Praying for Japan

I woke up this morning to the news of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.  There's so much happening in the aftermath of this--people who are missing, dead, people who lost loved ones and homes, people who are without electricity.  My thoughts and prayers are with the people there and everyone affected by this.

Japan Earthquake

Developing Characters, Part 1: Motivation

You know the part in Galaxy Quest when Jason is stuck on the planet with the rock monster?  (If you do not know what I'm talking about because you have not seen Galaxy Quest--*gasp*--go watch it.  Right now.  Okay, or later. Sometime.)  Anyway, Jason's on this planet, trying to figure out how to defeat the rock monster.

There's a line that Alexander gives him:  "Well, you're just going to have to figure out what it wants.  What is its motivation?"

That's the thing about characters.  Every single one of them wants something in his/her life, for his/her life, for someone else in his/her life.  Human beings are complex.  Our emotions and thoughts and dreams are many.  There are ulterior reasons for doing things.  There are things we don't even realize until someone else points them out or we have an epiphany about why we're so motivated in one way or another.  There are quiet dreams and loud dreams.  And as many emotions and thoughts and dreams as there are, there are so many personalities to go with them.

I'd like to be able to say, "This is exactly how you write a well-rounded character!" but I can't.  There's no clear-cut way to write--everyone is so very, very different in how they approach writing.  Everyone has a style.  Everyone has a way they work best.  Music while writing, no music while writing.  Absolute quiet is needed, or can work around a hundred people talking.  And so on.

But every character is a person who exists on a page.  Every character has something they want, and if you can find at least one thing, you can develop that character much better.  It can be something that seems simple: a twelve-year-old who is desperate to fit into school.  It can be something that seems more complicated: a college student whose dream is to travel the world, train dolphins, and start a charity--but first, they have to figure out how to get out of the cellar that their evil, identical cousin locked them in and stop him from switching human brains with monkey ones.

So what does your character want?  And next, why do they want it?  Why do they do what they do?  Maybe they want to do something because of their parents or their friends, or because they saw a play in high school, or because becoming a mad genius who switches human and monkey brains sounded wizard, or because they watched an episode of Doctor Who and decided they wanted to find out if they could really grow a time machine.

Sometimes it takes a lot of digging and poking and prodding before I can figure out what my character really wants.  Sometimes they dance around in crazy circles and scream at the top of their lungs about what they're going to do and why.

You have to find out what your characters' motivations are.  I know some people write character interview questions and see how each character would answer the questions. Some people dive in and start writing to see what happens as it goes along.

Remember, motivations can change.  Sometimes, it's crucial in a character journey that their motivations change.  But then you will have new motivations, a new goal the character wants to work toward.  It takes patience, and persistence, and sometimes some banging of the head against the keyboard when your characters announce entirely new plans halfway through your novel.

But that's half the fun. Er, not the banging-the-head-on-keyboard part, but having fresh goals and character growth.


Do you have certain ways you learn about your characters?  Do you struggle with finding out what they want?

Stay tuned for the next post on characters, all about perspectives.

Plans! I have them!

Tomorrow, I am going to attempt to start being a better blogger and actually structure out some future writing posts and soon put the first one up.

Only time will tell if this plan falls into disastrous ruin.  So, until tomorrow!  Er, or later today, since it technically is tomorrow.

*runs off to bed*

The End

Writing the end of a book can be a lot of things.  Easy.  Hard.  Daunting.  Terrifying.  Exhilarating.  Sad.  Exciting.  Some mixture of these or other things.  The end of a book can bring closure, or it can leave you hanging--either because it was the author's intention to leave some things open for your interpretation or for thought, or because you're working on a sequel and you need something to carry you over to the next book.

I have a novel that I've been writing for over a year now.  It was originally supposed to be one book, but it got a bit too long and so now I'm writing two books.  This is fine and dandy, except I have reached The End of the first book.

I've not yet written The End.  I've reached the last chapter, which means I have to write an ending.  I have been struggling with how best to do this for the past couple of days.  Every time I write something for the last chapter, it doesn't quite have the effect I want it to have.  Nothing quite clicks, nothing quite works.  If this book could have a happy ending, I would be all set, but alas, I am in that precarious place where I need to have some closure, yet have something drastic happen so that people will (hopefully) want to read the sequel.

I have considered many things.  Character deaths!  Kidnappings!  Assassinations! 

Except nothing seems to work.

I could go with a much calmer ending--just give the characters a little nudge on their way, except I kind of want this to go out with a bang.  (This is not necessarily a metaphor: I have considered explosions, too.)

There are a lot of emotions that go into finishing a book.  Part of me will be very relieved when this story is done and I can write the sequel.  A sequel means exploring new paths, digging deeper into the characters, discovering that those characters have plans I've not yet uncovered.  (And when I object to their plans, they will ignore me and do whatever they darn well please anyway.)  It means jumping into the new unknown.

It means jumping into the unknown.  O_O

 
For me, this is exhilarating and terrifying.  I have to let go of a book that has been more work than anything I have ever written in my life.  I have to walk from a plot that has been smoothed over a million times* into a plot that is going to be messy and unpredictable.  I will have familiar characters to help me along the way, but it will still be work.  Hard, hard work.

