Tag Archives: writing

by

Problems with my main character

As I work through the first few chapters of my current story yet again, one of the main issues I’m trying to address is a weak protagonist. For the last re-write of these chapters I intentionally focused on him having a lack of confidence. I thought this would be a good way to show the character grow as he regained that trait and took charge of his particular situation. Turns out this wasn’t a good idea. The entire story was written so that a protagonist without confidence simply isn’t believable. Damn. Now what?

Another aspect of this character is that he has been born with a special gift of magic. It’s a gift he doesn’t trust, and if anyone knew of it, he’d be ostracized. Not only that, it’s a gift he’d never been taught to fully exploit. There are some other twists to it, but this is the gist. By the end of the story, he will have learned the trick of commanding the better part of his real power, and use it to win the day. At first glance, it’s a pretty subtle bit of character development, but when I look back at what he goes through, it’s not really subtle. In fact, it’s the key change he undergoes through the story. From that perspective, it makes perfect sense that I should focus on his magic as the dynamic element, especially since most of the story revolves around his learning of magic. The next step is to go through each chapter and re-write to make him confident, perhaps to a fault, and instead focus on magic as the key aspect of character development. With luck, this change will make the story more interesting, believable and engaging. If not, well, I’ll just revise again.

by

Starting in the right place

I’ve been struggling with the first chapter of my story for some time, not the prologue, but the first-chapter proper. Part of the reason for this is that it was a breakthrough chapter for me when I wrote it, although it took me a long time to realize that. It had initially been a part of a different character’s back-story, and when I made it the starting point for my story, a lot of stuff started clicking into place. As a result, I was rather married to the first iteration of it. Then, I asked some friends to read it, they all said the same thing: It really doesn’t work with the rest of the story. It wasn’t that it didn’t fit the plot, it was the tone and direction that first chapter seemed to set out that wasn’t working. So, I revised it. The feedback I got on that was better, more along the lines of, this works way better, but it needs a lot of polishing. That felt better in terms of review and ego, but the chapter still doesn’t, in fact, work with the rest of the story. There are a lot of reasons for this, it still has vestigial bits and pieces from the original chapter so it has an uneven tone. The main character is still also not defined well enough, of course this causes other problems moving forward, there’s also a bit of that plausibility issue as well. So, I’ve decided to make another crack at it. This is largely because having that chapter so rough bothers me. I want it to be the best chapter of the book. It really needs to be if I expect anyone to actually pick it up.

I spent a lot of time today avoiding writing, not because I didn’t want to, but because I was letting this problem stew in my mind. Finally, I spent an hour working on the first couple of paragraphs (this is almost always a bad sign for me, unless there’s another real distraction in the room). After re-reading what I’d puked out, my conclusion: It’s worse than what I started with, hardly fixes the original plausibility problems, and really doesn’t even read well. So what am I going to do?

I have come to the conclusion the story starts in the wrong place. I’m actually not far, I think, I just need to step back to events fifteen minutes before the original start. At the beginning, I’ve got my character running through the woods, which I think is a really good idea, but it makes life difficult for establishing the setting properly, because I’m neck deep in action. I mean, this can be done, but I’m not quite skilled enough to pull it off. What this is going to do is give me a couple of sentences for setting, which is relevant to the larger story, though quite subtle, and then launch into the action more naturally. It will also stretch the action out a little so that when the main character has to give up the chase, it’ll feel less jarring. I’m super-optimistic about this change, so hopefully it’s what I need to help me launch chapter 1 so it’s every bit as great as I expect it to be.

by

Writer’s improvement hell

Screw you spell-check! I mean it. I’m a terrible speller, and it’s all your damn fault. I also blame you for my awful grammar. Okay, neither are so bad, but they really could be a lot better (insert angry spitting and what not)! I blame part of the problem on really bad habits developed by relying heavily on grammar and spell-checkers to notify me of problems then offer helpful suggestions along with an immediate remedy (right-click replace). The habit formed over a number of years, starting with college term papers, and now infiltrates my e-mails, memos, project plans, and also my creative writing.

So, why’s it a problem? I mean, those tools are there to help right? Yes, that is the claim. The first (minor) problem is that when I really get into a scene, I mean I’m really into it, I’m seeing the scene, not so much the words (I am conscious of things like word choice but I’m not really seeing those words. I can’t explain how this works, except to say it’s a lot like day dreaming in rush hour traffic – I get there, but haven’t got the foggiest how), and so I’m also not really paying attention to those nice little squiggles beneath my misspelled and out of place words. This is exacerbated by the fact that I’m writing a fantasy and a very large number of names aren’t in the correction database, so the writing is already full of squiggles (yes, I know this is an easy fix, and I should do it, but I’m reluctant all the same) That’s fine, I suppose, I’ll just catch it on the next read through, which will occur as soon as I’m finished with the scene or whatever. Yeah, I suppose that works, when I’m paying enough attention on the second, third and fourth run-throughs.

The real problem is that relying on those auto-tools not making me a better writer. I think my story is suffering for various and sundry mistakes that I’m unconsciously expecting to be noted or even corrected for me. Sure we all make them, and I do try to focus on improving those habits, but the damn bad habits are now so ingrained it’s like pulling teeth to focus on getting it right.

My solution? I don’t have one for my grammar issues yet, still working that out. Possibly fixing the exact same problem about sixteen thousand times will get me there (I wish this were a joke 😦 ). Spelling though, that one is simple. Instead of using the right-click replace trick we’re all so fond of, instead, I’m checking the spelling with that tool, and making the corrections by hand. That, I think, should help me learn to spell more words correctly the first time, naturally, and will help me to work toward being a better writer.

Also, to come clean on this a little. This idea came out of technical necessity, rather than just having a good idea. I run Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows, and though I long for a Mac, it’ll have to wait. As a result, many of my applications aren’t quite as well tested as other platforms, so when writing a blog post, for instance, I can’t highlight and replace text. It locks up the keyboard and I have to re-start the browser. So, all of my spell-checking has to be done manually (right-click replace causes the lock-up as well). When I started doing this, I realized that it was a good way to actually re-learn how to spell words.