Why I'll Never Cheer for the Patriots and How It Relates to Writing

On Sunday, we learned that the two teams that are heading to the Superbowl are the Atlanta Falcons (woo!) and the Patriots (boo). I should apologize to the people who read this who like the Patriots, Tom Brady, or both, so I do. However, I hate both because it's just getting to be too much. When they got to their first Superbowl, back in 2001, they were the underdogs then. They were going there for the first time since 1996, without winning, and Tom Brady was a sixth round pick out of Michigan. He was only there because they literally forced the old quarterback - a guy named Drew Bledsoe to the sidelines - and Brady was good. That Superbowl in 2001 was also a very close game with the Patriots only winning by a field goal (3 points) so it was a perfect storm of wanting to cheer for them. Then the scandals started and they got so good they weren't the underdogs and I couldn't cheer for them anymore. Props to those who can, but I can't. Tom Brady became the unrelatable and unlikable character in the drama llamas that is professional football, along with the rest of his team. Do you know when they become relatable? When they lose. That's kind of sad, but there it is.

In how this relates to writing, you want to make sure that your characters remain likable unless you're writing villains. To go back to Harry Potter, like I do a lot, Severus Snape is the perfect villain that you root for. With Star Wars, as you learn more about Vader, you want to root for him to come back to good. For your hero, you want the same thing. Harry Potter, for being the chosen one against the evil of Voldemort, was still relatable because his creator wanted him to be human. She wanted to make sure that it was a normal kid underneath all the layers of chosen one. When you're creating your characters, make sure there's something that attaches them to the rest of society. If they're too perfect, then people are going to want to root against them. Your readers might stop reading and that's never good.

Now, if you want someone to hate a character? You've got a perfect template for them. Same goes for if you want someone to hate a villain, but make sure they're doing their evilness for a reason. World Domination is a reason, but why? Because the original rulers are incompetent is a very good reason or because you can do it better is a good reason. Having a shitty childhood is a good reason and you get the added bonus of people wanting to relate to them (see Kingpin in Daredevil). If you need to look up why a character has a motive for doing something evil, look to normal life. Sometime's it's as simple as wanting to keep with the Jones-es situation.

So yeah, that's why I won't be rooting for the Patriots or Tom Brady anytime soon. He had a great origin story, but honestly, someone needs to smack him to make him relatable again. Same goes for the Patriots. Hopefully the Falcons, with their underdog relatable story line, can get the job done.

Until next time, keep on writing.

Characters and Mandyville

If you're not familiar with Mandyville, then it is possible that you've never seen The West Wing. It is named after a character called Mandy who up and disappeared during the end of season 1 and the start of season 2. She went poof, no explanation, even though there was a bit of a story line for why, but it was like she never existed in the first place. This happened with secondary characters where they just disappeared into the ether.

The reason why I'm writing about it is that it is one of the traps we should try not to fall into as writers. It's more for people who are writing a series, but you should have a plan for what happens for your secondary characters. Maybe not that they have a full on scene, but that they're talked about a small bit. You might not like the character but you might have a reader or a fan who does. Maybe they want to know what happened or what they're doing and that will spin into fanfic. That fanfic might bring in more people who read the original material and so on.

The easiest way to make sure you don't fall into the trap is to write down your characters, all of them, and write down what they do. Keep a line below their name to write which books they've appeared in and which books they're talked about in. You can do this either physically writing it down or Google Docs or a spreadsheet. Then, if you have nothing for them to do in the book, just mention them in dialogue if you can. But try not to fall into the trap that your secondary characters go poof. It's lazy writing. Yes, I'm saying that about Aaron Sorkin of all people, but, honestly, connect your characters.

So, until next time, back up your work and keep on writing.

Going Forward

Hi everyone.  I hope you enjoyed our look into short stories for the month of August.  Going forward, we've got NaNoWriMo in just two months (eeeek!) so we're going to see a bit of changes in the blog over those two months.

Every Monday, I'm going to talk about a bit of NaNoWriMo prep.  September is going to be mostly world building and we'll get into characters and outlining around October.  The rest of the week will be an exercise or prompt to help with building the novel that you'll write in November.  You'll still get the Friday Five / Friday Inspiration and there might be a few more off topic posts if I feel inspired but that's our frame work going forward.

