Master of Death, Master of Nothing

It's been a while since I've written anything here, and I suppose there should be an explaination forthcomming. First, I am actively writing again. If I'm writing here, I'm not writing my book. It's exceedingly hard to write good literature during every second of spare time I have, and then to squeeze yet more time out to write a 500 word blog article. To blame it all on my book and my time restraints isn't entirely fair, or honest, for that matter.

I have been decidedly distracted lately, though I haven't really been forthcomming about it. The issue has been plaguing me since I was 12 or so. At that point in my life I experienced, for me, the most tramatic thing I could have then, Death. My grandmother died, and she and I had become increasingly close during the last year and months of her life. I'll never understand it but the death haunted me, in ways that I can never really explain.

I've tried to explain them, in thousands of poems and free writes and pieces of verse, I've tried. I've tried to understand death, and in this I lost myself I think. What I had thought was my grieving process was, I think, just an obsession with death. Or perhaps more apropriately at that time the pain that death inflicts in the fallout of it's merciless grasp.

In my poetry I saught to conquer this pain, to overcome it, so that I never had to hurt that badly again. But the scariest part I'm only realizing now, is that I succeeded. And in what then I would have seen as my greatest accomplisment, I now see as my greatest failure, my dramatic flaw.

A year later my great aunt died, and a year after that my great grandmother, then my grandfather. Each time it hurt less, and less, and less. The deaths kept getting closer and closer and the pain kept fading. I didn't take much notice then, I just kept writing, working. It was like every emotion that pained me, I could, I would, find the words to describe it on my pad, and in doing so lock them away forever.

It's only now that I understand exactly what I've done. It took the death of a great woman, someone I admired and respected deeply, to help me understand. When a friend's mother passed away and I felt nothing, not sadness, not regret, nothing, some part of me questioned it. Why doesn't this feel bad? And it bothered me. Shook me, really, shook me deeply and I began to wonder how well I really knew myself, how well I understood myself.

I've been kind of lost lately, spending more time trying to understand myself. I've spent a great deal of time analyzing my past, trying to discern the turning point, trying to find the way back. I don't know, I do know that I've gone numb in a sense and for some reason the pain in the painlessness hurts that much more.

How to Kill a Character

Killing my first ever character was one of the hardest things I've ever done as a writer. It didn't help that the character, and its death, was crucial to the book. By now I hope you've guessed guessed I'm talking about Maerik. He was Mattes' mentor and teacher and stand-in father. He was incredibly important to Mattes, if not to the story in many subtle ways, and I understood that and I felt awful taking him away from Mattes.

I spent a week writing that scene, and to this day I don't believe I've done it justice. It was, after all, the first time I'd ever offed a character in a story I'd written. Not in a short story in high school, not in any of what I've written in my past. I get mixed feelings about the scene when I talk to people about it too. Some have told me that the emotional connection for the reader should have been stronger with Maerik, others have said I left them feeling incredibly sorry for Mattes.

Part of the problem with killing a character is that the reader isn't actually seeing it happen, and it forces me to work harder to create the right emotions in the text, to pull at the heart-strings of the reader. To do that I have to open old wounds from my childhood. I have to relive the loss of my grandparents, feeling all the pain and sadness all over again. Then I project it onto paper. 

I tend to gain a sense of attachment to the characters I write about. I'm not talking about Maud, even though her death was a crucial part of making Mattes understand that there was no doubt he would have to destroy Marqus, she was a minor character. The only difficulty she gave me was the manner of her death. In fact I created her only to kill her and wrote almost nothing about her. She existed to die and to break up the monotony of staying in Inns accross Kaetuernen.

When I speak of attachment I'm talking about the characters I've spent weeks developing before I even have them written anywhere. I know their fears, their desires, the story of their life. Sometimes I know who their parents are, I know their height, weight, eye color, hair color. I become so intimately familiar with them, that it sometimes feels like they're real, like I could call them and have a chat or something.

