Getting To Know You...

I'm maybe starting to get the hang of this writing malarkey, me thinks. I don't mean that I'm suddenly Agatha Christie or Enid Blyton (and no, I'm neither 75 nor 6 years old, but they've been my favourites since I could read and no one has done better!) - but I think I am starting to learn about putting into practice the things drilled into me studying English Lit. Like what's the point of the book - what is it trying to say, what exactly is it looking at, and why should the story be told at all... Well, apart from keeping me occupied where otherwise I would be bored out of my brain, of course.

I managed to work out the main focus of my story and what the characters were playing for, as it were. I realised that it focused on a different aspect of relationships, and that the story is telling a tale about something that is really more about the "what happens after the Happily Ever After" ideal, as it were. Especially when (in your character's opinion) it's not really the ideal result one would assume that it perhaps ought to be.

I managed to get a lot of character clarification and I organised everything in new notes from scratch. Then I wrote a new synopsis on it to see how it goes together, and I'm starting to get a better understanding now of what I want to do with it. Of what I want to do with then, and the journey I want to take them on. It's still not perfect, but I'm really now seeing how the jigsaw pieces come together and start to create a picture. The more pieces I put in, the clearer I see the end result and the quicker I can conjure the next correct piece, or where one is not sitting quite right and needs to be moved and replaced.

It took a few weeks to get there, and a few days of rather intense thinking (I would've had to have gone to lie down if I hadn't already been in bed suffering insomnia) to manage to start seeing these previously vague characters as whole people, especially the lead. She's the first one I've really got to know in too many years (I really invested in two others but then lost the MS files on my laptop of the time and subsequently stopped getting emotionally involved - big mistake!) - I think we're both starting to get something out of it.

Now I'm starting to get to know them, I'm starting to get a real idea of what they would "realistically" (and, yes, I do use that term loosely) do, say, think, feel, react, behave, etc. This has also meant that at least 90% of the original MS is obsolete, but the basic skeleton ideas were good, so they're being (drastically) modified for integration into the new one.

And the more I know them, the better I understand them. So the better I write them, and the better the reader understands them - important when the journey is so affected by what they think, feel and fear. And if you don't understand them, you don't understand the choices they make- and then neither does anyone else. Then the motivation for what's going on is lost on everybody. Which isn't helpful.

Psychology and motivation is definitely a big part of writing literature - yours and the characters'. You need to know your ideas and motivation for writing it, and you need to know the thoughts and motivation of the characters.

I think I'm now starting to get to grips with mine.

Brain Frazzling

Lack of food, no appetite, serious caffeine dependency, exhaustion, inability to concentrate, and the coffee just keeps getting stronger with no effect. Welcome to Brain Frazzling.

I've been trying to be clever - re-writing the first few chapters of a new MS I'm working on, one of an old story, and thinking about really giving the protagonist a stronger voice and a much more prominent and clear character. I've pulled the entire piece apart, leaving - maybe - 30% of the basic original plot still in there (I imagine most of that will probably go too). Of what little plot is still there, a basic thread of the skeleton is the only thing that remains and I'm hoping in understanding the character, their personality and their past better so I will hopefully be able to create a more believable, "real" character and a plot that is more character-driven.

By that, I mean going forward with the story (i.e. the protagonist & friends' lives) by thinking about what that driving character would do, how she would move forward and live her life and react to different things that happen - and for that to work it clearly needs to be character-based. Which means both myself, and (hopefully) the reader, will need to understand her.

Unfortunately, trying to pull apart a ready-made character in a book in class is a lot easier to do than trying to do it yourself from scratch, and I'm not sure really how well I'm doing with that right now.

The thing is there's one big problem in all of this - my brain no longer works. My concentration is shot and I'm not making the best decisions or writing anything constructive in the least anymore. I have notes - lots of notes. But that's almost the entire extent of it, although at least that's something. I didn't have such great ideas before. I've been reading back on what I've done so far and my brain is barely processing it - although I did manage to recognise that I accidentally wrote that a character was "blow-drying her hand"... Instead of her hair.

It's hard to be motivated when the only thing you can think about is getting an IV of some serious full-bean and you just can't feel your brain anymore. It's even harder to string a thought together, let alone a sentence and then being able to write it, when you've got ADD - for the total opposite reason to the usual one. I'm even struggling with Twitter, and that's just 140 characters. Reading them is hard enough right now - and since writing them is involves actual thinking, there's not a lot coming from me anymore.

So I've come to the conclusion that to be a writer, and to write, you need to have all your faculties intact - and most importantly, have the ability to sleep. Or the superhuman ability to go for months of sleep-deprivation without wanting to resort to living on seriously hardcore coffee and chocolate cake chocolate penguins.

Oh, hey - that's an actual thought I managed.... Although it did involve chocolate, so maybe that got my attention a little more than usual.

Going to go now and enjoy the novelty of an almost-coherent thought - and maybe go back and stare blankly at the screen again whilst pretending to actually do some work.

Background Work

Funny how these were meant to be about music. Then they end up being about writing. Is that priorities changing, or finding another string to my creative bow?... I hope it's the second, I'd hate to accidentally give up on the music.

But recently I've been thinking hard about the stories, writing stories, and using my "story-writing" abilities from songwriting for writing book(s). Last night I spent, quite probably, nearly the entire night contemplating background support and how relevant it is to stories as well as songs.

With songs, the background is the backing - the cacophony of instruments that the voice (story) sits on - and I realised the obvious (I don't realise the obvious with music, it's just too obvious to consider consciously) - that clearly without that backing there is no song, no support, no music - the "story" is bland. Accapella rarely works well - and it doesn't work at all when you're pushing particular music genres... Imagine writing hard rock with raging guitars and banging drums! It just wouldn't be rock - it would be a weirdo screaming strange things, and they would quite probably be carted away to the padded cells.

When I write any, and all, songs, I always start building the entire backing from the beginning, and never move on to the next section until I've created the complete sound for that section. Starting at the intro, then the first verse, then chorus (etc, etc), the music is built section by section in its (near) complete form so I immediately have the whole picture of where I've been, and subsequently I have a clear idea of where I'm going.

Now in storytelling, surely it must be the same? Without character background and circumstance created at the very least in your head - if not actually mentioned and to be peppered through the book - you surely have little chance of creating anything of substance. Just like if you only put down piano and drums in a song, you're going to have a very thin story, and support for that story, with just that menial effort. And just like in our own lives, how can we know where we're going if we don't really understand where we've been?

Ergo I was thinking that to create a decent - and efficient - story, I definitely need to do the equivalent of putting down all the instruments to make a full and complete (ish) backing - only in book-form. By this I mean create full, complete and clear lives, pasts, thoughts and personalities for the characters, and implement them clearly in dialogue, interaction, reaction and character thoughts - especially with the protagonist. And all this to be considered, really, before writing starts. Or shortly afterwards, at least. It's only in this way will they really come to life and start moving the story themselves.

The one main thing you study in English Lit is obviously character dynamics, character motivation, their reactions and behaviour to circumstances, and their interaction with each other. You're getting none of this if you don't bother putting the legwork in first. You'd think after putting the bother into studying it, I'd realise and remember that. Sometimes I'm too lazy to be that bright.

Now I've personally so far been very guilty of not quite grasping this concept and been very lazy about such important details - frankly hoping they would just turn up. Naively.

Now I'm going back to the drawing board, to create these characters so I know them as well as their fictitious parents do. I hope it's going to make my writing a little more coherent and a lot more interesting.

Hoping more that I'll do a good job and I'm going to get it right.