Writers Block has a Purpose...

Hello, HI...

Ok, I'm a little excited at the moment, I haven't posted for a while, simply because I had got to a part in the writing process where I couldn't go any further without taking time out to refine the story I was telling.

I had to look back at the original story I set out to tell, and look at the story I was telling with what I had written so far, there was a great difference, with the introduction of a few key players, came a desire to know more about these characters, who they are?, where do they come from? and ultimately, where are they going?

Much time was needed to figure or map out the story again, how much of a major part shall these characters play, truth be told, the character's are Rebecca's (the main hummingbird) best friends, and have always been apart of the story, but now their lives past, present and future has become apart of the story too.

After much thinking and planning I was in Charles Dickens mode with my James Bond game face on, working out the story was tough, what to include, what to leave out, my imagination was doing over time, but then BANG!... the break-through, that moment, before the dust falls, settling, and there is a brief moment of clarity, the story outline was complete, but still more work was needed.

I had to make sure that the characters were convincing, hummm, Dialogue, this is what seals a character, the moment they open their mouth, you either fall in love with them, or don't, bad dialogue is a terrible terrible thing, a character builds up a reader, the way they are described to their actions and movement and expressions, body language, but it is sealed once the trap door is opened.

So I read over some of my dialogue in parts and was not best pleased, In my opinion ( I didn't seek a second lol) I had killed my characters with the dead dialogue I had written as they interacted with each other.

Dead dialogue is chunks of dialogue, not always long, or lengthy in words, just dialogue without emotion, no details of actions, movement or body language, it's very rare, if not impossible to see two or more people standing dead still just moving their lips when interacting with one another, just look out of the bus window if in doubt.

so after readjusting my story, I came across the 'dialogue problem' and wasn't sure how to fix it, I had not much practise of writing novels, let alone dialogue, but I had read a fantastic book with great dialogue 'The Hot Kid - Elmore Leonard' and I came across an interview where he [Elmore Leonard] mentioned something about dialogue when being questioned...*light bulb effect* *hello!* that was it I was off on one!

Elmore Leonard Interview part1

Off to find out as much as I could as quickly as I could about dialogue, with writers block again in my rear view mirror, I was off, Thelma and Louise style!

I found out a lot about the same thing with dialogue, 'less is more' and 'simple but effected' is a code to follow if you want to sweet talk your readers ;)

well enough talk about sweet talking I guess, I'm gonna give u a preview of the dialogue I have written that has me all shook up with excitement.

Crystal dawned in a wholesome chocolate brown outfit, that hugs her figure and shows off her curves, but in a tasteful way, topped off with a brown and gold coach hand bag and matching brown and gold coach patchwork ballet flats, with bow tied laces, she is cute and knows it, but never plays on it, crystal purity by name and nature it seems, she turns to Rebecca and reaches out squeezing her hand in excitement, “how are things with you and Richard bec’s?” “Yeah bec’s, Anniversary soon, nearly a year now isn’t?” Italy chimes smiling while dying to hear that things are good with the newly weds, Rebecca, not so excited, sends a soft message to the girlies exporting excitement across the table in her direction, she responds with levels of silence, like a brief pause, sipping her tea, preparing to get into story mode,”Crumbs, surely not that bad bec’s, -are they?” Michelle wonders as she joins the girlie's eagerly awaiting Rebecca’s answer, she puts her cup of tea down and crosses her fingers as every good story teller does, “things are alright” breaking her fingers apart, she takes another sip of her tea, as do the ladies, knowing there is more to come, “Go On” Italy says, egging Rebecca to tell more, as Michelle shoots Italy a look that reads “Just Wait” Michelle turns to Rebecca, “take your time love, we ain’t going now where” “Well, it’s just that since his mother passed away, God bless her soul…” “Indeed” Italy says agreeing; Michelle shoots her another look, this one reading “be quiet” this time Italy demonstrates a finger movement around her lips as if she is buttoning it, “go on Bec’s” Crystal says, “well, he’s changed, that’s all, I’m not quite sure why, but he has” Michelle listening, tilts her head towards Rebecca and takes a firmer tone, “he hasn’t hit you has he Bec’s?”

This is just a preview of the draft version, but it is a whole sight better than what was there before, I feel reading this back that these characters are alive, they are real, u know? I feel like I have cracked it, and even though it may not seen like a milestone to me it is, now I can progress with added time spent applying what I have learned and practising writing, my dialogue will only get better, sharper, and my characters more convincing, once they open their mouths, 'SOLD!' to the highest reader/s lol.

be back soon

much love

What Makes For Good Writing?

I came across this article on suite101's website and thought I'd post it here as it hit some good points regarding writing and what makes good writing.

Link

What makes for good writing? There are a thousand ways to go about answering this question. One might offer examples—Shakespeare, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. These are all writers who have produced good writing. But listing them doesn’t get at why they are good. And it offers no help to the writer who is wondering how to produce something striking, original, and moving.
A better approach is to turn the question around: What are the things that, if missing, make a piece of writing not good? Three essentials jump out right away. These are: practice, trust, and judgment.

Practice

In a recent interview, the Australian writer Helen Garner said: “…you've got to practice every day. It's like practicing an instrument if you're a musician or keeping your tools sharpened. After many years of daily practice… you actually build up a competence.”
More laconically, Cormac McCarthy put it : “If you’re going to be a writer, then writing is what you have to do.”

These successful authors are on to something. Daily writing is the place to innovate, experiment, try on other voices. It’s exercise, not unlike jogging, swimming laps or working out at a gym, that keeps you fit, trim, well-trained.

Be disciplined: set a goal—one hour, so many words—and do it everyday. A lack of daily practice will show in a piece of writing.

Trust

If practice is like daily exercise, trust works as the metabolic centre of the writing process. It’s what fuels good writing. This element is about having a good relationship with your creative self and works in several ways:
Knowing when to listen – Certain ideas and themes resonate for a reason. It’s because you have something to say about a particular subject.
Believing in the inner work – If the time is not right, forcing it won’t come to any good. There is a really important purpose to writer’s block, and this should be paid attention to.
Drawing from the well – Having a notebook on hand to jot ideas down as they occur is one method. Some writers never do this, however. They test the value of an idea by letting it surface over and over.

Communicating honestly – Find your voice. Be authentic. Write what you know. Find a way to put yourself and your experiences into the story.

Attempting to control the process, writing prematurely or in the wrong genre, and being inauthentic in any way will show in the quality of the writing.

Judgment

Everyone’s heard the saying: one part inspiration, ten parts perspiration. Inspiration comes from trusting in the writing process; judgment is all about perspiration. It’s the conscious grind, bringing the intellect to bear on each and every aspect of the process.
In other words, if practice is what keeps one in shape as a writer, and trust is the metabolic system—the inner work—of writing, then judgment is involved with the actual performance. It’s the ‘big game’, where a writer gets to apply training, draw from the well of creativity, and produce a fine piece of writing.

It requires rigour, energy, stamina: How many drafts are needed to get it right? How much reshaping? Careful editing is essential. Hemingway noted: “The mark of a good book is how much good writing you cut out of it.” Stephen King advises: “Be prepared to murder your darlings”.

It’s a good idea to read your work out loud. Wherever you stumble, make a change. There is a story floating around writer’s festivals about a writer that holds herself to account in the following way: Before she submits any piece of writing, she performs a ritual. She goes into the bathroom, takes off her clothes, stands before the mirror and reads it out loud. Asked why she does this, she says: "Because if I’m there naked in front of the mirror, I can’t hide and I can’t lie."

Conclusion

The more one practices, the more one trusts in the process, and the more one exercises experienced judgment, the better the writing will be. It’s a simple approach that will lead to honest, living prose.

Character Details...

Name

Age

Place of birth

Marital Status

Appearance

Style

Family

Parents

Kids

Siblings

Friends

Pets

Hobbies

Strengths

Weakness

Occupation

Passions

Pet Peeves

Flaws

Fears

Contradiction

Most traumatic event

Most wonderful experience

The major struggle, past and present


I've come to a point where I'm feeling a little lethargic, I haven't written much in the last few days and have taken my eye slightly off the ball, and the prize to that matter, but I have pushed a little forward, and I'm beginning to feel a little excited, understanding feelings are just merely feelings and we should press on regardless.

Above is a brief character description / layout, this helps to make flat characters rounder, more real, understanding who they are is crucial to writing them as convincing characters, -feel free to copy the above and use it for your own purposes, film, TV, radio, books, anywhere where character development is needed.

Hope it helps, :)

Quote... sticking to ya guns...

"I like it, so I'm gonna write it" - M. Wint

A simple quote that describes my thoughts while I was deciding which direction to head in while writing up a typical day for one of the main characters (Richard), a sort of fly on the wall type of view, following him in his everyday movements, I was writing a piece of the story, like a freestyle, I rarely think too far ahead, I like to give myself enough room when writing, but I came to a point where I wanted to add a minor character into the story, I wasn't sure why or what purpose he would serve at the time, but I had a name and feel for the character in mind, I stopped to think about it and concluded my thinking by saying, I like it (the idea of introducing a small character at that point) so I'm gonna write it, and so I did, as it developed this little bit of writing, it added some much needed interaction with one of the main characters of the story in bringing out some of his character - happy days...

Always follow ya gut!

"I like it, so I'm gonna write it" - M. Wint

Round and Flat Characters

Source

Most of the characters in the above examples could be called round characters because they have three dimensions, like a ball. These characters are complex, possessing conflicting traits. me. Loisel is both frivolous and responsible. The Swede is paranoid yet insightful. John Marcher is sensitive yet callous. In writing, you must not oversimplify – that is, create flat characters. (It’s all right to have flat characters as part of a setting but not as part of an interactive community, the cast of your story.)

Flat characters have few traits, all of them predictable, none creating genuine conflicts. Flat characters often boil down to stereotypes: fat, doughnut-eating cop; forgetful professor; lecherous truck driver; jovial fatso; shifty-eyed thief; anorexic model. Using these prefab characters can give your prose a semblance of humor and quickness, but your story featuring them will have about as much chance of winning a contest as a prefab apartment in a competition of architects. Even more damaging, you will sound like a bigot. As a writer you ought to aspire toward understanding the varieties of human experiences, and bigotry simply means shutting out and insulting a segment of population (and their experiences) by reducing them to flat types.

But can you have a character without types? What would literature be without gamblers or misers? The answer, I believe, is simple: Draw portraits of misers, but not as misers – as people who happen to be miserly. And if while you draw misers as people you feel that you fail to make characters but do make people, all the better. Ernest Hemingway said, ‘‘When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.’’ So, give us people. (‘‘Give me me.’’) Let the miser in me come to life – and blush – reading your story.

Take one of the stereotypes mentioned (shifty-eyed thief, jovial fatso, etc.) or use one of your own. Write a brief scene in which you portray that character in a complex way, going against the usual expectations.

Examples:

the bullying headmaster with a tender sentimental side;
the meticulous manager who lives in a messy house;
the shy librarian who goes bungee-jumping;
the habitual flirt who avoids relationships.

Check what you've written to see if you've shown the character in a sympathetic light. If your portrayal seems distant or aloof, rewrite it. Try to identify more closely with the character. If you haven't already used the first person (‘I’), write it in the character's own voice. Does that makes a difference?

(I'll post my soon - see what you think.)

Characterization

Source: Novakovich, J. (1995) Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Cincinnati,
Ohio: Story Press, ‘Character’, pp.48–66; ‘Setting’, pp.25–42.

&

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=169781&direct=1


Most people read fiction not so much for plot as for company. In a good piece of fiction you can meet someone and get to know her in depth, or you can meet yourself, in disguise, and imaginatively live out and understand your passions. The writer William Sloan thinks it boils down to this: ‘‘Tell me about me. I want to be more alive. Give me me.’’

If character matters so much to the reader, it matters even more to the writer. Once you create convincing characters, everything else should easily follow. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, ‘‘Character is plot, plot is character.’’ But, as fiction writer and teacher Peter LaSalle has noted, out of character, plot easily grows, but out of plot, a character does not necessarily follow. To show what makes a character, you must come to a crucial choice that almost breaks and then makes the character. The make-or-break decision gives you plot.

Whether or not there’s a change in you, character is not the part of you that conforms, but rather, that sticks out. So a caricaturist seeks out oddities in a face; big jaws, slanted foreheads, strong creases. The part of the character that does not conform builds a conflict, and the conflict makes the story. Find something conflicting in a character, some trait sticking out of the plane, creating dimension and complexity. Make the conflict all-consuming, so that your character fights for life. (I would add to this by saying whether the character is aware of this fight or not, the conflict, fight is essential).

