Chapter Titles

Wow... so I found this saved as a draft from almost a year ago.  I decided I'll finish it and post it now; hopefully it still makes sense.

Happy End of the World, everyone!

I always seem to have a lot of trouble coming up with chapter titles.  I've heard that you're supposed* to title books after you finish writing them and I know a lot of people have trouble with this -  but to be honest, I have a much harder time titling the individual chapters.

I feel like the chapter titles should all sort of fit together, or have a theme or something.  Sort of like those young adult novels where every book in the series is an adjective (Broken, Taken, Flowing, Smelly) and it would be weird to have one out of place.

The big issue I'm having with Quicksand at the moment is titling the chapters (/parts).  The narrative is so long and convoluted (and will eventually put into an even less linear order) that I think separating it into chapters is necessary - but then I'm not sure how, or if the chapter titles should somehow indicate which of the three plots that chapter is technically about.  I've even considered little icons to indicate this - suns and moons and stars or rabbits and foxes or... something.  I don't even know.

I had this same problem with Aigaion Girl, and I think I was only saved by the fact that I wrote it in first person, so I very lazily titled each section with the name of the narrator, then counted down the signs of the apocalypse and BAM!

Of course, there's a little part of me that wonders if titled chapters are things that belong in children's books and fantasy novels only.  I'm racking my brain and I can't think of where else I've seen them.  Of course, I'm in Slovakia at the moment and don't have any books I can run and check.



*whoever decided that...

Mock ups

We've talked a fair bit about how figuring out what characters' names are and what they look like can give us a better idea of how they'd behave, so after ages of trying to work out the personality of my protagonist(s), I've come up with this mock up for the book cover (I came up with the working title in the process).  So now I have the looks, I just need the names... and to figure out if I want to write in first or third person. 

I know it's important in all fiction, but this piece is going to be SUPER character driven, so the names have to be perfect; I need to nail these characters.

Any suggestions would be more than welcome :)

Halloween!

I love Halloween.  I always have.  I think it's the combination of creepy and candy - and, of course, getting to be someone else for a night. 

I think the disguise aspect of Halloween appeals to my writer sensibilities.  I feel like each of our characters are costumes we put on, extensions of ourselves.  Obviously the degree to which this is true varies for each character (I don't believe all fiction writers are creating Mary-Sue MCs* and implanting them willy nilly into stories) but I think it's a little bit true for all of them.

You may be wonder why I am posting my Halloween post now, rather than, say, a week from now. Two reasons:

One, Neil Gaiman has come up with the concept of All Hallow's Read (If you haven't heard of it, the idea is that you give someone the gift of a scary book on Halloween), and I wanted to mention it early enough to give everyone a chance to choose and buy a scary book, if they are so inclined.

Two, it's been a while since we had a writing prompt, and I thought that since November is likely going to be a slow month in terms of DevCo posts, now would be a great time for one.

It's going to be a relatively easy one, because we all have NaNoWriMo and other things (if I remember correctly, midterms) on the brain, but here it goes:

Write something about fall.  Anything.  Up to 1000 words, fiction or non-fiction, poetry, whatever.  The only real rule is that it has to be about this wonderful season we find ourselves in (unless you live somewhere where it's spring right now.  If that is the case, please write about that).  To be posted anytime between now and October 31st.  Fallish/Halloween pictures would be great, too.

*If there isn't already, there needs to be a male equivalent to Mary-Sue.  My vote would be for Billy-Dean.

Character... Squids?

So, I'm thinking that if we have plot bunnies and marketing gorillas, we should have character squids. Squids, like the character descriptions, can sneak up on you. There are many, many different kinds of squids and all of them are complex and a little bit weird. And where plot bunnies can hop off in directions different from where we want or expect them to go, character squids can float in the water, waving their tentacles and making it really difficult for us to see what's what. In the end, if we're not careful, we'll just end up with a big inky mess.

This all came to me because yesterday, shortly after commenting on E's comment on my NaNo post, saying I want a shiny new story to write and how nice it would be if it popped fully formed into my head, I had an epiphany of sorts, and instantly got basics for two of the MCs for my NaNoWriMo story. Basic setting and plot elements started to form around these characters, and I now have six partially-to-mostly-formed characters of varying importance, a kick-ass (if I do say so myself) setting and general concept and a vague idea of where the story (or stories, as I'mna do three intertwining ones) is (are) going.

And I found that naming my characters really did help me pin them down. I was stuck for a long time between two very different names for my FMC and I couldn't work out her personality until I chose one.

