Writing about Writing about Writing

Sometimes I write about writing. I don’t do this nearly as often as I should, because I don’t have meta-thoughts about writing that often.

I could write about exposition, for example. What wisdom do I have about exposition? Only the big one: Show, don’t tell. And the not so big one: Conversations can be a form of exposition if you’re not writing things like “Did you hear about Betty? She ran off with the milkman last week.”

I could write about writing characters. Where do my characters come from? They come from an amalgam of people and stories I have known. Then I “interrogate” the character to see if they feel consistent in who they are. I have conversations with the characters, I put them in situations. I talk to my husband about characters — for example, “Would they talk back to the police?” Gideon would; he tends to be human and somewhat anti-authoritarian. Most of my Archetypes and Nephilim would never talk back lest they be discovered. They’re not quite immortal, after all, and they would alarm the authorities. Luke would talk around the cops, though. He’s a lawyer, after all.

I could write about publishing. There are many steps to publishing yourself; some of them go surprisingly smoothly, like most of the process on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP for those in the know). Others become a great source of frustration, like putting my book cover up on KDP.

I could write about hitting it big as a writer. No, I can’t, because I have not hit it big. Nor is it likely that I will, but that’s okay. I have a story to write, and it nags me at night. My characters (Sage Bertinelli and Forrest Gray at the moment) demand to be written.

I need to write more about writing, because there are so many topics … thank you, Hannah, for obliquely suggesting this!

Getting to Know My Characters

I occasionally throw my characters into other situations where they have to have a close interaction with another character. This is the way my characters teach me who they are. These also become short stories to be included in short story collections (such as Stories Within Stories, which will be out January 1st.)

For example:

What does a vision quest look like in a big city?
How do two enemies interact when one is having a very bad day?
How do two characters navigate a cultural divide?
How do a human and an immortal negotiate having a child?
How do you confront a mythical creature?

There are hundreds of ways to write these, and I’ll argue that what really determines where the story goes are the characters. Two enemies that have millennia of conflict may have a rapport. How to confront that mythical creature may depend on whether it has kidnapped your grandma — and, for that matter, whether your grandma can take care of herself.

The thing, though, is that not only do the characters make the story, but the story turns around and makes the character. I learn new things about my characters from writing these stories, especially things like their vulnerabilities and idiosyncracies. Things that make my characters real.

I need another story to write!

Characters First

When I write a story, I begin with the characters, because without them there would be no story. The story is theirs; it’s my responsibility to get the characters and story on paper.

In the current story, Avatar of the Maker, there are three main characters: the sheltered but headstrong eighteen-year-old Leah Inhofer; her devoted half-Archetype boyfriend Baird Wilkens; and Luke Dunstan, a six-thousand-year-old Archetype.

From there, I want to know what their motivations are. Leah’s is to be independent, which seems contradictory to having a child on the way. Baird’s is to support Leah, however possible; another goal is to find his way into a human adulthood. Luke’s goal is to keep a calamity in the Archetypes from happening, weighing potential harm to Leah and her unborn child with harm to humanity if she doesn’t act.

Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Pexels.com

It’s necessary to get their speech cadence, their mannerisms, their word choice, all the things that make the characters distinctive and alive. Luke keeps pulling his blond hair back in a ponytail and letting it loose. Baird ducks his head sometimes because he’s shy. Leah talks emphatically; Baird talks in a slow drawl. Leah braids her hair tight. Luke’s accent is Yankee.

When I feel comfortable with these, I feel much more comfortable putting in the plot.

Feeling the Tug of Writing

It’s about time

I didn’t write yesterday, but I really wanted to. I was tired after a day of meetings and taking care of my husband (the stomach flu, not anything dangerous). But I felt the Spring in my bones, and I felt my muse over my shoulder and I wondered if I could get back into my story that needs writing.

Stories on the docket

I have, in fact, two stories that I could write. One of them is contemporary fantasy, taking place on my fictitious collective Barn Swallows Dance, and in the realm of the Archetypes, InterSpace. Changes happen such that the Archetypes are slowly being fired from their task carrying the essence of humanity and thus humans’ lives. The Archetypes explode at their sudden lack of purpose. The only person who can stop the bloodshed, if at all, is a pregnant eighteen-year-old girl who carries the gift of influencing history randomly. To do so, she faces the dangers of a human in InterSpace.

The other is fantasy romance, about a thirty-something librarian who encounters a charming neighbor who she falls for, to her friend’s surprise. When the man disappears, the librarian meets his goblin accomplice, and she embarks on a journey to rescue her man from a very possessive queen of Faerie.

So there are two stories that I could write — and a third option, which would be to come up with a new story. I don’t know that I have any knocking around my brain right now. I am inspired by the extrordinary relationships of ordinary people, the surprising things hidden in plain sight, and the unexpected consequences of seemingly ordinary things. And people, beautiful people who I can write fanciful things about.

All I need to do is write.

Character sheets — Brent and Sunshine

Today I’m going to play with character sheets for the two main characters in the next Kringle book, which I will be working on during NaNo in November.

One of the characters will be Brent Oberhauser. Brent is 29 years old, tall and slender. He would have ash blond hair if he were not shaving his head bald to hide his receding hairline. He has a pale beige complexion and ice blue eyes, and black framed glasses that somewhat conceal his striking good looks. This makes him a light summer in seasonal color analysis. He is a PhD candidate in Medievalist History whose dissertation is titled “Scandal and Secret: The Sex Lives of Clergy in the 1300s”. He works as a teaching assistant in the history department at University of Colorado-Denver and as a part-time barista at the cafe, which he does in part because of the social aspects.

His father was career Army in Civil Affairs. He spent 20 years in the military and left with the rank of Colonel; he is now a freelance consultant. His mother died when he was seven.

Brent has a somewhat contentious relationship with his father, mostly because of what his father calls his spacy demeanor. In reality, Brent is an idealist who masks his disappointment in humor. He loves music, including EDM and jazz, and he participates in a local medieval reenactment group. He dresses in shirt/tie/sweater and chinos to teach, sweaters and jeans casually, and jeans/t-shirt to work as a barista.

Meanwhile, Sunshine Watson is 5’5″, athletically built, with medium brown skin and black hair; its style tends to change often. Her seasonal color is dark winter. She works as an accountant for Yes, Virginia, a nebulous non-profit funding charitable Christmas works in the Denver area. She attended University of California Berkeley, and traveled for a couple years working as an accountant before moving to Denver. She moved to Denver because she wanted to live near the mountains.

Sunshine’s Dad — was career Army, spending 20 years working as a Horizontal Construction Engineer. He retired with rank of captain. He now is a contractor. Sunshine’s mother was an accredited financial counselor working with military personnel. She has been all over the world because of the military, and her parents made sure she was given a broad cultural background.

Sunshine has a sardonic way of looking at things, unless she’s talking about what she’s passionate about, such as travel and world cultures, her family, and justice. She is extremely experiential; she became an accountant to earn money toward her travels. She lives frugally so she can do so; she dresses sharply through sales and an interchangeable, classic wardrobe.

I feel like a murderer.

This edit of Apocalypse is a bit harder than I thought. I need to make our unlikely heroes more unlikely, and by that I mean they need to struggle more. They need to be less successful.

More of them, in other words, need to die.

I don’t like killing characters. Not because of sentiment; I would kill major characters if I didn’t need them for the plot. I’m just bad at writing death.

But my dev editor is very, very correct. This battle is going to have to be stacked against my protagonists and people are going to have to die.

In a Stuck Place

So I’ve been told by my developmental editor that I need to rewrite Apocalypse — not because it’s so bad, she says, but because it’s so good. My developmental editor, Chelsea Harper, knows her stuff and I know she’s right. Apocalypse is the combination of the second and third books I’d written, and I didn’t know things that I know now.

Still, I’m finding it hard to rewrite. First, because my semester is winding down, I have end-of-semester items in mind even when I’m not doing them yet, things like the final exam and projects to grade.

Second, because — well, basically what I have to do with the rewrite is:
1) Stretch out three chapters into the first third of the book
2) Rewrite the rest of the book with fewer points of view
3) Cut out some of the lag from the second half of the book
4) Add more tension and loss.

I think I can deal with 2-4 relatively easily, but I struggle with stretching out that first three chapters to eight chapters. I’ve tried outlining it (being a plantser, or someone who roughly outlines and fills in) but I don’t feel the inspiration.

I think I need to sit with it a while, talk with my characters and see what it is they want to do.

Wish me luck.

PS: To My Friends

If I base a character on you, it is not you. Seriously, if that were the case, I wouldn’t be able to kill off any of my characters.

More specifically:

Some characters only look like you.
Some characters have some of your basic characteristics (personality, looks, likes), but not your stories.
Some characters have your stories, but don’t share your basic characteristics.
Some characters are you from the Mirror Universe.

Why do I base my characters on people I know?