*this might be a slight exaggeration

At this moment, I want more than anything to have this book finished.  I want The End, and I want it to help me start my next book.  I just wish I knew how to best do that.  Finish one book satisfactorily and build a bridge to the second book--it's not a lot to ask, right?

Riiiiight.

Contest Time!

My co-author, Faith King, and I are having a contest where one person will win a signed copy of Restoration Book 1: Awakenings.  For details on how to enter, please visit our LiveJournal blog here:

"Awakenings" Contest

The "and other randomness" part of this blog.

First, I think it should be said that I get this award:



Because my last blog post was December 1st.  I said I was going to come back once my brain wasn't a pile of mush, but then December was gone and then January was here, and I was thinking that I should do a post, and then suddenly it was past the middle of January.  I think there's a little fairy around here that has stolen some of my days, because how is it already January 18th?  O_O

My life these past weeks has been full of struggling to write, spurts of writing, homeschooling, Christmas, family, friends, and a lot of other things.  And here I've been, randomly looking at my blog as if it were a bomb waiting to go off and the only way I could disable it was to actually post something, and yet...there was nothing.

So I have decided to share a random moment of my life.  A random moment that actually happened about half an hour ago, when my five-year-old daughter scared me half to death.  She was getting ready for bed, and went into the downstairs bathroom.  No sooner had she walked in there than she came running out as if a monster was on her heels.  She was screaming bloody murder and crying big, frantic crocodile tears.




Then she shouted,




My heart was not pounding quite so loudly then and I did the Nice Mommy thing and reassured her, and went to see this cockroach.

The thing was pretty big, but it was also lying on its back and wiggling its legs in the air.




It escaped before I could find something to catch it with.  I may not be afraid of cockroaches, but I kind of have this thing with touching giant wiggling bugs.  Or tiny wiggling bugs.  And I absolutely cannot squash a big bug, because it crunches and ewwwww I'm shuddering just thinking about the horrible, awful, wretched sound of crunching bugs.




Anyway.  I got my kids tucked into bed, and then went back to the bathroom to see if the cockroach was hiding out again.  I found it under the kids' stepping stool and it met its end with spray bottle of bleach and a flush down the toilet.



The point of this story?

Yeah, I don't really have one except that cockroaches are nasty and wiggly bugs creep me out.

Random Post is Random. AKA "Laura's Glee Over Pre-designed Speech Bubbles."

At the end of October, I got a laptop as a late birthday present.  I named it Momo, because I am a very big fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender and hello, it's Momo.  He is adorable.



Never mind that my laptop is black and does not have pointy ears. I could easily imagine my power cord being a tail, but this is beside the point. It has been fantastic to have a laptop after about six years of using a desktop.  (Especially during the frantic typing of NaNoWriMo.)  And then I discovered that the Paint program on my new computer comes with speech and thought bubbles. This made me very excited. I was all "YEA!! THIS IS AWESOME!" because they're much prettier and simpler than trying to draw the bubbles with a mouse and a pointer.

Hey, it's the little things.

In the meantime, I have been very bad about updating this blog. I am going to blame November. I did NaNoWriMo and I had a book signing in the middle of the month.


#proofofbooksigning

I got very sick right after the book signing, my kids were sick, my parents came for Thanksgiving, I had homeschooling to do, and I finished my NaNo story. It ended up being less than fifty thousand words, because I got to the end and realized that there were no filler scenes that I wanted to add and nothing else I wanted to say in the story. So instead of typing out thousands of more words that I knew I didn't want and that I would just cut as soon as NaNo was over, I worked on another novel to get to my fifty thousand words. (Yes, I suppose I technically cheated, but I don't care. I wrote a book, worked on one that needed it, and accumulated 50,000 words.  For me, NaNoWriMo was a success!)

All of this to say: I have been busy and I am terrible blogger. Here I am trying to think of something worthwhile to say and all I can do is post pictures of cartoon lemurs and my excitement over pre-made speech bubbles.



See, I'm hopeless.

Well, I suppose given that NaNoWriMo just ended, I should talk a little bit about what to do with a first draft. You may need time to just wait and let it sit for a while, give yourself some time and space from it, but when you are ready to face it again, what you do is very simple.

Edit. Rewrite sentences/paragraphs/scenes/chapters/half the book that need to be rewritten. Wash, rinse, repeat. Give your story to people whose opinions you trust so that they can tell you where your weak points are. If they tell you they cried, make sure you know if the tears were because of some bit of unexpected brilliance on your part or if they're weeping because the story is so terrible that they burned their eyes trying to read it. If the latter is the case, find out how you can fix it. Then edit some more. About the time when you are like this--


--then your story might be about ready. You might set it aside for a little while and come back to it again after this stage, because it's amazing what a little bit of time can do to give you a fresh perspective.

For all of you writers out there, what do you like to do once you have a first draft? What tips and tricks have you found work best for you when whipping your newly finished book into shape?

That is all I have for today. I shall return when my brain doesn't feel so much like this: