Guest Post: Your character may be a mugger if…

16 Oct 2012 3 Comments

by irowboat in NaNoWriMo, October, Slightly off Kilter Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Written by irowboat

 

I was going to respond this comment from dawnstarpony, but it ran considerably long, and PartlyPixie made me turn it into a post. dawnstarpony asked:

Do you consider character planning/-izing/character personality sheets as outlining and wasting time?

I've encountered two general populations of writers when it comes to characters:

  • Those who are caught off-guard and mugged by their characters in a dark alley, who wake up in cold sweats, imagining that the character is watching them from every shadow, scheming to take their plot to terrible, undreamt places;
  • And those who are portrait photographers, casting the right character to tell the desired story, supplying props, dressing the set, controlling the lighting, and posing the character.

Neither of these are The Right Way™,but nor are they incorrect, for just as a photographer can still take a blurry photo even given the best circumstances and nearly unlimited control, those that are mugged can endlessly describe—in searingly vivid detail—the one or two distinguishing features they were able to make out in the dimmest of starlight and sodium-arc shadows.

There is promising research into the possibility of a third population, which has not yet been granted an official registration from the Writer Taxonomy Bureau; some argue it is simply a hybrid or mutant population and may be sterile. This population is the fashion photographer, who shares attributes of the two other populations: they control the lighting, provide props, cast the character, and provide minimal direction, but have little (or no) control of how the character actually interacts with the setting and props.

With a little luck (and the experience of the photographer), mediocre settings, marginal props, poor lighting, or the occasional blurry shot, the character can work the camera – producing unexpected and wonderful results that could never have been planned. Moments often noticed only when everything is done and examined in review.

Snapshots of serendipity.

 

Living Multiple Realities

13 Jul 2012 3 Comments

by PartlyPixie in July Tags: , , , , , ,

Reality is a subjective thing, especially to us writers.

We see things multiple ways. We sit on an old stone bridge and look down at a length of pipe sunken to the bottom of an icy stream, and in a blink we see a sword, golden and forgotten, lost, waiting for a hero to come and take up the fight again.

We see her, the hero, bending down and at the edge of the stream in our mind. She is wearing jeans and a blue shirt; her dog got lost in the woods and she’s been searching for him, calling out his name. And then, she finds herself called to the sword, her birthright. Her cheeks are rosy from running. She reaches a hand into the stream and hisses through her teeth – the water is cold from spring runoff, the snow melting into perfectly clear water – and her fingers close slowly around the freezing metal hilt. Then, in wonder and fear, she pulls the blade free from the mosses and reeds out into the sunlight.

We see the story, there, waiting in the middle of the “real world,” hanging ripe like fruit from the tree of imagination. We rush home, we must write her; we must find out what happens next. What does she do with the sword? Where does it take her? We’re swooning with possibility as we rush to get the images down, the character. We want to know who she is, what she likes, how old she is.

We fall in love with her, her flaws and her talents. We find out who she has a crush on, and who she is dating. We follow her around her life and see her go to her job at the frozen yogurt shop where she gets in trouble for giving out too many sprinkles on the samples. She is distracted by images of a golden sword she has hidden in her laundry pile at her apartment, and it is hard to concentrate. Her boyfriend stops in to say hello and get a free cup of vanilla yogurt, and he can tell her mind is elsewhere. He leaves, jealous and upset. This will come back to haunt her later. But by then, a dangerous and handsome stranger will have come to town, looking for the girl who has heeded the call.

Like a polaroid, it develops. And like magicians, we turn the images into words, alchemists of language.

It is our jobs to see the world two, three, one hundred ways at once. We are the translators of possibility, telling the stories that open the hearts of our readers, fold open the curtain and give them the hope that there is so much more than what is in front of us. We open them, we open ourselves. We make reality greater than the sum of its parts.

And as we follow our stories, we write ourselves real. We forget to be us, and we become gods, for just five minutes or five hours each week or day or month when we find a corner of time to sit down and tell the story. We write to make what is within us known to the world. We have something to share.