Come November, I'm not sure what is going to happen.  The blog might go into hiatus for the month or there might be rants about how the writing process is going.  We'll see when it gets here.

Either way, I hope you enjoyed the past month and will stick around going forward.  Until tomorrow, keep on writing.

Short Stories and Characters

When I first talked about short stories, I brought up that one of the problems is characters.  I meant it as a way that there are times, in short stories, where there are too many characters and you need to cut them out.  The characters that you need to cut out, especially when you're hitting the ceiling of the word count, are the ones in the background.  The ones that don't do something but you introduce them anyways because it seems like a good idea.  Those are the ones who get cut.  They wouldn't if you were writing a novel, unless an editor thought it was a good idea, but you need the words in a short story, so they go.

This post isn't talking about that though.  This post is more to remind you that, no matter what you're writing, you need to have well rounded characters.  Even though you don't have as many words as you do in a novel, your characters still have to connect to your readers.  They have to connect to the other characters in your story and feel like normal people.  That is the baseline for all stories, no matter the length - well, maybe not drabbles as those are so short, but that's what your characters should be like.

There are character templates out there, through simple Google searches, and I recommend that you try a few.  You might take some things out while making your characters, but this needs to be apart of whatever you do in the writing process.  Characters matter, as they're usually the vehicle for your story, and you should not skimp on them just because you're writing a short story.

That's it for the day, really.  It was just a PSA on not forgetting to make sure your characters shine.  Until next time, keep on writing and don't forget your characters!

Throwback Thursday: Character Connections

Today we're going to wind back the clock to the WriYe Blog Circle prompt from February about character connections.  Since I am someone who writes more for the characters and have the plot wind around those characters, I'm surprised I haven't looked at this sooner.  The connections between characters, the frictions and the sparks, is what drives the plot forward for me.  Two people hate each other or love each other or something else entirely and then their lives spiral off because of it.  I think it's why one of my favorite movies is The Holiday with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet.  Their two characters swap houses for Christmas due to needing to run away from their lives / situations and how doing so makes them meet and touch other lives.

So, yeah, I love plot that happens like that.  I try to make my own stories and writing like that because it's what I love.  And, when you write what you know / like / love, then you are going to be successful in getting your writing project done.  That all said, let's get into the questions.

How do your characters connect with one another?  What kind of connection do they have?
Well, they're going to be one of three things - acquaintances, friends, or lovers - and react to each other as such.  For example, using Mystery of the Dark's Kate, she's going to react differently to the person who take her food order differently than Mark or Justinian.  To the person who takes her food order, she's going to be polite, use please and thank you, and not think of that person beyond that small interaction.  With Mark, a close / best friend, she's going to be a lot more open and honest.  She'll still be polite, but there will be times when she forgets to say please and thank you.  However, it's different because she still wants him to be her friend at the end of the day.  That means trying to not kill him over the stupid things he does and so on, like one would do with a normal friend.

Now, with Justinian?  Oh boy.  Yes, he's her love interest and eventual partner (sorry, spoilers), but he's still a vampire.  She kills those things for a living.  The two don't get off on the best foot but it'll come around in the end.  In the beginning, she doesn't want to connect with him.  She wants to write him off, make him into an acquaintance, but it's the strength of his character that makes him into her love interest.  He pushes back and makes himself stand out in a way that she starts to take him seriously.  It also helps that they go through a trial together and come out the other side whole time and time again.

How do you connect your character to your reader?
Well... I try to make the character feel like someone the reader can relate to.  That, despite the fact that they might only be half human or not human at all, the character feels human.  That they are human after all and has just the same problems that the reader might have on some level.  I think that connection makes the reader want to continue reading to find out the plot.  When it's the other way around, when it's more about the plot than the character, I lose interest.  I don't want my readers to lose interest, so I make the characters interesting and then I make the plot interesting.

So, dear readers, what are your connections and how do you show them in your characters?  Feel free to leave a comment below or connect to me on Facebook or twitter.  Until next time, keep on writing.

Plotting Time!: AKA How I Plot a Novel

Yesterday, I talked about pants vs plotter and showed a bit of the hybrid going between the two.  Today, we're going to go into what I usually do when I am plotting a novel and the steps I go through before I get to plotting.