Also, on the subject of genre, I decided not to bother with one at all for this story. It's going to be difficult to write because of the effed-up-ness of the setting and the characters and I can't even imagine what kind of genre it could try to fit into.

So, now of to bubbl.us to try to make sense of it all.

The Summer NaNo Post, Writer's Block and the Importance of Characters

I know NaNoWriMo is three months away, yet and we're all trying to enjoy our summers and relax (at least, I hope we're all trying to enjoy our summers and relax), but as I said last year*, August is when I always seem to have NaNoWriMo on the brain.

I have no idea what I'm going to write this year. None. I've been stuck in a perpetual state of writer's block since I finished 2010's NaNo - and even that needs a lot of polishing before it'll be anywhere near ready for public or semi-public consumption.

Just a reminder: three of us won NaNoWriMo in 2010. Therefore, we rock!

Out of everything I've written, Aigaion Girl has to be my favourite long piece (it incorporates my favourite piece of short fiction), so, lately, I've been trying to figure out why I like it so much more than my other work. I think what it comes down to is characters. A/G was relatively easy and extremely enjoyable to write (rewriting is another story) because I was in love with my characters. Even now, I keep trying to come up with an idea for a sequel so that I'll have an excuse to keep writing them. But I think maybe that's the secret - at least for me. I have another story I've been working on, 200 Pages which has a really good (IMO) concept, but I can't get the characters nailed down and it's killing the story. So I guess what I need, before I start trying to come up with a plot and an original idea and all of that, is a group of truly kick-ass characters.

So, NaNoWriMo - will you be participating this year? Do you have any idea what you'll be writing if you decide to participate? What do you think your chances of winning are?

And my bigger, kind of discussion questiony question: how will you find/create your story? will you work out a plot and create characters to fill it, or create characters and build a plot around them, or do it at once, or in bits and pieces as it comes to you - or is your process completely different?

*Can you believe that was a year ago?

OH MY GOD

It's finally happened. They showed signs of rebellion, but nothing like this has ever occured. Yet. And now it has, and I can't stop grinning. I blame the fact that I created a character who was meant to be a bit mysterious and inscrutable.

Okay. I'm getting ahead of myself. Basically, the story goes like this: Today I sat down and wrote like a madwoman. I'm nearing the grand finale, I'm worrying about how I'm going to work certain elements into my story, I'm not sure I'll have enough plot left to fill 50k, and I haven't explained a lot of what seems like filler.

Then I come to the scene where my Mysterious Wise Woman character has to explain Peter's Very Important Backstory to Wendy. This is an important scene, even pivotal, and I've been looking forward to it for forever. I hit this scene with about two hundred words to go before I hit 20k, and I'm thinking, "I'll just start this, maybe with a bit of foreshadowing, get those two hundred words down without getting into the Very Important Backstory so I'm not tempted to stay up all night writing, and then I'll go to bed." Seemed like a sound and solid plan, right?

WRONG.

My Mysterious Wise Woman proceeded to dash off onto an eloquent and excellent tangent about my magical world, and, in doing so, managed to fill in a few of my plot holes, add some of my neglected elements, introduce a possibility for a WHOLE 'NOTHER GRAND FINALE past the one I already have planned out, provide reasons for the actions of pretty much everyone throughout the book, tie in the Very Important Backstory and Wendy's identity as a writer, add a darker, stranger, more Gaimanesque twist to the magical world and pretty much the whole book, and cast a sense of foreboding over what is shaping up to be the Final Battle (unless I run out of plot before I run out of words, in which case it will be the Penultimate Battle). And not one word of this did I plan. I don't think I even knew it was percolating in my subconscious until Erzebet laid it all out in black and white. I know where some elements of it came from (Coraline and Solemn Coyote's reviews on FP, to name two), but I had no idea that it would all tie together so nicely, and turn into such a lovely little piece of spine-tingling silliness.

So thanks, characters, for indulging in your rebellious urges. :D I'll be right back, though: busy sleeping. LIKE YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN AT FOUR IN THE MORNING, GUYS.

Gender Bias in Book Selection

Someone on Book Blogs started a discussion (and posted this link to her blog) about gender bias in book selection. Apparently, she has a colleague who will not read books written by women. As a female author, this bothers me. As a human being, it scares me a little. As a reader, I can kind of see his point.

I can't imagine deciding against picking up a book to read because its author is female, but if we didn't judge books based on things other than their content, all books could just be a flat light grey with their titles printed in an easy-to-read font. So I judge books (at least a little) by their covers, and part of that includes the author's name*. If an author's name is gender-ambiguous, I don't feel any great need to find out their sex. In some cases, the rest of the book cover gives that away (P.C. Cast, anyone?), but by and large gender doesn't really matter to me when choosing an author, as long as the book looks good.

