relationships

04 May 2014

Don't get into a relationship because you want to make the other person better. Get into a relationship because the other person makes you better.

Relationships are important, romantic or not, and in any written work, they need to feel real, be real. So people are going to make mistakes, make the wrong choices, inadvertently hurt others, etc. Sometimes it's a good thing to be able to write a cringe-worthy line or action, something the reader knows shouldn't have been said or done but happened anyway.

Unfortunately, that means not every love will be requited (averting No Loves Intersect). It's hard, but not every character gets a Happily Ever After or their romantic loose ends dealt with. Not every friendship will be reciprocated. There will be rough patches.

Often that's easier said than done. Can you tell this is something I'm struggling with right now?


themes

25 September 2013

I should probably declare 2013 "The Year of Writing" in my life. It was never a formal New Year's resolution, but since the first week of January I've deliberately spent more time writing. It really is like a muscle; the more I write, the easier it gets to just jump into a story for even one page of fresh text.

Over the past nine months, I've completed my first full-length novel (and it wasn't either novel mentioned earlier on this page!), I've started my first sequel, and I've written over 30k words for a completely unrelated novel. I've also dabbled in a few other story ideas as well as my first attempt at a web comic. In that time, I've discovered that there are certain themes that keep cropping up despite the completely different subject material of each story.

Home.

I'll admit it. I'm homesick. I've lived outside my home state of Oregon for nearly 25% of my life now, and I'm ready to go back. And armed as I now am with that knowledge, I can much more readily spot the same theme in my writing projects. Handwavy explanations, I know, but I don't want to divulge everything that's going on in each of those stories, either because I haven't finished writing it or because I want you to read it and find out what "home" means to the character for yourself.


the influence of music

18 January 2013

I've developed a bad habit of obsessing over particular songs for days (or more) at a time. One reason is that I find it easier to focus on work if I'm not thinking about the music I'm listening to. I also just get addicted to songs from time to time. (YouTube "repeater" services are dangerous.)

It does have an unintended side effect, though: ideas end up simmering for extended periods in the back of my mind. I can name multiple times where stories have deviated from the original plan or gotten brand new scenes largely because of music, and I can often point to the songs that caused them with ease.

Here's a list, in no particular order, of the songs of which I'm currently, ah, overfond: I'm pretty sure that the next few scenes I write, regardless of story, will be darker ones... unless a happy song or two happen to land on my playlist.


a tale of two novels

4 January 2013

I'm working on two novels right now. Okay, let me rephrase that: I'm focusing on two novels right now. (Let's not get me started on the number of ideas I have floating around in my head.) For the sake of hey-maybe-I'll-publish-these-someday, I'm going to refer to them by their titular acronyms, BTM and TI.

I've been working on both for closer to two decades than one. I probably hadn't even reached teenhood when I first started putting thoughts together on BTM, and within a few years of BTM's inception, I came up with the preliminary plot of TI.

They have certainly changed in the meantime.

I'm rewriting both of them. Almost from scratch. Hey, when you're twelve, a futuristic sci-fi political thriller isn't going to have much depth. And TI, my more fantasy-based story, has undergone character redesigns and major plot tweaks. It hardly resembles its former self, and believe me, that's a very good thing.

But the main driving force of these changes is the number of years that have passed since I came up with the basic ideas behind them and the experience I've accumulated as a result. I've met a more diverse group of people, read/watched/played a greater variety of stories, and (hopefully) grown as a person in the meantime. My opinions of others, of the world around me, have definitely evolved, as have the character traits I find realistic. The standards of detail and credibility I require in the worlds others create have risen, and I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't apply the same rigor to my own work.

For a long time I was afraid of showing my writing to others because I figured they would find it dull, unoriginal, childish, or any number of uncomplimentary things. Now I fear how much of a window to my inner self these stories could become. Who knew I'd experience some self-discovery by describing the lives of characters so seemingly different from myself?

I guess it'll be up to you to tell me whether or not I'm being paranoid.