How then, do you make this whole process easier? I don't think you can. It's going to make you feel bad, if it doesn't something's wrong. I'm not sure I want it to be easier, I think if I stopped feeling the pain I'd stop writing it well, and I'd probably begin to question which part of me had to die so I couldn't feel anymore.

Something we also have to worry about, as a writer, is alienating our reader. Going back to what someone had said about there not being a strong enough emotional connection between the reader and Maerik, I did that on purpose. I built the connection to Maerik through Mattes, I wanted the reader to feel Mattes' pain, not the grief at having lost a good character. I was also acutely aware that if I made Maerik seem too important, and made my readers love in too much, I would run the risk of alienating someone. After all, it was the first couple chapters of the first book.

The best tip I can give to someone though, who is struggling with killing a character is to relive the saddest moments of your life and write it into the story, make it feel real. But steel yourself because it's going to be unpleasant.

The Perilous Comma

If you've read much of what I write, or you've ever been my English teacher (or professor), you probably know that I have a problem. I hate admitting it, but the first step to recovery is admitting that one has a problem and well, here I am, on my way to recovery.

I tend to over use the comma. I'm a huge fan of run-on sentences. I've practically mastered the ability to write, what I've dubbed, the "paragraph-sentence." It is just as it sounds, a whole paragraph comprised of one sentence, or perhaps it's a sentence that should have been a paragraph (or could be). However you'd care to define it, you get the picture.

I don't know why I don't use periods more often, it's right beside the comma. Perhaps I tend to write like I speak, fast. Too fast sometimes with little sepparation between my sentences. So where I should actually be ending a sentence and starting a new one, it feels to me like it should be a natural pause in speech denoted with a comma. I guess I talk in paragraph-sentences. I'm working on it though.

If you visit this blog regularly, and re-read an article a day or two after it's been published you notice some minor changes. Usually it's me going back and re-reading what I've written and fixing the giant run-ons. This is another terrible habit of mine, I seem to treat proofreading like an after thought. Usually because I'm crazy tired when I get home and still have an article to write not to mention a chunk of my second novel and in delirium I click publish. Despite my constant effort to stay a few days ahead, (I've been trying to write several articles at once for some time now) I can't seem to manage it. This is another matter entirely but I'm working on this as well.

I'd intended this article to be more of a grammar lesson than anything else, however it has evolved into what it is mostly because a grammar lesson would bore you to death whereas this is, at least mostly, bearable (I hope).

The Fickle Friend Fame

The one thing I hear the most from friends and new acquaintances since being published goes something like "Don't forget us when you're famous." The sentiment comes in many different forms but always boils down to me not forgetting all the people who cared for me when I was still an unknown kid getting by in Southwestern Pennsylvania. My fundamental response to this statement I get so often these days is always: "I don't want fame." I don't, not really.

I don't want every moment of my existence scrutinized by gossip-mongers looking to make a few bucks off of some good celebrity gossip. I don't want photographers constantly popping out of nowhere taking pictures of every embarrassing moment in my life. Honestly, I don't even want to become incredibly wealthy.

I think perhaps when I was younger, I may have entertained the idea of being famous. I also think that I'd not really at that time had a distinction between being famous and having money pouring out of my ears so I could have every new toy I saw on TV immediately teleported into my living room without waiting for Christmas.

Now though, with the advent of reality TV and shows like TMZ, or at least with my ability to watch them, I've learned the monster that fame truly is. I feel genuinely badly, in some respects, for the people, or train-wrecks in some cases, that are exploited in the press. In other ways, I know they've chosen their profession and their lifestyles, and the fame can often come with it.

I know I, too, have chosen to be an author. I know that there is a possibility, though probably infinitely small, that this series could blow up over night or acquire a crazy following of fans. I understand that if it happens it is my own doing and that I need to deal with it. I won't bask in the limelight or parade around lavish establishments making a total fool of myself. I'll attempt to live as I do now, quietly and very un-lavishly.