The reason I said I could kind of see Buddy's point is that, when I thought about it, I realized that most of my favourite authors are male (Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Robert A. Heinlein, etc.). I don't think that's because of their use of “male” language (although, in the case of Gaiman and Pratchett, I would say it definitely has something to do with their British language), so much as the (often) male perspective on characters. Apart from a clever and engaging style, what I look for most in fiction is something character-driven. Fun and wonderful plots are all well and good, but if I don't care about the characters, I can hardly be expected to care about how they spend their time... and I think that men are more likely to write characters I care about. The reason for this? Flaws. Female authors (and I am way generalizing here; clearly I don't think this is true of all female authors) tend to have the unfortunate habit of forgetting to give their protagonists flaws of any kind – and many times, when they do have flaws, they're things like thinking that they're more flawed than they really are. I like my characters to be overcoming addiction, or give careless criticisms to people or be so heartsick that they can barely function. I don't want to read men who never ask for directions and frequently forget to pick up milk or women who insist on watching chick flicks and won't eat Chinese. There are flaws and there are quirks, and I think male authors are quicker to heap on the flaws when their characters are in their planning stages.

With all of that being said, I should mention that my favourite book EVER is Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen's style is very distinctly female and her characters are real, flawed people who I can relate to and enjoy reading about.

A few (though admittedly, a very few) people on Book Blogs didn't think there was much of a difference between male and female authors and Amanda Markham, the author of the blog that prompted this whole thing, points out that “... men can be every bit as fluffy and emotional as women”. This is true, but, as Ms. Markham goes on to point out, there is a discernible difference between the way women write and the way men write. She directs her readers (and I direct you) to the Gender Genie, which boasts something like 80% accuracy when determining if a passage was written by a male or female author. What's really interesting is that it shows you how it reached its conclusion, which is great, especially if you want to get really good at writing first person characters who aren't the same sex as you.

I'm still fairly ambivalent about this issue, because while there are traits that are often attributed to female authors (some of which I attribute to female authors in this post), I don't think that women should strive to be/write/act more like men. Actually, I think that if everyone strove to be and write more like themselves, we would have a lot more interesting and varied fiction available to us and a lot less weird men refusing to read woman authors.

*If an author has a name like Adrienne Loveheart, I'm likely to avoid anything she's written on principal.

Naming Characters

I'm of two minds about this. In my very early writing days, I tried to come up with completely unique names for my female protagonists, and as a result, came up with very common names like Ariel and Violet and Adrianna. Now, I find I'm always torn between the extremes. I have characters named things like Apple, Caution, Emmeline, Fiercely, and then characters with names like Kate and Sophia. What I find I'm trying to walk in the middle, with common names that aren't too common. My latest two are Daphne and Jillian.

I was usuing babynames.com to look for character names long before they added their very useful tips for writers section and I've always been pleased with the results. They suggest:

If you name your character right, you will choose a name that is unique to your character and memorable to your story.

I completely agree, but my problem is with finding unique names that don't clash with the realism of the story. Some heroine who's grown up in an average family with boring parents is not going to have a name like Tatiana Starr McKnight (thank God), after all.

I'm just wondering what everyone else does for this. For my side characters, I often use Seventh Sanctum's Quick Name Generator, but for my mains, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to come up with totally unique names that are still readable.

Character Deaths and How To Deal With Them

Right.

So, having spent the large majority of the night laughing our asses off at the worst fanfic that has ever happened to anything, anywhere (see Bean's post below), we watched some canned TV. I won't divulge the series, in case of spoilers, and while it seems that rambling about TV at twenty after one in the a.m* seems...random...it does have a point. About characters. And killing them off.

Now, I get that it's not always possible to keep actors from season to season, due to contracts, and other jobs, and life stuff, and...maybe they're horrible bastards/bitches to work with and no one likes them in real life. Or maybe not. Sometimes the writers are just assholes. Whatever. There are times when a writer has to make a decision about what to do with a character, and it usually boils down to a few options:

a) Send them on a 'vacation' that lasts a very long, long time
b) Kill them off
c) ...I had a 'c', but I can't remember it right now.

How a writer (for anything, TV show, book, short story, etc) handles that character's departure is a delicate, delicate thing. Especially if you've got vocal fans, and especially if you're going with option b).

