Oh, The Joys of Writing

Today I get to kill someone.  Okay, well I get to decide who gets killed, but not actually kill them.

Before you call the cops, I suppose I should explain.  My epiphany (which is what I'm calling the writing exercises I've been working on) today requires me to gather together three or four ordinary people whose task it is to decide who should be killed.  I'm not allowed to convey why they have to do this, and I'm not supposed to reveal their thought process, other than what is spoken out loud to each other, and the death is not supposed to happen in the scene.

My first reaction when I read the assignment?  This is going to be fun!

Which started me thinking.  Just how sadistic am I?  This is a topic that my friends and I have all the time.  And our non-writer friends usually give us that look like they're worried we're about to have a mental breakdown.  We don't take offense to that.  If we were them we would probably be worried about the same thing.

Because I'm a writer, though, I understand the thought process that goes into the idea that having a group of ordinary people deciding on who they're going to kill is fun.  I understand that if this were happening in real life, I would be absolutely horrified.  No doubt I would seeing a news story about it, my mouth would drop open and I would think  'that's terrible!'

The fact is, though, the person getting killed is a character.  And not just any character, but my own character.

While I often contend that my characters are real to me, the truth is I know just how not real they are.  And how real I need to make them feel.

That's the heart of it, really.  We as writers are aware of just how not real our characters are.  And we know that our readers will feel the same way.  So we make them real by putting them in situations that no one would ever want to be in and force them to make a decision, or react.  That's how we can make them 'real' even in our own heads.  That's how they get their voices and personalities.  It's how we form them in our heads.

So when I say that it will be 'fun' to place characters in this situation, what I really mean is this is going to be interesting.  To see how there characters grow and develop in the short amount of time I'm giving them.

To see what answer they come up with.

Now I'm going to go force my characters to make an impossible decision.  Wish me luck.

What's the worst situation you've ever put a character in?

Productive Days

This isn't something I get to talk about very often.  In fact, most of the time I'm complaining about how far behind I am in all of my goals.  But not today.  No, today I get to tell you all about the productive day I had on Sunday.

It started out fairly well.  Without the use of an alarm clock, I was up by ten.  (For those of you who know me, you'll know that this really is a feat.  I tend to sleep in when there's nothing waking me up).  As I thought it was closer to noon or one, I started the day on a happy note.

I didn't get up right away (because, why would I?) but I also didn't go back to sleep, which I'm pretty proud of.

By eleven, though, I had already gotten to work.  The first order of business was to catch up on the editing that I hadn't managed to get to the two days before.  That wasn't difficult, as I'd already gone through the chapters, I just had to put the changes into the computer.

Then came the blog post, which was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be.  See, I had tried to do my epiphany, and got a little stuck, so I wrote a blog post, which helped with my idea for the epiphany.

By the time I had done all of that, it was about one, and all I had left to do for the day was to do the two chapters of editing that I had scheduled for that day.

I'll admit, I slacked off a little at this point.  I might have gotten distracted by gag reels of comedies.  It started with How I Met Your Mother and quickly progressed on to Friends.  I had a few good laughs, but eventually I had to get back to work.

When I had finished my daily editing for the day (and had even managed to polish off the epiphany for Monday and got it all set up to post) I decided that I deserved a treat for sticking to my work all day (I don't really count the slacking off.  It was just a break, I swear!)

Anyway, I decided to watch Pitch Perfect, which I've seen before, but can't seem to get enough of.  It was a nice little way to reward myself, and when I was done, I thought, I might as well get a bit more work done.

So I did my Monday editing, and threw together another blog post (yep, this one right here) just to give myself a kick start for the week.

Now, if that isn't a productive day, please, tell me what is!

I'm happy with the progress I made.  I'm sticking to my goals for the year, which is surprising me.  I'm not usually good about keeping them.  Generally I procrastinate so long that it's no longer plausible for me to finish on time, and decide that I might as well just push back that deadline since I'm not going to meet it anyway.

With the way this year has been going, I'm going to accomplish all of my goals.  My first novel of the year is going to be edited to the second draft by the end of the month, and I couldn't be happier!

Now I'm going to go...I don't know...maybe work on another chapter of editing that doesn't need to be done yet.

How are your goals for the year going?  Have you started on any of them yet?

Blood, Sweat and Epiphanies

This year, as I'm sure you all know, I've decided to do all 201 writing exercises in Brian Kiteley's The 3 A.M. Epiphany. (I've been calling them my epiphanies, and you can check them at here)

So far they've been really hard.  Some days I stare at the exercise and think 'What?  I can't do that!  Who can do that?'  I've had stories where I could only use I or me twice in the entire thing.  I've had to write from the POV of someone who told a story that wasn't true.  I've had to write from the perspective an entire family.  I'm telling you, it's been really freaking hard.

Today's assignment is to take an old story that I've written and redo it as a first person perspective.  And, while I'm at it, count how many she's I had and cut that in half.  It's probably one of the easier assignments I've had so far, and for a second I thought 'Finally!  I can get this done in no time!'

Nope.  I'm stuck.  What am I stuck on, you ask?  Quite simple: I can't decide which story to rewrite.

I know, it's pathetic.  It's not like I have a shortage of stories or novels.  They're all sitting there on my hard drive wondering if I'm ever going to dust them off and look at them again.  Honestly, I didn't think I would for most of them.  Now I have delve down into the depths of the books that needed far too much work to even make them worthy of critique group.

I have to pick out one of the novels that I didn't want to work with anymore and work on it.  I have to face the characters that I've been ignoring for months, or even years.  What will I say to them?  Will they understand?  Will they hate me forever?

So, rather than facing that decision, I decided to write my blog post super early in the day.

I'm a coward.  I know it, you know it, let's get past it, shall we?

I know I can't put it off for the entire day. (Okay, that's a lie.  I probably could put it off for the entire day.  There is a backlog of shows on the PVR I could watch, and if I really wanted to, I could just do a whole bunch of editing and act like that was what I was going to do all along, but I don't want to.)  I just need to suck it up and find a story that I want to work on again and hope that my characters are still willing to talk to me.

Alright, I'm going to go for it.  Dangerous Waters it is.  I hope that this change will inspire me to get back into that book, because I really did love it.  I even have a map of that world, and every time I look at it I feel a little guilty that I shelved it.

Time to get back to my epiphany.  Come on over and see how it turns out?  Maybe you'll be inspired to do a couple of epiphanies yourself.