Before I can even get to plotting, I like to set up what is called the basic stats of the novel.  I like to have a title in mind, even if it's mystery novel, more than any sort of real title.  I put which genre I'll be writing in, a subgenre if needed, how many words I plan to write, if there's a challenge involved such as NaNoWriMo, and a summary.  You're probably wondering how I can have a summary before I have a plot, but the summary isn't all that in depth.  Sometimes it'll just be a few lines of the idea that I have and then I'll come back to fill in the summary after I've got the plot outline done.

If you're wondering how long your novel should be, LitRejections has genre guidelines that can be found here.  For fantasy, I always try to shoot for 90,000 and to not go above 100,000.  It seems like a lot but, at the end of the novel, I'm always right in-between 90 and 100 thousand words.

After you have your basic stats, I then create the world through worldbuilding.  If you're setting something in the real world, you don't have to create a whole new world.  However, you do need to know where your characters are going to be at any given moment.  To take Chicago as an example, you'll want a map or two in order to see where your characters are going.  Are they going to travel by car or are they going to take public transport?  If it's public transport, are you going by bus or L?  So, it does take a bit of research and visiting the city that you want to set your city in.  I know that we have Google and other ways to look, but sometimes the best way to know your setting is to visit it.  How else are you going to know that the best way to get across town as quickly as possible?  You won't unless you go and see for yourself.  If you are creating a new world, I highly recommend Patrica C. Wrede's Worldbuilder Questions, 30 Days of Worldbuilding, and Anna Staniszewski's World Building Through Character.  I've used the last link a lot as it springboards into creating more of the fantasy world in different ways than the other two.

So, you've got your world, now it's time for characters.  There are a lot of character sheets that you can use out there.  However, I find it easy to boil down the characters to the following:

Name:
Age / Apparent Age:
Appearance:
Background:
About (Personality):
Weapons, Magical Ability, Misc:

Now, I sometimes do this before I get into world building.  It helps to have an idea of the characters I went to set in the world vs creating a world and then putting the characters into them.  You can write as little or as much as you want, but that's the basic formula I use to create my characters.  There are also various places where you can get appearance ideas, but I recommend just taking a look around you when you're out and about.  Sometimes you get the best ideas by seeing people in Starbucks and deciding that their mohawk works perfectly for the character in your head.

So, now we're at the outline.  You're probably all thinking "thank Deity of Choice".  Since we have everything all together before getting to this point, there are some novels where the outline writes itself.  All one needs to remember is the classic where you have a start, the middle, and the end.  I like throwing in a little curve or twist near the end, before you get the clear ending, as a way to put in a bit more plot.  It's usually used with police procedural, when they think they've got the killer, but it turns out to be someone they suspected but discarded.  It's not rocket science and this outline type has gotten me through a lot of different novels.

So, that's how I plot out my novels.  It takes a while, so I like to give myself a month or two before I sit down to write.  That way I can make sure that everything is in order and I don't need to change anything.  Plotting is a lot of work but it is nothing compared to trying to write the novel itself.  So, you want to make sure that you like what you're about to write, you like the characters, and you know the world.  If you've got those three, then you're going to be all set.

Would this method work for you?  I'd like to know, if you feel like leaving a comment, or if you've got a method that works better.  Until next time, keep on writing.

Character Studies

I just watched Person of Interest's penultimate episode, .exe, and I'm in awe of all the complex characters they have.  There's the Machine, who only wants to help humanity because that's what she was taught by her creator, Harold Finch.  Harold, himself, is shrouded in mystery and we've gotten very little about who he really is over the seasons.  There's John Reese, not the first lost soul that helps Finch help the Machine, but as the series comes to an end next week, it looks like he's going to be the last.  He's got a military background, a CIA background, basically he's your Jack of All Trades who's signature is shooting the bad guys in the kneecaps.  Then there's Sameen Shaw, who also has a CIA / spy background, who likes killing people and can't feel emotions.  At all.

And that's just the good guys.  The antagonists are just as complex, make me want to know exactly what make them tick, and yet I want them to fail.  I want them to fail in such a way that everything they want is burned to the ground and the good guys win.  They've got a Machine too - Samaritan - and an evil Harold (John Greer) and Greer has different Johns and Shaws to help him out in his own ways.  I want to know more about why Greer chose his path, even though they did show us in a background episode, but I feel there's more.  There's got to be more.