Examples

Think of the basic character conflicts in successful stories. ‘‘The Necklace’’ by Guy de Maupassant: Mme. Loisel, unreconciled to her lower-class standing, strives to appear upper class, at all costs. Out of that internal conflict ensues the tragedy of her working most of her adult life to pay for a fake necklace.

‘‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses’’ by Irwin Shaw: Though married and in love with his wife, a young man is still attracted to other women.

In Henry James’ ‘‘The Beast in the Jungle’’: John Marcher waits for some extraordinary passion to take hold of him; he dreams of it so much that he does not notice he is in love with May Bertram, who is at his side all along. Only when she dies, of neglect, does he realize it.

In ‘‘The Blue Hotel’’ by Stephen Crane: The Swede, visiting a small town in rural Nebraska, imagines that he is in the wild West and consequently sets himself against a bar of ordinary people whom he imagines as gamblers and murderers.

In all these stories, characters suffer from a conflicting flaw. Aristotle called these character flaws hamartia – usually interpreted as ‘‘tragic flaw’’ (most often hubris or arrogance) when we talk about tragedies. Sometimes, however, a flaw may not lead to disaster, but to a struggle with a subsequent enlightenment.

A flaw could result also from an excessive virtue. Look at the opening of Michael Kohlhaas by the early nineteenth-century German writer Heinrich von Kleist:

Michael Kohlhaas ... owned a farm on which he quietly earned a living by his trade; his children were brought up in the fear of God to be industrious and honest; there was not one of his neighbors who had not benefited from his goodness and fair-mindedness – the world would have had every reason to bless his memory, if he had not carried one virtue to excess. But his sense of justice turned him into a robber and a murderer.

Since his horses were abused at a border crossing between two principalities, and he could not get a just compensation in courts, Kohlhaas takes justice into his hands and burns down the castle where the horses suffered. In addition, he burns the city of Dresden, which protected the offenders. His sense of justice provokes a war. His uncompromising virtue may amount to vice – certainly it’s a flaw, the plot-generating flaw.

The dictum that ‘character is plot, plot is character’, attributed to Henry James (in Novakovich, 1995) is a familiar one, similar to Shakespeare's ‘Character is destiny’ (from King Lear). This is not to say that what happens to characters is inevitable or predetermined. It's simply that particular characters seek or attract certain events or encounters. If you start by building a strong sense of your main character or characters, then add a dilemma, challenge or conflict, you will automatically be generating your plot. Starting the other way around, with a chain of events into which you then fit characters, can often be more difficult and less convincing.
Character + conflict=plot

Inspiration from Charles Dickens...

Source

Many of his character's names provide the reader with a hint as to the roles played in advancing the storyline, such as Mr. Murdstone in the novel David Copperfield, which is clearly a combination of "murder" and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism.

Dickens is famed for many things—his depiction of the hardships of the working class, his intricate plots, his sense of humour. But he is perhaps most famed for the characters he created. His novels were heralded early in his career for their ability to capture the everyday man on paper and thus create a memorable character to whom readers could relate, and envision as a real person. Beginning with Pickwick Papers in 1836, Dickens wrote numerous novels, each uniquely filled with believable personalities and vivid physical descriptions. Dickens's friend and biographer, John Forster, said that Dickens made "characters real existences, not by describing them but by letting them describe themselves."

Dickensian characters—especially their typically whimsical names—are among the most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Pip, Miss Havisham, Charles Darnay, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heep and many others are so well known and can be believed to be living a life outside the novels that their stories have been continued by other authors.[citation needed]
The author worked closely with his illustrators supplying them with an overall summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his vision of his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them to be.

He would brief the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work on the two illustrations could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy."

This close working relationship with his illustrators is important to readers of Dickens today. The illustrations give us a glimpse of the characters as Dickens described them to the illustrator and approved when the drawing was finished. Film makers still use the illustrations as a basis for characterization, costume, and set design in the dramatization of Dickens' works.

Often these characters were based on people that he knew. In a few instances Dickens based the character too closely on the original and got into trouble, as in the case of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, based on Leigh Hunt, and Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield based on his wife's dwarf chiropodist. These are not over-dramatized caricatures, but believable people we might seen walking down the street. Indeed, the acquaintances made when reading a Dickens novel are not easily forgotten. The author, Virginia Woolf, maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks."

I found this information very insightful as I read through it, I realised that character names have an important part to play in drawing a character, it's not something to be overlooked.