run a line of dashes to separate the two methods in the experiment, like so.
———————————————————————————————————————-

This will allow me to easily find the beginning of the change and prior to it. This has also given me ideas about a different way to outline. Basically using Pantsing and telling to get the basics down for the entire book. Then when I go to write it, the entire story will have already been seeded into my imagination and growing while I work on other projects.

The importance for seeding is my own, but possibly will help others. My brain tends to work on multiple things at the same time. When I was younger this was an issue, and some thought I had ADHD. It’s possible I do, I just consider it built in multitasking. A trait that is very useful, but also has its own difficulties that I have had to adapt to over the years.

So… What seeding does is give my brain multiple tasks to work on at the same time, just in my subconscious. In adapting to this multitasking aspect, I have learned to set multiple tasks to work on, while also training my mind to focus strongly. The focusing was much more difficult without the multiple tasks in play.

How did I learn to do this you might be asking? I watched mothers, they’ve been doing it for generations, possibly since the beginning. So if you have ADHD, ask your mother for advice.

 

Experiments

This week I’ve been conducting an experiment. I find that I learn more when I explore avenues that aren’t strictly needed, but are part of, or related to the task at hand. I have blogged before about overcoming writers block by outlining and building the story scenes in my mind. Those were both experiments that proved to be greatly beneficial.

One experiment that didn’t prove beneficial was to focus on just one book. I have written one book of a serial focusing on just that one, and it worked. So I decided to do the same on another book. It on the other hand I couldn’t write, I wasn’t ready to. I needed much more research and studying to write it properly.

In trying to stick with that one book no matter what I wasted a lot of time. Time I could have spent writing a different book. The reason I couldn’t write that book without more research is that I couldn’t build the story in my head without figuring out certain things. I saw that early on, but I tried pushing through and ended up wasting time.

Every writer is different and will have different ways they write well. So I experiment to find the best ways for me. I listen and read what other writers do, and test each way for how it works for me.

Right now I am doing an experiment where I’m totally Pantsing what I write. I’m trying to improve the speed and thoroughness of my imagination. I also want to see if I can write a complex story without outlining. To see how many plot holes, fraying threads, character inaccuracies, etc. that I end up with.

My reason for doing this is two fold. To exercise my imagination, and to see if I’m restraining my imagination with too much plotting. I have already found that I need some plotting, so I’m working out a balance.

I’m not expecting to write one or a few books and strike it rich. I expect to make writing a career, even if I end up striking rich. I love writing more than just about anything, and I hope to be making stories for a long time. So I’m continually looking to improve so my career will always produce better and better product.