Character

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”

~ Abraham Lincoln

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So you want to build a character? A great exercise in the journey of building a character is having your character describe YOU. When you put on your characters personality in introducing you to the world, something happens, you learn more about your character(s) in their voice, actions, and their readability.

A lot of the times you find out things about your characters that you never knew.

1) Are they antagonist or protagonist?

2) Does their voice sound flat?

3) Do they need to be redefined in your eyes?

4) Can this (these) characters carry a fifty-thousand word novel? A short story?

5) Are you ready to hear from your character what they dislike about you the most?

Keep in mind your characters take on a life of their own. They think for themselves, dress for themselves and are everything they need to get by. When you, the nosey writer, pokes and prods, you create things that maybe really are not in character for him or her.

This character exchange exercise really gives you a window to look through at your character to see how THEY see YOU! And they’ll be real vocal about it too. Once you begin writing you just can’t stop. You didn’t realize Rapunzel (my character) could be so vocal!

Maybe I should do my exercise here, for you all to see a writer and character at work! Well that’s a cool idea. I see too many people do this exercise allowing the ego-tripping character to go on and on about THEM, when that is not the point AT ALL in the exercise. WE, the reader, want to hear about YOU, the writer, from your characters perspective!

Introducing (drum roll please) Rapunzel

My name’s Rapunzel and my Drama Queen of a writer, Joni, wants me to tell you about her. Sure she’s going to stir my story up like stew but it is her story that I can’t wait to tell YOU about.

She went and shifted gears in the mentoring stage and is now going to be teaching you, the gracious readers of her blog. She thinks the writing sites are full of fluff and has put them in the closet, but her blog, now that is her own and where she can be free to write whatever she wants to write.

Freedom, that is what she likes and I sure hope she likes it enough to give me a taste of it too! Funny thing is, she has long flowing blond hair, like me, often feels imprisoned, like me, and she tries to be a light at the end of the tunnel, like I am for some.

I’m thinking she chose to write about me because we’re so much alike. Will she be able to pull off a story of say 1500 words about a fictional character and keep herself out of it or will we merge together. Hey, I don’t want to be a writer, after some of the things I’ve witnessed her go through, no thanks!

Freedom will be the goal for both of us and I’ll watch as she soars, now if only I could too.

Footprints...

He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away. ~Raymond Hull
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“Everybody who is in business with you, in a personal, professional, romantic, transactional relationship with you, is looking up information about you.. and then.. making decisions about what they find about you on the Internet. That’s why everybody has a need and obligation to themselves, to their family members to their shareholders, to manage their footprint on the Internet.” This is part of Bloomberg news www.bloomberg.com

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This made me think of all the footprints I’ve left around the net, all the hand-print's I’ve left on peoples heart, and the smudged up mirrors I’ve left behind for people to see. Then I remembered...I am an open book, I have nothing to hide and anything I want hidden, I keep in my mind, brain, thoughts.

I am a person who is honest to a fault. I say a fault because being truthful can get you slapped across the face, maybe not literally, but emotionally. People don’t want to hear or read the truth, that is why it is so easy for people to lie.

Most of all, people lie to themselves in a fit of what I call either denial, self-flattery, or justification. In Sunday’s sermon, Pastor Mike said that it is one way, or no way. We can’t do a rewrite and make the Word fit into our lives, we have to change and make ourselves fit into what the Word says.

Not many people are left in the world that are willing to suffer pain, grovel for food and water, practically beg for help in their time of need but we’re in a whole different place us Americans. We’ve had a recession, Earthquakes in unlikely places, hurricanes flood streets that haven’t seen rain in months, wildfires eating homes and the devastation goes on and on. 

We’ve had people honored for going against orders in the military, and we’ve seen total strangers and hero’s pull a young man from under a burning car, by lifting it?

The footprint that I leave behind better be a print that is too big to fill. When anyone looks at my intricate web of work on the net, they won’t find insanity, sleaze and smut exuding from my past, present OR future. If they want my life story, they can read my memoirs. All the juicy tidbits of my darkly lit past will be in there not on some social wall where the robots of the world can pick and choose the bad, highlight it and never show the good wholesome woman in me.

As writers we create characters. Characters that sometimes are pieces of ourselves. When we write a story we weave little tiny particles of our beings in these characters, whether protagonist or antagonist. If you like a character, more than likely you will like the person who wrote the book. If you are really pulling for the damsel, you more than likely are glad to see her win in the end, just like maybe you in reality were never able to do? Possibly? If you relate to the ‘bad guy’ in some way, perhaps a portion of you has not dealt with that dark side of you yet?

