Writers Drawing The Line For Their Characters

We, as people, have all kinds of values and codes we live by whether we’re fully aware of how we define them or not. There are things that just stick in our craws or rub us the wrong way. There are lines that can’t or won’t be crossed and places we don’t want to go. Beliefs we hold dear and of course reactions to those held by others.

So, how can we use all this in writing. 

Simple. 

Make your characters draw their lines in the sand. Think about the big issues in life and how your characters feel/react to them. How they can be integrated into your story and your characters to draw tension and create action.

For example. Where is the line drawn between a freedom fighter and a terrorist? Thinking of Snowden, just exactly who is a traitor or who is a whistle blower patriot? How do you decide when a character is out and out greedy or just very ambitious? At times how does your character determine the difference between murder and justice? Confronting a black-hearted, cold-blooded killer who’s just murdered one the hero loves is it murder to kill that person or is it justice? 

There are many lines to be drawn, many strongly held beliefs. An assassin kills without a second thought – but he/she won’t harm a child – no matter what.

Life is full of dichotomies; give some to your characters. Force the issues in their lives. Put them up against their own strongly held beliefs and moral codes.  Let the freedom fighter teeter dangerously close to becoming no more than a terrorist and find himself again. Is all great ambition no more than cloaked greed? Let your character sort that out.

And what about responsibility for our own actions? The hero or heroine’s actions? When is it a ‘child’ committing a crime (cold blooded murder by a twelve-year-old) and when should that ‘child’ be considered an adult? By his or her age? By his or her actions? By his or her understanding of right and wrong?

How about a criminal who performed a violent act that cost the lives of many? If he is a great person in prison, helping others find their way out of a life of crime and then proceeds to save the warden’s life during a prison break out does that make up for the past? Is he reformed ~ or not? Should he be granted his freedom? What about those he harmed so grievously in the past? Is one of them going to come after him with revenge in mind?

Yep, it’s worth thinking about. You can see it in many movie plots and novel threads and you see it every day around you. Just read the paper or listen to the news, or your friends chat.

Take those lines drawn, those beliefs and force your characters to make hard choices. Draw some lines and see where it leads.

Writers Writing For Pleasure

“Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.” ~ Joseph Joubert  

As a writer have you ever thought about that? Do you believe it?

Personally I do.

Over the years as a writer I’ve discovered the more emotion I put into the writing the more it connects on a very deep level with readers. Thus my general agreement with the statement above, though I’m not quite sure ‘pleasure’ is the right word for it unless referencing to the actual act of writing itself. Getting caught in the thrall of a story, fingers racing along the keyboard as it spills out onto the screen (knowing all the while there’ll be some heavy editing later).

As to the rest, the roiling, spitting, balled-up, pacifistic, loving, hateful emotions, I wouldn’t call them pleasure, but more like the intensity scale. Different emotions evoke different feelings, obviously. You aren’t going to write a gentle love scene with a backdrop of hateful and cruel emotions (at least not in most circumstances). You probably won’t have a murder backed up by the equivalent of violins and roses.

What we have to consider as writers is our life’s experiences (no doubt where the ‘write what you know’ phrase came from). From birth we experience the whole human range of emotion. As we grow we experience illness, injury, loss, love, physical and emotional pain. We absorb it and express it in a great variety of ways. The trick for the writer is to draw on that life experience that fits with the scene being written and inject it into your story for your reader to be drawn into the world you’ve created because he or she has ‘been there’.

And in that Joseph Jourbert is correct. When you dig deep, when you strike the right vein, you know it. And when a reader tells you “it was just like being there” or it was ‘stirring’ or your writing made them cry, or laugh, you’ve hit paydirt.

So from all of this we garner today’s writing tip and it’s nothing so straight forward or simple like how to edit or grammar or how to use your spell check properly. Nope, this one is a lot more heavily on you, the writer. This time I’m suggesting the need to take the time with a story; to sit back and consider what parts of yourself you can inject into the writing. What experiences you’ve had that you can pass on to your characters and breath real life into your writing. And how it needs to be written so all of those feelings, all of that experience, comes across through the written page to touch the reader’s heart and soul.

Forget The Rules Already - Newest Writing Advice

Today I’m going to give some advice that’ll make some people sit up and spit.

It’s this – Forget the Rules Already and Write.

Yep, that simple.

I could stop writing right now and leave it at that, but of course I won’t.

We humans seem to be constantly in search of advice, guess that’s why “self-help” books sell so well. But really, do we NEED all that advice? Can’t we rely on our own abilities and instincts once in a while – or most of the time? And don’t many of those ‘rules’ just tie writers up in knots  trying to ‘do it right’?

Now, I’m not saying we don’t need to know things in order to write well, such as grammar and some decent spelling (though we do have spell checks and grammar checks these days). We do need to know how to format the manuscript or screen script for submission so it doesn’t get trashed upon receipt. The once-upon-a-time of an editor at a publishing house doing all the grunt work of cleaning up a manuscript are long gone. You absolutely must present a clean, readable manuscript or screen script in the currently accepted format.

But those aren’t the kinds of rules I’m talking about. There are lots and lots….and lots of places on the web, in person, at writer’s groups, where you can hear ‘rules’ recited. Don’t to this. Do that. Nobody’s doing it that way!

What?

Hmmm. Here’s the way I see it. Writing is an evolving craft, always has been. If you look back at what others have written, the classics and the ‘penny-dreadfuls’ and compare it to novels, literature and pulp books along the way up to now you’ll see just how writing has changed. Not really because of ‘rules’ but more because of the way society is changing and readability. Some of the old ways of writing a novel could now be called ‘stilted’, but it was perfectly accepted and great reading when published. Things change. Styles change. Subject matter changes.  And yet what was old is new again (take for example the fixation with vampires – we’ve seen vampire books before Anne Rice and the vampire romances). So ‘story’ keeps coming around, but ‘delivery’ and ‘style’ changes.

So, what am I saying? Quite simply, forget the rules and write already. Get your story out. Break a few rules and by doing so you may well be creating new ones; someone before you did. You may have to change it, rearrange it, but if you don’t stop worrying about all the rules that are getting crammed into your head about how a story is to be presented, then you’re never going to do it at all. You’ll just keep spinning your wheels.

Really, learn how to handle language, present in an acceptable format and give yourself free rein to cause a few new rules to be created that someone else will worry about down the road.

So write already.