I can’t visualize people. Honestly, if I try to call up your face in my mind, your nose floats off somewhere and I can’t see your eyes. So, yeah, you have hair.
Apparently, from what I can see in Wattpad, everyone does this, except they base their characters on movie and TV stars. My characters are quirkier than that, so they look like you.
My friends (including you, reader, a friend I haven’t met) have cool stories.
My friends (including you, reader, etc), have rich personalities.

On the other hand, I once killed off my ex-husband in a novel after establishing him as a pathetic womanizer. I have a t-shirt that says “You are dangerously close to being killed off in my novel.” So I suppose there is some danger of being killed off by me. Sorry.

Quirky Characters I Have Known

I think what drives me to write is the characters. My characters have been known to show up in my imagination during coffee hour. For example:

I sit in my favorite coffeehouse at the moment, a Starbucks in an expansive space at the corner of our college library. Grzegorz visits — he orders tea and brews it strong. He folds his lanky frame into the chair and cups his hands around his tea as if it was his chance of salvation. His copper hair spills down his shoulders and gets into his eyes. He speaks with a low, sibilant voice, sometimes halting to find a word. “Did I ever tell you about the time I had to pass as a college professor?”

“No!” I exclaimed. “How did you do that?”

“It’s actually pretty easy. Wear a tweed jacket, put on nerd glasses, wear the hair in a man bun — the bun was so tight it gave me headaches — and explain nonsense in an authoritative manner.”

“Hey! I protested. “I resemble that remark!”

Grzegorz chuckles and makes a defiant face at me.

Kat pops in occasionally — I mean literally pops in, because she’s a hereditary time traveler. This is her “natural time”, but chances are she set a bounce point in her favorite place, Starved Rock 1958, to get here.

“Hey,” she says, standing by the table, gazing with ice blue eyes. “Do you know what the hell that blonde espresso is?”

“As far as I can tell, it’s a light roast put through the espresso machine.”

“There’s no there there, if you know what I mean.” She brushed back the lock of white in her otherwise black hair. “Ian says he wants a blonde espresso — “

Ian pops in, five inches shorter than Kat, his crinkly brown eyes merry in his freckled face. “We were playing hide-and-seek; it took me a while to figure out where she went,”he noted, putting his arm around Kat’s waist.

“I thought you’d never show up,” Kat scoffed. “I was about to get you a blonde cappuccino. Which is so far removed from coffee I might as well give you chocolate milk.”

“Hey, I like chocolate milk!” Ian protested.

Amarel, their* white-blond hair braided neatly down their back, sits down across from me, smiling with dimples showing. “Lauren,” they say, head propped on knuckles, china blue eyes focused on me, “Tell me about your writing.”

I had forgotten that Amarel was in training to be a social worker. “I’ve been struggling for a while. I’m demoralized because I can’t seem to get anyone to read my stuff.”

“You could,” they said, flexing their long fingers as their hands steepled, “write as if they are reading. And then maybe they will find you. Your words deserve to be heard.”

Maybe Amarel is right — maybe I need to write for my potential audience rather than mourning the lack of hits on this blog or on Wattpad. Moreso, maybe I need to write for Amarel, Grzegorz, Kat, and Ian. And all my other quirky characters.

*************

* Amarel is genderqueer, having been born with male and female genitals. This is a preferred gender pronoun form for them.

Potential

More than anything, I think the thing that inspires me when it comes to writing is the potential a story has. The potential to be read or heard, the potential to speak to someone’s condition, the potential to make someone laugh.

This is more important to me that simply writing for the joy of it. For me, the joy is from a human interacting with the humanity of my stories. My love of stories predates my love of writing, coming from a family where both sides excelled in their kind of stories. My dad’s family told hunting stories with a sense of slapstick and absurdity, except for the Native American tale about sacred white deer disguised as something my Grandfather had witnessed. My mother’s family loved wordplay, and very often my grandmother served as the “straight guy” a la vaudeville who would set up the play on words.

When I write characters, I want to bring them home for dinner and have a dinner party. When I write themes, I ask myself if they will entwine into my readers’ lives and change them. When I write plots, I think of my family stories and how they walked me into surprising places.

It’s good for me to think about why I write.

The situation is that I don’t have much patience. Much perseverance, but not much patience. Oh, well, I forgot to get that when I grew up. I’m trying new things now, like maybe small press even though I will be lucky to get 100 readers, and Wattpad, which is the massive marketplace of ideas with no curator.

Find me on Wattpad — you have to subscribe, but it’s free. Read my story collection as it develops. Say hi. Feel moved to interact with me.

Wattpad

And if you want to write me? lleachie AT gmail.com