And we must be bold enough to tell the world however we see it, shining and glittering or dripping with vampire venom. We see the world as what it could be, should be.

And we make the world magnificent with our dreams.

A Meeting of Two Birds and a Stone

10 Feb 2012 2 Comments

by PartlyPixie in February, Slightly off Kilter Tags: , , , , , , ,

Day 9: 11,355 of 50,000 words

I suppose I should update about what I’ve decided to do about my little dilemma this month.

It started out with a story that seemed to take a defined shape early. Good character, decent back story, lots of room for mystery and things to go wrong. But it just wasn’t flowing and I decided to start over. It’s a short month, after all.

But the story clung to me like cat hair to a black wool sweater. I started writing from the viewpoint of a girl who just broke up with her boyfriend, sitting alone in a coffee shop and looking for an opportunity to change her life. Then she started to check out a cute guy across the room, and I realized:

DING!

Oh, crap. It’s that guy from the story I just discarded.

Let’s see if I can get out before he notices me. Sneak out the back – past the bathroom.

Too late! He’s walking this way. And smiling. And producing roses from beneath his jacket.

I’m a sucker for that move.

So I back up to the beginning again, cut and paste in the original 3,000 words. Keep writing. If I can’t get rid of him, I might as well try and use him for something. I have a general rule of not fighting myself on things overmuch; if my subconscious is determined to write this dude and his hard-to-squeeze-the-words-out story, fine. Game on.

Then….

Then I wrote that last post about not being able to do bad things to my characters.

Fast forward to me trying to wring some plot out of this piece of driftwood I’m calling a novel, and

DING!

I can practice doing no good, terrible, very bad things to this main character.

I mean, we don’t even like each other.

He’ll probably just give me roses again or something and thank me for the lovely time.

And if not, he’ll finally go away.

So this month I am practicing two things I’m not good at yet: chasing my characters into trees and throwing rocks at them, and working through a plot that isn’t singing along and playing nice from the beginning.

I’m going to write into the dark places. Make him a killer, maybe – thinking he’s doing the right thing. Lead him down rabbit holes while following bunnies stained black from the blood of their enemies. Let every single thing he cares about betray him and see how long he lasts.

Yes, this could be a good time after all. At least, once the screaming stops.

Speaking of dark things. Sometimes, there are beautiful dark things.

Day One

01 Jan 2012 1 Comment

by PartlyPixie in January Tags: , , , ,

2,008 of 50,000 words 

 The first day is usually the worst day for me.

I might be saying that because this is the first day, and I spent a long time deciding what to write. Ask me again at day fifteen, and I might say that the middle is the worst day because I’m getting stuck.

But for today, starting has been difficult.

I spend a lot of the first day staring at a blank page, shifting through the internet, fighting with myself. To start, I need a character I want to spend time with – any little clue is good enough; a scene, a gripe, a name. I sit and stare at the page and listen hard for the next character ready to be written.

It’s a little like getting a cat in a cat carrier. They run around and spread out their legs to hang on to the side, and hiss and growl and bite, and just when you finally get them in the box they disappear in some quantum physics-like maneuver and are running under the bed, and you’re wondering if you should call the vet and reschedule.

But eventually they get in the carrier and you slam the door down and they howl and protest and you wonder if you’ve made a mistake because of all the noise they’re making.

That’s how the first day usually goes for me.

I know that once I’m past these first few thousand words, I’m stuck with the character. I’ll be living with this person for at least a book and I need to like them, even if we don’t see from the same angle on everything. I have to sit and stare at the screen and interview them, see if they have what it takes to survive a story I’m writing. I sit and figure out where they don’t want to be – I ask what would upset their way of life, usually something small that will get bigger with time.

I start there – right when things start to go wrong.

Then, usually at the eleventh hour of the first day, I stop staring and get to typing.

It’s usually not great prose (otherwise known as a shitty first draft). I’ve learned over the years of NaNoWriMo to not be bothered. Words are words.

And a beginning is a beginning.

Hold on to something – this is really happening. 12 novels, still 12 to go.

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