How do you write your characters?

I'm several good scenes and most of a prologue into my NaNo novel, and I've discovered something about my characters.

Most of them are pretty skeletal right now.

I have an overall idea of who I want then to be, but since my real goal at the moment is to get the plot out before I talk myself into changing something major, I've pretty much glossed over the characters, dropping little hints now and then, but not really fleshing them out.

Last year, when I was prepping for NaNoWriMo, I did all this character analysis (part of the writing program I use, so why not?) in order to really understand my characters. And while that was helpful, I spent an inordinate amount of time fretting about demonstrating these little character ticks while I was working on laying out the plot. If I had months and months to do this kind of edit-as-you-go writing, I'd have been ok. But my word count was deplorable simply because I couldn't get things out.

So this year, I'm letting the characters kind of exist for the most part until I get the plot out, and then I'll start adding in those endearing or annoying or nauseating traits when I have to start plumping up the word count.

Not to say I'm not recognizing some of the character traits already. Some are just...cardboard at the moment, or paper dolls. They serve a purpose, perhaps demonstrate some of their ultimate selves in tiny glimmers.

So, how do you write your characters? Do you plan them out first? Let them write themselves? Maybe a little of both?

NaNo Update

Going well. Lots of words. Manifesto is helping immensely. Don't care about spelling. And I think I've changed narrators three times. owell. I'm enjoying the hell outta this. 

Day 4 - nearly 8000 words and I haven't started writing today.

It's not pretty. It's not completely fleshed out. It's skeletal and the dialog is kinda...cardboard. But I can work on that all later. When the words are out. When the ideas are out.

Last night, I was trying to go to sleep after midnight, and I had a flash of conversation for the story, and I had to get up and scribble it down before I forgot it. I've lost many a glorious passage through swearing I would remember it overnight. Not this time. I wrote it down as fast as I could, because the words were materializing before my hands could scrawl them on the page.

I had forgotten how amazing this feels. Here we go with a few more hours of writing, a few more hours of dissolving into this little world in process, a story that refuses to stay on track, but seems to work nonetheless.

Raise your oversized mugs of straight espresso, folks! I need a battlecry!

My NaNo Manifesto

I tried to sleep tonight. I really did.

But then I started thinking about little details for my NaNo novel and suddenly I couldn't shut down. So I left my nice warm bed and came out to the living room to start clacking away at this year's story.

But not before making some rules for this year.

1. If I decide at one point that I want to shift from 3rd to 1st person, I will not waste time revising what I've already written.

2. If I have a "what's the damn word" moment (which happens a lot with Fibro fog and pain meds), I will find a close approximation and go from there. No scouring the thesaurus for "just the right word."

3. I will NOT let my failed previous attempts discourage me.

4. I will NOT make this a deep, thought-provoking exploration. It's gonna be action. It's gonna be fun. It's gonna be apocalyptic steampunk fun with little consideration of the exact hows and whys. It's going to have some blatant references to Doctor Who. Because I want it to.

5. I'm going to enjoy the hell out of this story. I'm going to throw some twists and flips and WTFs in.

6. I'm going to finish this MF-er.

So, there are a few of my rules for NaNoWriMo 2013.

Now that I've written more than my daily allotment of the story and set up my rules, I think I'll go ahead and sleep. Yes, indeed.

Yes, People, Yes.

Last week, before my back surgery, I was fearing the worst about NaNoWriMo - that I wouldn't be able to do much in the first couple of weeks because of altered mental states due to medicine and not being able to sit up much. I was, honestly, dreading this whole recovery process. While I love to read, it loses much of its luxury when it's the only thing I can do. I don't do well with cabin fever, either.

Turns out, it's not an issue. The medicines that I'm taking don't alter my mental state more than make me rather sleepy and perhaps a bit more likely to write what first enters my mind rather than what gets filtered through the fine muslin of my perpetual mental editor. Add to this the capacity to sit for a couple of hours at a time at least three times a day, and November is shaping up to be pretty damn productive. I have no work obligations, and no where to go except for walks to build up my endurance.

I also have a great story idea this year that promises to give me plenty of imaginative romping room. I'm exploring some steampunk/apocalypse punk ideas within a framework of time manipulation.

As such, I've been playing around with my writing music list. I've recently been introduced to Armin Van Buuren, a Trance DJ, whose music provides me with just the kind of ambiance that I need to push my story forward. I started listening to trance when I was a graphic artist, when I needed something to engage my mind while I played around visually. I love the repetitive nature with few lyrics. Lyrics, I've noticed, snatch my attention too much, causing me to listen too closely to what they words are, to analyze rather than create. I've also found that classical music takes too much of my attention as well. Trance just let's me bob on the surface and play.

So I'm likely to be listening to a lot of Armin Van Buuren next month.

My husband just asked me why I wait until November to focus on my story - why I don't just start now. I've asked myself that, periodically, when I have an idea that I can't wait to flesh out, but have to settle for sketching in the meantime. I'm getting antsy to start writing on this baby. But for me, NaNoWriMo gives me the competition that I like to have, and the deadline. I can set myself deadlines all I want, but I suck at keeping them. Even when I tell my friends I'll have something done, I just...don't hold to it. But NaNo is a set time, a set date, and if I don't make the deadline, I feel rotten.

Have I mentioned how much I like Armin Van Buuren's music? I'm listening to it now, and I'm just...yes. Yes, indeed.

SIX DAYS, MY FRIENDS! SIX DAYS AND THIS ADVENTURE WILL COME TO LIFE!

Damn, I can't wait.

Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo

Alright, ladies and gents. I know it's only halfway through October, but I've been gearing up for National Novel Writing Month since - like - May. Now it's only a couple of weeks away and I'm gettin' giddy. I've been batting around a story idea in my head and I'm newly armed with wisdoms gleaned from my past attempts. This year I'm pretty much a captive author so I will have little to do but write.

