Creative Writing 101 :: Character Creation, Part II

Delving a little bit deeper into the characters here, just a few more points I wanted to add to the previous character-based entry.

Understand your characters. If you write characters alien to you, they aren't deep enough to hold a reader's interest. They become flat, unchanging, and too shallow for anyone to understand. Make sure that your main characters (at least) contain a part of you, you can relate to, make sure you spend time trying to put yourself into the mind frame of your creation. Flat characters are all right in short stories sometimes, because they're too short to actually develop them properly. But in a novel's case, you have to be able to know who they are.

Remember, there's always a motive. The main motives are love, power, safety, and revenge. Does your hero seek power for himself, to rule in wisdom and justice and the American Way? Or perhaps to set himself up as an evil overlord? (For once, I'd like to see a smart bad guy. They all seem to be the most inept dolts.) Is his (or her) love being held hostage, or does she (or he) demand that the hero accomplish some feat before they wed? Do raiders regularly descend on his village and carry off random people? Give the bad guys motives, too. Simply being evil doesn't cover everything.

Killing off Characters: Don’t do it unless crucial to the plot!! Even though death is natural, Don’t do it for shock value. That’s basically telling us that you didn’t have anything interesting to say. You could akin it to adding cursing into music. If a song is all foul language the general public takes it as the artist not having any originality to express their emotions. With prose, and killing off characters, it's the same, it's letting your reader know, if there is not a solid reason behind it, that you don't have an original way in taking the character away for a while, or out of the story all together, without their death. Definitely don’t do it if you’re telling the story in first person. It leaves the reader confused.

Here's a list of a few things to consider when you are creating your characters (Possibly to add to your Character 'sheets':

1. Name (You have 26 letters of the alphabet to work with here and a myriad of possibilities. Don't stick with standard names like Bob, Tom, Dick and Jane. It's BORING)
2. Gender
3. Nationality (How many nationalities are there on the planet? find one that fits the character!)
4. Parents names/occupations
5. Brief description (height, weight, blood type, hair/eye/skin color... prominent features? Scars? Tattoos?)
6. Education
7. Major illnesses in history?
8. Major family tragedies?
9. Has/had pets? What animals? What names?
10. What does the character do for a living?
11. Favorite food/music/TV Show/Colors
12. Where do they live? How nice a place is it? Where is it?
13. Do they have a life goal? if so, what is it? if not, find them one.
14. Religion?
15. Brief Background Overview.
16. ETC . . .

Considering I feel characters are the driving force to any good Novel, I will probably add additional revelations as they come about to me. For now . . .

Cheers!

~Hoshi

Creative Writing 101 :: Character Creation, Part I

So, among other discoveries I have made along the way, one of the major things I have uncovered in my writing is the means by which to completely flesh out a character. There are a few different ways to go about this, and I will share with you a couple of them right now.

You should ALWAYS give your audience at least one character that they can root for or connect with.

Write out background information for your characters. This cannot be stressed enough. Even if no one else sees the complete ’character sheet’, this will allow you to help flush out the character’s past, and possibly give you some additional plot points that you can explore in the story. It seems like a lot of extra work, but it will give you as a writer, a glimpse into the Character’s Psyche. I always find it's so much more satisfying to find characters who have flaws, and play up those flaws in any way I can. No one is perfect, and anyone who says they are is lying to you. Giving characters flaws, be it alcoholism, kleptomania, or even just having the innate urge to always tell the truth no matter what, adds verisimilitude and a lot of interesting character interaction to the plot.

Diversity is key in character creation. Everything from personality to their names are important to who they are. Looks and personality of the character aside, the most important part of characters are their names. A character’s name is the reader’s first impression of them, and is a major defining factor to whether the reader likes or dislikes the character. In my experience I have noticed that I tend to flesh out the past and personalities of my characters before I name them. That way the name will fit the character. If I do it the other way around, well . . . you get a lot of baggage that way. For example, if you name your character Charlie, you can imagine all the Charlie brown songs running through your mind. Or if your reader had a bad experience with a girl named Rebecca, then they won’t like your Rebecca, despite Rebecca being the Heroin who owns a pet store and spends her weekends with underprivileged kids because she brings back bad memories to that reader.

While, granted, you can’t know who has wronged who all over this planet, you can get rid of the baggage of Celebrity names by RESEARCHING. I can’t stress that enough. Find an obscure name, a name that fits the character. Honestly, do not be surprised if after you have written half the book you want to change a character’s name. Whether it’s for plot line or fate or irony in the story itself, I have been known by my beta readers to just have place-holder names for my characters until the name I really wanted hit me in the face. Search Google for baby naming websites an ancient names and research the meaning of the names for the characters. You will surprise yourself with the abundance of creativity that flows from that research.

On that note, develop your characters, develop your characters, and develop your characters. Stories generally aren't about what happens to characters, but rather, how characters react to what happens to them.

Be a sadist. No, really. Be evil to them. Do terrible, awful things to them. No matter how sweet or innocent your leading characters, make dreadful things happen to them to show the reader what they can really do. Don't be afraid to make your characters FAIL. I read many stories where the main character, while not a Mary Sue by any stretch of the imagination, WON everything all the time. It gets redundant and boring. When a character fails, you want to pick them up and tell them to go for it again, or to try something different. When a character fails, that’s when you start to see who they really are, and what they are capable of doing.