I don't want to say that there are rules, but there are...sort of. Well, guidelines. Like 'Be Consistent'. If a well-loved character is about to get offed, at least make it make some sort of sense. Don't do it because you think ratings will go up, or to sensationalize it, because that just cheapens the experience. And it cheapens the characters.

If your characters are really that good, your audience will (on some level) believe that they're real. It's how our minds work. We personify everything. This doesn't mean they'll write horrific fanfic about it, or even good fanfic, but they'll keep watching the show/reading the book. They'll keep searching for that connection they felt.

Removing that connection will leave a hole, even just a tiny one. We all want our own deaths to mean something - it's another consequence of being human. A beloved character dying, seemingly at the whim of an author and for no other purpose...there is no meaning there. It leaves the audience confused, hurt, angry, and a little afraid. Then they stop reading/watching, which is the exact opposite of what you, as an author, want.

This leads naturally into 'Remember Your Canon'**. If you're going to turn a character into (for example) the murderous sidekick of an recurring cannibalistic villain because you don't want to bother developing him any more***, at least make sure there isn't an episode earlier in the series that won't make it extremely obvious what you're doing.

Art, in any form, is about evoking emotional responses from your audience. There's also a very close tie to our biological need to reproduce, but that can be a topic for a different post. Even if you're in it only to make money off the masses, you should still remember that 'art=emotion'. Killing a character will trigger that emotional response very quickly, and if that's what you're going for, then yeah...it works. It can just as easily backfire, though. So be careful.

Oh! I remembered option c) have them switch sides long enough for people to begin to hate them, and then kill them off****. This, too, has to be done delicately. If there's no basis for having them become turncoats, then your audience won't believe it. And if they can't believe it, they won't keep watching/reading. Their emotional ties will be severed.

Whatever. Sometimes, killing your own characters is unavoidable. Sometimes, you've killed them off before you've even realized what you were doing, sometimes it's a premeditated removal of a character. Whichever it ends up being, and whatever comes after, do it well. You owe your characters that much.

* It was 1:20 am when I started writing this, but...I was much too tired to finish it, so now it's the next day.
** Not the explosive device. The other one. I can never remember which one has two 'n's.
*** I'm looking at you, Bones.
**** Goddamnit, Joss Whedon

I'm sick.

I've just finished writing out the plot for the story I posted the chunk of yesterday. I think I know where it's going, which is cool. I have three pages of plot and two pages of general notes and back story...

... and, the reason why I'm sick, I have the beginnings of a sequel. I seriously don't know what is wrong with me. I mean, I know people get the writing bug, but I have an addiction. I suppose it's a good thing that I plan to do this with the rest of my life; I have a feeling this sort of thing would get in the way of any other job.

Anyway, I have four fairly strong characters (actually, I think one of the more secondary characters is more interesting than my heroine; I'll have to work on that), and the vague notions of some less important characters to include.

Now I'm just working on a title.

Plot vs. Characters

I'm having serious trouble with a story idea of mine. I've got these two characters. I've figured them out pretty well, and I really like them. The thing is, I don't know what to DO with them. But I might be over thinking things. Allow me to elaborate. Here's a brief descrip of the two characters.

Olive is twenty-two, wears Buddy Holly glasses, has a lack of social skills that she just can't seem to fix. She's an outcast and weird, but also very caring and sweet. She becomes obsessed with....

Charles, who is thirty-two and just became a superhero. (Don't know what his supower(s) are or how he got them yet-- maybe that's part of the problem?) His entire life has been planned out and he's always been okay with that. Now he's got these very un-cool superpowers (like super-breath or being able to turn himself yellow, not sure really but it won't be your typical stuff) and he's stuck with Olive following him around and telling him he looks like Superman.

That's a very brief sketch of them. I can't figure out, though, what their story is. If I were to try to write this right now (and I have written one scene with them) it would have no plot. I'd just have to follow them around and see what they do. I've never had this problem before and it weirds me out. Usually I have some cutesy plot twist to rely on. Something to move the story forward. But what's moving this story forward? I don't know. And I don't know how to write a story that doesn't have an end-goal in mind.

What do you guys think? Should I try to write it anyway, even if it seems to have no plot? Should I give it some time and see if a nice plot twist comes to mind? Do any of YOU have any plot ideas? Help would be so appreciated. Thank you!

What do you think of...

...vampires and cat-people and werespiders, oh my?
I've been trying to be original with my characters in my less hammy, angsty vampire story, but I'm worried I've either taken it too far or not far enough. I mean, a werespider is rather original, but a cat-boy is just asking for trouble. Especially when the way he got to be part cat sounds like the setup for a bad joke. What do you all think?