Tag Archives: fiction

March 20, 2014 · 3:20 PM

Hopkins and Rowell

You know what sucks?  Being sick.  I started my new, glamorous job at Applebee’s the other day.  I am a waitress there (if you’re super into being PC then replace “waitress” with “server”) and I got super sick just in time for my last couple days of training and my first day off training.  So that meant no reading, writing, thinking, breathing, or blogging.  It was the worst.

But now I’m all better!  And I’m getting slightly better at waiting tables.

I also read a couple books.

The first: Crank by Ellen Hopkins.  This one is going on the Books I Recommend list, so look for a link there if you’re interested.  It’s a really chilling, powerful book.  My favorite part is that it’s part poetry, part prose, and part artwork.  Like the words are arranged in patterns.  Sometimes certain words are isolated so that if you read just them it becomes an entirely new sentence.  Which is awesome because it makes me feel like I’m breaking a secret code and reading all these encrypted messages.  I had the pleasure of hearing Ellen Hopkins speak at the SCBWI conference in NYC and she was an absolutely fantastic person.

The second book: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell.  It’s not going on the Books I Recommend list, but not because it was bad.  It was a really good book.  It kept me turning pages.  In fact, the only reason I’m not putting it on the list is because I have to be somewhat selective.  Otherwise that list is going to be ten miles long.  But I will recommend it here.  If you’re interested, it’s about a girl named Cath(er) who is a twin.  She’s starting college, but her social anxiety keeps her locked in her room writing FanFiction while her twin, Wren, takes the opposite approach to college life.  Cath’s also got some family problems, some boyfriend problems, and some school problems.

Reading Rowell’s book made me realize why I have so much trouble writing realistic fiction: Real life, especially real life for teenagers, is very boring and repetitive.  If you are a teenager in high school or college, this is the short list of real-life problems that you might face:

  • Parents
  • Siblings
  • Teachers/Professors
  • Classwork
  • Who is or isn’t kissing you
  • Alcohol/drugs
  • Sex

And it is really hard to make that list unique.  Like, you could add in something about how Sarah’s archery coach told her that she doesn’t have the eye for the bulls-eye like she used to.  Or Peter is going on a camping trip with his class and he is extremely worried about sleeping at night without his stuffed Zebra, Furkle.  But for the most part a lot of these books seem to boil back down to the above list.  And that’s a difficult problem to overcome.  It is.

So that’s the main issue I ran into with Fangirl.  It had this flavor of familiarity like I’d seen and read it all before, despite the characters’ names and hair colors being different.  But what’s an author to do?  If you suddenly veer off the course, people might start criticizing you for having unrealistic realistic fiction.  It’s why I have a great respect for realistic fiction writers, and why I feel like I hit a big, fat roadblock whenever I try it.  My biggest problem with rewriting The Dreamcatchers has been this block.  The Reality Block, I’ll call it.  I want my main character’s real life to factor into her dream world, and I also want the two other teenagers she meets to have their own lives and their own stories which also become apparent in the dreams.  That’s three different lives I have to create!  Three different realities that need to appear unique while still being believable, but without being cliche.  And that’s hard.  So my hat goes off to Rainbow.  She did a hard thing, and she made it entertaining.  Go ahead and read the book.  You’ll see what I’m talking about.

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August 27, 2012 · 4:38 PM

Sharing without Caring

Well I’m a working woman now!

Ok…so I’m an interning woman.

It’s still fun, though!  I’m not going to say where I’m interning, but I will say that I’m getting to read a lot of query letters and sample manuscripts, and I’ve learned a lot.  One thing I learned I will now share with you here.

A lot of books that come through are nonfiction, though this advice can apply to fiction as well.  What these nonfiction writers often do is provide a lot of information about their life, or the life of someone close to them, without giving the reader a reason to care.  And I understand why this mistake is made.  I mean, you know your life is interesting.  You know that the time you found a cure for skin cancer while rescuing a beached whale is the most important moment of your life.  And you know that this story is very important, and should be shared with the world.