Finally, remember, EVERY character should want something, even if it’s only a glass of water. While yes, the characters react to what happens to them; a lot of the time it is the characters themselves who drive the plot line forward.

More on character creation later.

Cheers,
~Hoshi

Playing God

I wonder if it’s all that common for authors to dream about their characters. I would have to think so. Seeing as we spend so much time with them, almost daily, they would have to slip into our unconscious at some point. I wonder how many authors actually listen to their characters in those dreams. Probably not enough. Usually they tell us things we need to know, like how THEY want the story to end, or where they would like to have the opportunity to do away with their personal antagonist once and for all. Granted, we don’t always have to give-into their wishes—sometimes demands, seeing as we are, in effect, God to them; but on the same note, I think we should listen to them at the very least.

We are the ones who breathe life into, and sometimes snatch it away, from them. We owe them the time and the ear to listen. These characters in the most basic of senses are part of us, the author. Ignoring what they have to say to you not only stifles your creativity and the story line itself, but it’s also you not listening to you.

I remember a year and a half or so back, after the rough draft of EH was completed, I was working on a very difficult scene while on break at my job. I was going back over what is now going to be a later book in the series, to where I kill off a character who was an integral part to the EH plotline. I had every character who had ever met the one who was doomed screaming at me to let them stop it from happening. When my characters cried, I couldn’t take it anymore. I broke down while writing that scene and no one around me understood why. While they all kept asking if I was alright, and why all of the sudden I lost control, part of me laughed inside. It was something that they wouldn’t have ever been able to understand. A connection that none of them had.

It’s very difficult to describe that sort of thing to people. How you’re ecstatic when you finally find a way to help the characters along on their journey, and how you want to curl up and die when you see that the best way to go about a situation is to destroy a person that you’d put so much heart and soul into.

Don’t get me wrong, I love playing God . . . . but there are times when things just can’t end happily ever after.


On that note, I'll probably have a character profile or two up within the next day or so.

Cheers,

~Hoshi

Creative Writing 101 :: Begin at the Beginning

• All poetry has to rhyme/meter

• Each piece of writing must have layers upon layers of meaning

• You must follow grammar and punctuation avidly

• You must write something profound

• Everything must be formatted perfectly

¡¡¡WRONG!!!

Part of the reason I began this Blog was to get some of my personal writing theories and experiences out into the open. These posts will be know as my 'Creative Writing 101' posts. Now, a little bit of information before you bite my head off: That term, ‘Creative writing 101’ is a loaded term; And I’ll let you in on a little secret by saying that in all actuality, *Grabs the nearest megaphone* There IS NO formula to writing. If there were, we’d all be the next J.R.R. Tolkein or Stephen King. However here you will be able to slowly begin to piece the puzzle together and start to open up yourself to more and more ideas of how to help your writing as well as help others with their writing.
Every one of these is up for discussion on any level. Disagree with me? Cool, comment about it. I want to hear all points of view about the creative writing process. I have never published a novel, and will not pretend to know all of the ins and outs of the creative muses. A lot of my theory stems from personal experience coupled with advice I have received from seasoned veterans of the literary world. Take what you will of it, and yes! please discuss it!

Now for some elaboration on the above, I would like to bring to the table some 'pointers' regarding story lines.

• Use the time of a total stranger in a way that [s]he will not feel the time was wasted

• Start as close to the end as possible.

• Write to please yourself first!

• Give details and background! Make the reader feel as if they are part of the action, part of the story.

• Literary agents are your friends (no, not the kind that you pay). Metaphors, allusions, even hyperbole, they are there to make your writing better. Use them.

• To keep your writing from becoming dry and boring, use sentences of differing length. It keeps the flow from tricking to obscurity or washing away a reader in a flood or run-on sentences.

• Avoid Clichés like the plague. Unless it’s intended to sound that way.

• Research! Research, Research, Research!! Especially when it comes to Non-fiction. You should know every detail that you can about what you are writing about.

Questions? comments? let me know! I will elaborate as best I can in every way I can.

for now, Cheers!

~Hoshi

Greetings and Welcome!

Good morning one and all. First off I would like to thank you for dropping by one of my little corners of the interwebs. I don’t know how well this will go considering the fact that I have tried things like this before and never kept up with them, but I hope that this time around it will be different. I avoid the tl;dr posts I will make this brief. I am an artist and writer and this blog is here to document the ups and downs of the writing process (and maybe some art dumps in the interim).

The novel that I am currently focused on is called Ethereal Heart. It is the first book in a series of novels that I plan to complete. Ethereal Heart is co-authored by Ashley Lorenzo, a good friend with an amazing imagination. She has gone above and beyond any expectations I could ever have hoped to set as far as a partner in writing goes.

Ethereal Heart is currently in the second draft and I’ve been struggling with a lot of the elements to it. The story was actually never supposed to go this far. It was meant as a role play to develop characterization and to gather some new perspectives on the way of telling the story that I was writing at the time, which contained a couple of the characters from said novel. It’s amazing to me how wonderfully things like that develop!

So, after three years in production just to get this far, I think that I am finally ready to start on the final steps to publishing. This is a Blog to learn, to teach, and hopefully meet some fellow writers along the way.

Being that it’s late and I’ve already gone beyond my tl;dr promise, I will update again tomorrow with some additional information and other literary goodness.

Cheers!

~Hoshi

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