What I’m trying to say here is this. Get a Grip! Take a look at who you really are and make sure that that is who the world sees. I’m tired of all the masked people who hide behind levels of themselves that they think no one can see. I’m here to tell you, I SEE YOU!

Get it all out in the open, if not, the many social networks will.

Crazy Characters

"However great a man's natural talent may be, the art of writing cannot be learned all at once." Jean Jacques Rousseau
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Characterization

This week we’re going to learn about characterization. Characterization is basically getting to know your character like you would any friend that you have. Their thoughts, their likes and dislikes, maybe their skin color or eye color and lastly, a name. Yes your characters become some of your nearest and dearest friends. You spend mornings, noons and many nights with them so the least you should do is know them, intimately.

As an exercise, we ask for your character to tell us about you! What would they see your life as being? Are you a bored housewife living vicariously through your character, Lola. Or are you a busy stay at home mom who colors her world with the likes of Beth and Bob?

When you climb inside your characters head, and look out into the real world, what would they see? Is there life exciting compared to yours or are you more exciting than them. Oh goodness... you better make your character’s life more exciting than yours.

Can you imagine reading a book, and the character appears as a cardboard cutout; meaning, stiff, colorless, flat, no real connection to the reader? If that’s the case then for sure you’ve lost your reader. We have to give our readers more to sink their teeth into. They, as you well know, don’t pick up a book to be bored out of their skin. They pick it up so they can jump into a fantasy world alive with conflict, pain, struggle and hopefully a resolution.

Now I don’t pick up a book for the fantasy elements, I, personal preference here, like the reality elements. I like a character who could be me, or my sister or maybe my mother or brother. I like to see within characters elements of my real world. I like to see possible struggles that I went through and want to see how they get resolved in a book.

Keep in mind I’ve had a colorful life, maybe not to some, but daily, monthly, yearly struggles are my forte. So when I read a book I want the character to survive the unconscionable blood of the past. I want them to soar like no eagle has soared before. They need to take whatever obstacle is thrown at them and either overcome it, or die.

You’re going to lose the reader if your main character is a wimp and dies; also spells out a boring story.  And trust me, you don’t need a voluptuous maiden to be a main character either, although everyone loves a good ‘Damsel in Distress’ novel, don’t they?

Get inside your characters head, know every mole, every pimple that has surfaced, every flaw on their skin, and everything that makes him or her tick on a daily basis. By allowing the character to interview you, you in return will be learning intricate aspects of them, without even knowing it. Try it, you might like it. :)

Something Wicked this way Comes

Genesis 1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
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Something Wicked this way Comes...

Just so you know, I write spiritual stuff. I embrace the light and everything that means to you and me. I try my darnedest to walk in an upright manner sharing and giving love where it might lack. But as for my writing, now that’s a totally different story. (Pardon the pun.)

Most of the time when I’m writing a short story, I start off with my heroine as this upstanding epitome of the highest perfection, then as I’m sitting there writing, something takes over my character and things start to happen. It is as if she has been overcome by the dark force and then my story heads down a path of unknown.

A discussion began in the f2k class when a woman asked if she was the only one where her ‘people’ seem to take charge and the story basically writes itself or is written by these people (aka characters.) Many of us writers piped in to assure her that not only do our characters claim full reign but that what we had intended on the story being took a turn somewhere along the line and we came up with something utterly different than what we proposed the story line to be about.

I’m wondering if this ghost that takes over is our conscious turning off the internal editor. You see, we all write with the internal editor on. We backtrack every paragraph, we spellcheck a page, we’re constantly checking for consistencies and inconsistencies. With that mind, remember, you lose something along the way. You’re so worried about everything being right, you miss the point of where you went wrong.

As writers we can not try so hard that we lose sight of the story. I’m telling you, when you try to write a story, when you try to get it perfect, when you keep trying so hard to make everything right, it is at this point that you’ve lost the basis of your story. You’ve allowed the characters to quiet down and hide in the shadows. You have essentially put tape over their mouth’s and you, the writer creator of the work, has taken over to make your work perfect.

Guess what? Nobody is perfect! I bet that was enlightening wasn’t it? You need to put tape over your brain! ha ha. Turn the internal editor off. Don’t tell me, but, but, but it is too hard. Tell me, okay I will and see what kind of story you write. You’re characters will come out of the shadows, they will become people who are shaped by your fingers but their conscious. They will carry an air of mystery with them as good verses evil challenge each other to a duel. The characters will become people, no longer cardboard cut-outs. Living breathing entities.

In essence, something wicked this way comes.

Plot! Plot! Fizz! Fizz!

Gen. 1: 1 "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
The very first plot was born

Yesterday we talked about theme and today we’re going to talk about plot. What, you thought they were one and the same? Well they differ slightly.

You see, the theme is what is carried throughout your story. Let say, good vs. evil and the good triumphs. (always does doesn’t it?) This struggle between good and evil is an underlying force swerving in and out of the lanes, around the bend and sometimes flies right off the edge of the cliff!

The plot is the reason behind the story. Why does the man fall in love, why doesn’t the woman fall for him, why on earth do they rob a bank? Why does the woman suddenly fall in love? What happens to their lives while on the run before getting nabbed?

A lot of times as you’re writing, the plot changes. Maybe you had in mind the above scenario of man meets woman, but then he finds that she has a child that she’s been hiding from her estranged ex-husband. They no longer want to rob a bank, they want to both see the child safely across the border into another country. These are the kind of conflicts that are going to keep the reader turning the pages.

You see? The plot isn’t a set of rules that you play by. Sure someone can say “plan your plot THEN write the story,” but as a writer (and as a human being) I find that plans never go the way they are intended. Unintentionally, they go somewhere you hadn’t planned at all. This is where the creative writer expands his/her imagination and delves into the unknown.

Breeding familiarity is not a place for your plot. Your story needs to be UNIQUE, something that ISN’T out there on the shelf right now. A lot of writers try the backward method. And that is writing the last scene first and backtracking to the beginning. Seeing it from this angle, you’re in the midst of creating a plot.

In essence the plot is the WHY your story is taking place (character’s etc.) You character is what’s going to shape your plot. Create a good character, give him/her their own profile, (what color eyes, hair, faults, vices, benefits etc.) With each part of the character’s development, the plot will surface. Always ask WHY and the next paragraph will form itself (in your mind’s eye.) Write your heart out without even thinking of a plot.

Allow the plot to become a mirage way off down the road, the closer you get to it, the clearer the whole picture becomes.

And whatever you do folks, WRITE RIGHT!

The Theme of Things

Theme ~~ what is it and why do writer’s need the haunting lure of it to reign in the reader?
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It is good practice to carry a theme throughout your story. The theme of your story is usually implied through other elements, such as point of view, setting, imagery and the tone set throughout your piece of work. The theme becomes illuminated through these elements of style.

The theme is the underlying consciousness of your work. It is a central idea running like a stream throughout your work making it come together like cogs on a machine. Your theme will be the bonding of you and the reader, where he/she has a lightbulb moment, grasping what you have conveyed. If you have no theme, more than likely, you have no story that will glue the reader to your words and pages.

Sometimes the theme is not planned and often it changes in mid-writing. You had planned on your theme to be about the acceptance of death on humanity, but something happened along the typing path that had you (unconsciously) shifting to the beauty of mortality.

An idea is of the broader spectrum of the rainbow, where as the theme becomes subjective without limitations to you or your reader; over the rainbow so-to-speak. It is like feeding to your reader what he was thinking to be a lighthearted comedy, instead he received a thought-provoking piece of art that touched him profoundly.

If you’ve written 2500 words and haven’t a clue as to what your theme is, maybe go back and re-read, seeing if you missed something. It is possible that even you, the writer, missed the boat.

The theme is the underlying canvas to which you place the paint. You pick up a paintbrush (that looks an awful lot like a pen) and in a whimsical spin you begin creating art with words. As you feel the artistic flow being created subconsciously you will be spilling part of your sight and wisdom onto the canvas creating …a theme.

1.Don’t force a theme ~ It can’t be done and will come off as preachy or forced.

2.Write what you know ~ Writing what you have experienced in life and the hardships is perfect for the theme setting to begin. In fiction embellish your heart out.

3.Use a psychological approach ~ Think depth when you write. Is there a deeper meaning than what you had anticipated?

4.Try subtlety ~ Being subtle makes the reader do the thinking on many levels.

5.Do NOT struggle ~ Struggling to find a theme or to make your theme work will also assist you in losing the personality of your characters. Writing should come naturally, the theme will surface without your realization. Accept the theme you have and don’t try to change it. Natural flow is best.

Write Right friends!