NaNoWriMo Strikes!

A friend of mine has been going through the NaNoWriMo writing challenge and has finally completed the challenge. She is one of my inspirations during my own writing.

NaNoWriMo

I’ve been thinking seriously about joining NaNoWriMo for the last week or so. A few disadvantages face me:

• It’s late in the game.
• I’m in the middle of a book already
• Time

Aside from all that, I believe I have the correct motivation and a story that I could flush out. I decline to sign up this year but I think next year will see me in this race.

Writing my way through chapter by chapter

Hey.
I’ve been writing my second book. The first book was an experiment and has never been completed. I’ve taken stabs at my first book from time to time and over many years several parts of it have made different progress. I’m not sure that my first book was really ready for writing. The basis behind my first book was not for a book. I was attempting to create the ultimate character for role playing. A dungeon master once gave me some advice about creating a character. He said that you need to know your character well. Even though the character might be set in a fantasy world where modern kitchens and cars don’t exist, you need to know enough about your character to know what your character would think and how your character would react to such items. If your character was presented with a hamburger, would your character like it? Would they even try it out? What about fries?

I took the advice to heart and set about creating a character that I knew so well, I could react to any situation. So I started to create a background on my character. I soon realized that much of who a character is depends on who their parents were and how their parents raised them. This led me into creating the parents of my character. Of course you soon realize that you need to know why the character’s parents are raising the character the way that they chose to. So then you need to know the parent’s parents and how they were raised. Now you start to see a pattern that you don’t like. How far back to you need to go?

So I did some thinking about this for a while. I decided that as you start to go back into the family history, the farther away the influence will be on your character. Clearly who your character is will be directly influenced on how they grew up and the direction and guidance they are given by their parents is a large factor of this. The type of guidance and direction given by parents will be largely influenced by how they grew up and partly in how they were directed and guided by their parents. The key thing here is that aside from how the grandparents brought up the parents, the direct infuence of the grandparents on the character is significantly less. In this sense, it is significantly less important to understand how the grandparents were brought up. Instead I find it is sufficient to understand only how the grandparents brought up the parents and not focus deeply on the details of why they brought up the parents this way. In many stories, the main character doesn’t interact directly with any of the grandparents and so this is sufficient for decent character background.

There are always exceptions to the rule. If there is a strong family lineage, there may be a greater incentive to understand the family chain. In these cases however, I would recomend focusing on memorable highlights. There should be a significant enough change in attitude and influence through the generations to allow for most of the trivial details to have no influence on who your character is. Perhaps there is a strong influence on the character by a specific grandparent or they were raised by their grandparent. In these cases it might be wise to extend the understanding of the character ancestory by one more generation. Keep in mind though that it is easier to accept that grandparents are settled in their ways and have specific ways of doing what they do. It is easier to accept that there is a wisdom behind their actions that is not always understood. This works in your favour in not having to work so hard on developing the background with them.

And so, my first book was really about the mother of my main character (which later became two characters). I started from her running away from an abusive family at a young age and growing up, having children, raising them on her own and finally having to send them away for their safety. Enough of a background was established to know who the children were and why they did what they did and how they would react to new situations. It was really a brilliant idea if it wasn’t for the fact that I didn’t create it for a book. Later on in my life when I thought about writing the book, I discovered that it didn’t flow well as a book. There are many parts of the story that I think I can adapt for a novel however I believe it will need a lot of work to make it interesting to read.

So I started with a fresh idea and a new book. As I have taken on this new project as a book, it is working as a book. I have a lot of support from friends and family (or at least those who know that I’m writing a book) and have been paying much more attention to writing and how to make the story work in a book.

Start

Hi there. Heard so much about blogging. Thought I aught to give it a try.