Proverbs

So, I came up with this idea to sock writer's block right in the jaw, and I thought I'd share it with you.

• Step 1
• Figure out the location of your story. The country or land where that country currently resides or the country that most closely resembles the culture in your story will do.
• Step 2
• Look up proverbs from that country. World Proverbs is a great place to begin your search. Bonus: that site is just fascinating to leaf through.
• Step 3 
• Choose a proverb that sounds like something one of your characters would say. Or maybe choose a character that would normally never say something like your proverb and have them deliver that line. Zing!
• Step 4
• Write a scene that involves that proverb. When would your character say something like that proverb and to whom would they say it? Has something profound or silly or devastating or frightening or happy just occurred? What was that thing? Does that thing exist in your story already? Write about that event, too.
• Step 5
• Enjoy! You've just kicked the crap out of your writer's block. You now have a scene and maybe a new character or event! As Charlie Sheen would say, "duh, WINNING!"

May the 4th be with you!

A Wedding and a Funeral (Read: Lawful Assassination)

The lovely Moira McGann has completed the character concept for Bramar!

Ok, so I feel it is only right that I weigh in on these two important current events: The Royal Wedding and the death of Osama bin Laden.
Here's the thing, I don't want to give my personal opinion on these goings-on. While I do have strong opinions on both subjects, I feel I would be straying from the core principles of this blog to give you my take on either topic. Instead, I will discuss them as I think they pertain to writing. And yes, I think that both of them are valuable teaching tools.

1. The Wedding
   So, whenever the royals have a wedding, there's always a big to-do and the whole world gets to celebrate/hate on it. How great is that? We all get to stop obsessing about the natural disasters and wars and famines and death and destruction and decline of the world as we know it and tune in to a lovely morning of fairytale matrimonial bliss.
   I think of this as the perfect reminder that not every major event in my story has to be awful. I mean, I put my characters through a respectable regimen of hellish happenings. So much so that I often forget to have a wedding. Or a baby. Or a victory. Or a kit kat. Anything positive, really. It's good to be reminded that a little romance never hurt anyone, and while everyone has an opinion on it, we all have to admit that it was kind of a nice break.


2. The Funeral
   Killing off a bad guy is one of the most powerful events in a story. To America, at least in this century, Osama bin Laden was like the Boss in a Nintendo game. His death is considered a victory. Now, I've been saying this for a couple of days, and I'll say it now because I think it applies to the big baddie in my story:
Most people do not relish the idea of murder. The loss of human life, whether it is an infant or an old man or a mass murderer is as awful thing. We are all human, and we must treat human life as precious. However, when a person commits unspeakable acts, it is not an inhuman thing to want him or her dead. I think it is the evil most of us revel in vanquishing, not the human being.
   This applies to evil characters in my story. In my opinion, a good writer acquaints you with the villain, allows you to get to know them a little, to understand, perhaps, some of the reasons for their abhorrent actions. This may not be to garner sympathy for the evil-doer. I allow you to know a bit about my villains so that you can know that the evil within them is a true poison, that they can never be separated from it, that they feed on it, and that there is truly no other course of action than to permanently prevent them from ever causing harm again. You kill the evil, not the man. Otherwise you are no better than he.


I have another spin on this. Yes, my plot comes from major tides of good an evil sweeping over the world of my characters and the parts they play in standing against or moving with these tides. That does not mean that important events do not happen outside of my characters' reach. Sometimes, a major event, like a (spoiler!) rebellion occurs far away from my characters, leaving them virtually unaffected (except, perhaps, for having an opinion on them), until sometime in the future. Or not. Sometimes hugely important events happen without our being affected by them in any clearly discernible way. It's a small indication that the world is vast, and I think it enriches the story to include some carefully-thought out non-effectual events.

In other news, Thesaurus.com is the best thing ever.

Book Review of Plot and Structure

I have recently completed the book Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell, and I would like to share my thoughts on it with you. The book is part of a series titled Write Great Fiction.
When I decided to purchase some how-to books on novel-writing, I briefly perused my local Books-A-Million for a few books that grabbed my attention. This book is orange. When I hoisted a stack of books over to a chair and began leafing through them with, I admit, a little skepticism, this book immediately held my interest.
Mostly because it was orange. But also because Bell's tone was so witty and colloquial. It was as if he was sitting next to me, giving me some much needed advice on plot (and structure) as I started out on my adventure to write my novel.
I was actually unaware of how much of his advice I would end up needing, but I bought his book along with a few others, took them home, and began reading. Turns out I really needed his advice. He outlines tons of tricks to outfox my writer's block, and a whole slew of tips to bulk up my plot.
It was from him that I learned of the invaluable importance of cohesive subplots.
If you are an aspiring writer, buy this book. Buy other books too, and read often, but buy this one. He's funny and engaging and informative.
Do yourself a favor and trust me on this one. If you've never written a full-length novel before, then you don't even know how little you know. You need all the help you can get.

In other news, I am not feeling well. My cat, Tink (not the gross one) seems to know I'm sick. She won't leave me alone.

Rewriting Law

This song is by Sigur Rós, one of my all-time favorite bands. It is so beautiful it breaks my heart. If this is your first time hearing it, I suggest you put in your earphones, jack the volume up all the way, and let it just flow over you.

Moving on. I wrote a character death today. And as I was writing about this character's unhappy demise, a thought occurred to me about the nature of law in my books. Even though the civilization I have created is unique, it must still have law and order, right? I've even written about the laws, but I never really sparred a thought for them. I've always just assumed they were there and that people would just get it.

It is interesting that Valdevia, the empire in which my story takes place, is around two thousand years old. It has built on the civilizations that existed before it, and those built on others, and on and on, back until the Great Decline (a catastrophic event in my story). And all of these civilizations had laws. Or at least some ground rules.

Some laws tend to be basic to civilizations across our current world and reaching back into humanity's rich history:

• Don't kill people.
• Don't take what doesn't belong to you.
• Don't cheat. 
• Don't run around beating people up. 
• Don't thumb your nose at the Establishment.

Did I forget some? Yeah. I think you get the idea.

I believe I have taken these pretty basic laws for granted in my story. I've added some others, but those are pretty much the core.

So what happens when someone supported by the Establishment, also known as the people who make the laws, kills someone who the Establishment doesn't like? Is that cool? Are there any repercussions to that someone going around murdering other someones? It doesn't seem like that's a huge deal historically, as long as the stakes are high enough.

I'm sort of rambling now, but I have striven to learn a little (a very little) about the laws of ancient and modern civilizations across the world in order to write a more convincing set of laws for my own civilization. The major thing I've learned? People seem to need a lot of negative reinforcement to prevent them from doing bad things. I think that says something interesting about humanity. What do you think?

Also, check out my writer friend Dot Hutchison's blog. She does book reviews and has nifty insights on writing techniques. She even drops hints about her upcoming projects on her blog, which is super cool because she's a talented lady.

Character Archery

I'm going places. On a train.

So, yes, that's me.

I know it's been a few days since I posted. Sorry about that. I've been writing.

And while I was writing and reading my books about how to write, I kept coming back to this question of character arcs. The books I read on novel-writing have a lot to say about the character arc. Generally, it begins in the first paragraph of the first chapter and ends in the last paragraph of the last chapter.

I don't agree with that line of thinking. It is my belief that if your character is 20 years old at the beginning of the book and 23 by the end of it, then their character arc begins 20 years before the first paragraph and about 70 years after the last paragraph (assuming they survive your ending). The rather startling idea that a writer should just think of a character in terms of what they personally write about them is rather naive, in my opinion. I pose that such thinking is akin to believing that when a friend leaves your house they cease to exist until the next time you see them. Your friends do not, as I'm sure you know, merely pop in and out of being as you will it. Neither do the characters of your novel.

Instead, they go on living, independent of your pen. My ole paw (grandfather) used to say that you can never truly know another person. I believe that extends to the characters of my story as well. They surprise me all the time. The things they say and do can be outright staggering. They constantly impress me with their fortitude, their sense of humor, their evil and their good. And it is a constant lesson in patience to try and understand why they go about in the world behaving as they do.

This is my struggle: to know the secrets of my characters, to know the regrets of their past and the hopes for their futures, to understand them and love them for who they are. They are people, like us. They wish and laugh and grieve and hate like us, in all the myriad and wonderful ways that we mortals do. I would not have it any other way.

In conclusion, the character arc, or the change in a character over the course of a story, is not the change in them over the novel we write. Rather it is the character's growth in their own story, the human story. Keep this in mind as you write: you do not write a character, you write about them. A subtle truth, but a truth nonetheless.

Go to a Place...

From the Louvre at sunset.

Today I was reading a very interesting book on plot and structure (in the bathroom). In this book, it said a lot of things that I think most writers accept as the basic rules of writing. But it also had some great ideas for ways to come up with plot. There was one suggestion (there were twenty or something), that read "go to a place and drink it in."
I, however, misread it as "go to a place and drink in it."
That makes much more sense to me that some quixotic nonsense like "drink it in". What does that even mean? Anyway, I think my accidental misreading was really my subconscious trying to give me some more digestible advice. I take it to mean something like, "go somewhere -- anywhere -- and just hang out. Grab a drink. Get into trouble. Do something real there, instead of site-seeing." That's the kind of thing people want to read about. And I think that's the kind of thing people want to write as well. 

Don't keep life at arm's length. Hold history in your hands. Sucker punch convention. Get drunk. Get lost.
Truth will find you.

Initial Thoughts

I am not a writer. I am not a poet or anything either. So, for now, I'll be a blogger.

The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing encourages its readers to create a blog. I bought this book, among others, as is my custom, in order to enhance my understanding of this business of writing books. Buying books on my obsession du jour has been a long-time habit of mine. Whenever I decide I'm going to learn about something or do something, I buy a few books on it. This happened to me when I undertook to understand the nature of symbolism. Suddenly, a dozen symbol dictionaries appeared in the clutter of my bookshelves, and my passion of symbolism took a back seat to my passion for buy reference books on symbolism. I booked tickets to Paris, and my fingers itched to buy travel books. I co-founded an acting troupe, and tons of tomes on Shakespeare found their way into my home.

Obsession begets obsession.

So, now I am writing a blog because my book on novel-writing told me to. It's good advice. And I'm not doing much with the time I set aside to write at the moment, because I am giving myself some breathing room from the freshly finished outline of my novel (another helpful suggestion from the novel-writing book). Apparently, this will give me some perspective on the plot and character decisions my past self thought were good, and not only allow me to see that everything I'd written thus far was utter nonsense but also give me the wisdom to improve the drivel I had thought was the trappings of a worthy piece of fiction not two days ago. Sounds good.

I am, as I have said, not a writer. But, I am writing a book. A series actually. It's been coming on slowly, and now it refuses to leave me alone. This is my retaliation. I will vent my frustrations here, and maybe that'll teach my book a lesson about bullying. I hope so.