The only problem is that the readers don’t know.  They don’t know what’s happened, and even reading the synopsis on the back of the book isn’t going to captivate them for very long if they’re not given a reason to care.  There are exceptions to every rule of course, but for the most part, even nonfiction stories of whale saving/cancer curing need to have more to them than just that one event.  They have to have good writing, sure, but I like to see a full story.  I wrote before about making a timeline for the various events in a story, and that only works if your book has more than one event to put on the timeline.  What kind of person were you before you saved the whale?  How did you change after the whale was saved?  What’s your whole story?  Give me that, and I’ll care much more about the big events in your life.  I’ll begin to understand for myself why they’re important, instead of having to take your word for it.

I can tell that I’m on to something here, because I have read some really good nonfiction since I started work last Tuesday, and I’ve read some nonfiction with a lot of potential to be good, that really just couldn’t keep my interest.  That’s the difference you want to make.  And, as I said, it applies to fiction, too.  You’ve got to give your reader some context as to why they’re reading.

Because if you saved a whale, but made a habit of drowning kittens in your youth, that’s something I want to know.

Word of the Day: Captivate (v) – to attract and hold the attention or interest of, as by beauty or excellence; enchant

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December 11, 2011 · 6:54 AM

The Swirling Vortex of Doom (AKA Character Development)

Remember how I was talking about how very wrong I was in my first few posts?  [EDIT 3/13/21: These posts have since been unpublished due to being blatantly wrong and insulting.] Yeah, I remember now that there’s something else I wanted to clear up besides how sorry I am – What I wrote about character development.

My methods for getting to know your character?  Sound.  Good enough anyway.

My timeline for getting to know your character?  WRONG.  I made it seem like you had to know everything there is to know about your character before you even start your story!  No no no!  I don’t even think that’s possible.  Even if you have an absolutely super special intimate relationship with your character before you start writing, and you think you know all there is to know, I’m still pretty convinced that something about that character is going to change once you start writing.  And that’s the whole point!  It’s supposed to change!  If your writing isn’t teasing out more and more little things about your character that you didn’t even think about before you started, then maybe you’re not doing it right.  To illustrate this point (literally) I painstakingly drew my character development process for Serrafiel.

First, we have what I knew about the character before I started writing:

Yeah, that’s about it.  So I ask you: Does this look like a fully-developed character?  The answer is no.  So I had that, and then I started writing and, after a chapter or two, I got this:

So there’s a little more.  He’s blonde now, and he has green eyes.  I didn’t know either of those things until I wrote about him looking at himself in the mirror for the first time.  And the talking to owls thing, yeah…decided that one on a whim.  It worked out really well once I got further in the book, which brings me to:

So now I’ve got a pretty well-rounded character.  By now, I’m really into the book, and I know a lot about him.  You may also notice that this picture has a lot more words in it than the first one.  But it’s also important to remember that all of these things I know about him are constantly framed by questions, things I don’t know yet.  So in the next picture, he’s literally framed by questions.

And then you have to remember that all of these questions and personality traits and feelings and words are often linked directly (or indirectly) to other characters in the book.  Which I have also drawn.

Believe it or not, there is some rhyme and reason to the direction of the arrows.  If a question is going to be answered by a character, then the arrow points to them.  If a character caused the question, or the feeling/emotion whatever, then the arrow points from that character to the corresponding word(s).  I mean, that’s not totally important.  This is just supposed to show how incredibly complicated character development is.  In other words, I’m trying to prove without a doubt that I was epically wrong the first time I talked about this.  Oh and we’re not done by the way.  Because you have to remember that all those colored blobs aren’t just blobs, they’re other characters.

And all of those other characters, plus any number of others, need their own swirling mass of words, arrows, and relationships.  They all need to be developed just like I developed Serrafiel.  (Don’t worry, I didn’t draw out their developments, too.  That was the last picture)

In conclusion, you should definitely get to know your character as well as you might know a sibling or close friend, but don’t be afraid to use your writing to help you develop that relationship.

Word of the Day: Nascent (adj) – beginning to exist or develop

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