I haven't "won" a NaNoWriMo yet, and for a few good reasons. Last year I was dealing with the death of my mother and then a knee injury, so I just couldn't focus. The year before I was rudely interrupted by thesis revisions. But my biggest nemesis is myself: my tendency to edit as I go and second guess every inch of plot. Basically, I'm scared that my stories are too predictable, too Been There Done That. My love of storytelling loses all its warm glow and turns into a cudgel with which I beat my brains. Not to mention that, should I decide I need to go a different direction that requires some revision to the previous storyline, I feel I have to go back and fix what I've already written for the sake of continuity. Not exactly conducive to meeting word count goals.

This year I'm toying with time manipulation and post-apocalypse-punk. Not Mad Max. More in the steampunk vein, but including technology from a lot of different time periods from updated siege engines to bombers to mind-manipulation and time-manipulation tech.  To be honest, I'm just exploring all the different off-shoots of steampunk for kicks and giggles. Last year I tried very hard to write something serious and deep and significant. To hell with that. 

As a matter of fact, that's my motto for this year's Nano novel. What the hell, sounds like fun!

Some things write themselves

This may be my last post for a few weeks. I'm having spine surgery on Wednesday and will be highly medicated while lying down, sitting, or standing as the case may be as I recover. However, as I'm pretty much homebound for at least a month (I can't even get in a car for that long), I may be craving non-spouse human interaction and may also encounter some glorious moments of lucidity and will brave the pain to share them. Here's hoping.

Alright, back to the writing craft.

When I took a creative writing class in college, my instructor encouraged us to "write what we know." Every aspiring author has heard these words and has either taken them to heart or cast them whirling into the winds as they desire. I took them very seriously because I've found that life + poetic license = pretty good fiction. So far all of my stories have drawn deeply on actual events reinterpreted or bent to my will. For instance, I fixed my romantic naivete and ultimate dumb mistake in one story. But the events up to the end were almost entirely exact to what happened in real life, all the way down to the songs that played at the club. That story wrote itself. All I did was tweek it a little to salve my bruised ego.

Since then, I've continued to draw heavily from my life, even if it's just details and locations. The home in my YA novel is a variant of a house I lived in as a teenager, and the location itself is my childhood home. Some of the events are true as well. I'm even going to keep the name of the road. It's simply too appropriate.

Real personal events and details are like an umbilical cord. While the story develops, you feed it with emotions and rich details that sustain it even as you're creating something entirely unique and ultimately independent. It's also like letting a child run wild in home territory, exploring all the hidey-holes you'd forgotten. New eyes, new adventures, new revelations.

It can also be therapeutic. I've rewritten and explored some painful events in my life, and just the act of remolding them or imbuing some unifying perspective makes them easier to handle. Not to mention that you get to right some wrongs or recast yourself as the hero instead of the fool. Or vice-versa. Sometimes it's fun be wild in print. To explore the not-so-logical options, to slip the bonds of morality for a while. It keeps you from going insane.

So why is this important? To me at least? Think about that child running wild in a familiar place. You know all the details, all the potential hiding places, all the creaky boards and groaning hinges. You know the smell, the quality of light, the way the dust swirls in the slanting sun-beams. You know the place. The action might be new and hard to describe, but the locale is familiar and perhaps beloved. You can imagine it without effort and that can make writing about it almost automatic. And again, you can imbue the place and your writing with all those interlacing connotations swelling inside you. It can mean a scene or story that writes itself.

That can't be bad.

My writing genre list

Have you ever heard a song and suddenly have a scene in your mind for a story? That happened recently. It was like Pandora was poking me in the shoulder - hey, write this! - and I just couldn't resist. It rechurned within me a story that I hadn't really touched in over a year, even though the heroine often came to mind. It wasn't until this song played that the tumblers in my head fell back into place so I could restart. And instead of just that one scene, it became the impetus for the entire closing of the novel, complete with the climax action. 

Since then, I've started thinking more about mood music, and what I listen to when I need to write scenes. This is usually a tricky subject for me, because, depending on the kind of writing I'm doing, my ambiance ranges from techno to meditation music to Celtic to metal to Steam Powered Giraffe to bare silence.

If I really need to think about what I'm writing, like during dialogue, I need silence. I need to hear the characters in my head so I can capture their cadence. Or I need to focus on something very detailed. No distractions. And I tend to get rather grumpy about it, too. My husband has experienced the snappishness that is me when he interrupts in these silent times.

Note to self: set writing boundaries with husband.

If I'm bashing through an action sequence or just trying to set up the bones of a scene I pick the music according to the action. I rely heavily on Celtic myth in my current project, so I listen to a lot of Celtic music, especially when the mythological characters are the main focus.

Since it's a YA novel, there's a considerable amount of angst, and that requires rock. Linkin Park, Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters, Dresden Dolls. Sometimes I need snark, too, so I head for Lily Allen. Nothing better for a snit fit than "Fuck you very, very much!"

Also since the novel has quite a bit of fantasy, I like listening to Within Temptation for the modern fantasy element. And the lead's voice is angelic to the point of pain at times. Eisley is also great for this, since their sound is so ethereal. Bjork, too.

I have an element of steampunk in this novel as well. A co-worker recently introduced me to Steam Powered Giraffe, and I have made them my official steampunk scene go-to on Pandora.

Sometimes I just need to write, to get a scene out that isn't a particular mood. That's a good time for techno - trance in particular. Repetitive and driving.

So that's my writing genre list. I'm always up for suggestions, so if you have any bands that you think I simply must hear, do share!