I bring this up, mostly because I'm in awe of the writing and the acting, but because we can learn from this.  It's not easy and you have to love, unconditionally, what you decide to take to study.  If you don't love the thing you're going to unpack, then it's not going to work.  You're going to get frustrated and you're going to hate it in the end.  You won't take anything away from it.  On the flip side, you might unpack it and end up hating the thing you love.  I went down this hole with Grey's Anatomy, in trying to understand how to work out romance and chick lit, and I had to take a break from the show.  So, make sure that you want to do this and you won't end up hating what you're unpacking.

Simply put, you take the character that interests you the most and unpack why.  It can be as simple as you like the actor playing the character to the character giving an impassioned speech that makes you rethink what you know about them.  If it's more the actor than the character, then you need to look to the actor.  Is it the way they're delivering the lines?  A little twitch of the head that seems to bring the character together?  Or is it simply the whole package that the actor shows everything the character could be?  For example, I'll watch nearly anything with Tom Cruise in it due to how he plays his characters.  Same goes for Matt Damon.  It's more how they play the character than how the character plays them, if you get my meaning.

Now, if it's the character, what about them?  Is it that they're leading from behind?  Or is it that they're the best leader of the group?  What is the trait that draws you to them and, once you find it, are you going to be able to write it?  Or, when you dive into what makes the character tick, do you regret doing so?  Do you realize that he or she would make a better villain?  You can still use what you find but put it into the villain file instead of the hero pile.

For those of you who are wondering what to do if you realize the plot is the reason you love your favorite show... well, do the same thing.  Find the one thing in the plot that you love and figure out why.  Is it the plot twists that you can't seem coming but feel completely natural?  Learn how to write like that - it's hard but it can be done.  Or do you like how there are a million plot threads that lead to one conclusion (or at least we hope so, Game of Thrones)?  I recommend a big white board where you can connect A to B all the way to Z.

So, character studies, of characters that you love, is one of the easier things to do.  As I was told recently, if you don't love it, then don't do it.  There's no reason to force yourself to do anything that isn't going to help you in the long term.  I hope that this helps someone.  If you try to do a character study in the way above, feel free to hop in the comments and say how well it worked or didn't work for you.

Until next time, keep on writing.

Characters: Where Do They Come From?

Yesterday, I spent the day retooling a novel I'm trying to write.  It's called Daughter of the Scribe, where the main character is exactly what the title says she is, and she's tasked with protecting a magical artifact.  It goes on but my plot was limp and I felt like I was pulling teeth while writing it.  I'm reworking the plot today, but before I could do that, I had to look at my characters.  I needed to figure out what was wrong with them in order to figure out what was wrong with my plot.  When I did that and tweaked the main character - same background but different life experience growing up - the characters around her changed for the better.  The plot is fitting into place and makes it something that I want to write.  She's now a thief who can kill you with an arrow from an impressive distance and I changed how she grew up.  Instead of living the life of a scholar, she grew up with her uncle who trained her to be an assassin and thief.  She's still the daughter of a scribe but she didn't grow up with her father.  Now, he was disappeared by an evil king and she needed to change her life goals, but there comes motivation and, therefore, plot.

My main character, Liliana, when I think of where she comes from, is not from just one person.  My life, while not as jarring as what happens to others, changed completely due to something outside of my control.  At the same time, this character isn't me.  She's not just one person, but she's someone who's story is familiar to a lot of us.  She adapted and she might or might not be okay.  She might be okay on the outside but inside, she just wants to curl up away from the world and make it go away.

What I'm trying to get at here, if you're still reading and not just rolling your eyes at me, is that there's no one place where I get my characters from.  When I look at all of my characters, from Power to when I first started writing Mystery of the Dark to where I am today, there's no one single person or thing that defines them.  I think that gives the character strength because it makes them easier to relate to.  I think, well more I hope, when I publish and you read my stories, that you see a bit of yourself in the characters I put forward.  It might not happen but that's my hope.

Readers, where do your characters come from?  Are you like me, where there's no one point or person, but they're several different little things put together?  Or are your characters pointed to be the one person that touched your life, no matter how briefly?  Feel free to leave your answers in the comments and, until next time, keep on writing.