I'm Completely Awkward at Parties

I spent the night at a small Halloween party hosted by a friend of mine who I work with. Immediately upon arrival I had a rum punch in my left hand, a pudding shot in my right, a pastry stuffed between my fingers, and a kamikaze jello shot tucked between the fingers of my other hand. The night was fun, or at least about as much fun as I'm capable of having at these things.

I tend to stand around a lot, gravitating toward the larger groups of people so I look like I'm part of the group, but not actually participating in the conversation. I feel weird if I'm just standing completely alone, as I should, because who stands alone at a party? The worst bit is my social awkwardness, I earned some distinctive honors back in high school doing forensics (the National Forensics League), which is essentially a bunch of speech and debate competitions.

I obviously have no problem talking to people, but I have trouble conversating with them. Generally you'll talk and I'll listen intently (presumably) dropping in a "yeah" or "of course" here and there, especially if I'm not really interested in what you're talking about. It doesn't help that I love to people watch and get distracted fairly easily in large gatherings of my prey as there are so many personalities to take in and analyze later. If I don't know who you are, well I'm even worse. I'm not shy, but I don't know how to explain it, I don't know what you're interested in  and have no idea what to discuss.

There are always the "Bards," as I like to call them, at parties though who don't care who's interested in what, they have a story to tell, or a bunch (God help us), and they plan on telling it (them) to everyone they stumble upon. These are the people that are often also the ones that can't quite handle their liquor as well as they think and they end up running into you multiple times throughout the evening and forcing you to listen once more to yet another story, or even worse, the same story they told you 15 minutes ago, which happens to also be the story they told you 30 minutes ago and when you walked in the door.

That said, I know way too much about this guy's great aunt's cousin's niece's daughter who's kitten drank some spilled beer off a floor this one time and ended up in the mailbox where it attacked the mail lady the next day when she attempted to deliver the mail. While a summary is mildly amusing, the 20 minute version with the guy breathing his gross, alcohol lace breath in your face is less so, especially after hearing it for the 4th time.

If you're that guy or girl (they're often male) please understand that while we don't hate you, you'v probably only been invited as a courtesy and probably weren't really supposed to actually show up and have some stranger you've never met before drive you home in the crazy fog because you insist on drinking too much and telling too many stories. I feel bad for the poor guy who ended up taking this particular gentleman home.

At any rate, the night was fun, and since I have almost no life outside of work, writing, and writing (no, it's not a typo, I write so much I counted it twice) was also a much needed retreat where I could relax and have a few drinks with friends. Kim throws one hell of a party and makes some killer pudding shots. I'm mostly writing this because I wanted to put another article out today but didn't have time to actually sit down and do the work for the article I wanted to write given the party and all, plus I decided to sleep a little later than usual.

How Do Authors Keep Ideas Organized?

One of the biggest issues for writers is keeping all the plots they construct organized, along with the flow of the story and the way the characters develop with the plot. For every author it's different, and I struggled while I was working on my debut novel, Majician's Journey, “TheProphecy,” and it shows, at least to me. I'm told though, that people are very critical by nature of their own work, but that's another matter entirely.

I'd tried to outline, like we'd been taught in my English classes in high school, and it always felt too refined, too finite. When I used an outline, I felt too restricted and often ended up diverting entirely off topic. The basic plot would rarely change but the details I'd imagined and jotted down almost always did. I think it was more in part my initial brainstorming/epiphany being flawed than with the way I was writing the story. Outlining in the standard sense just wasn't going to work for me.

Before I started working on my current book, I had a breakthrough. One day I got the urge to start working and I was curious as to how some of my favorite authors planned their work, so I started with the most obvious, Joanne Rowling, whom I respect and admire greatly. I ended up clicking on a Google search result that led me to a photo of a page from her notebook laying out her plan for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in which she'd set up a grid, kind of like an Excel sheet (this is probably what I liken it to most), that laid out the time of year, the times, the chapters and the individual chapter plots among other things.

When I saw it my brain whirred, and started building it's own version, making changes that began to fit perfectly with how I write and the way I approach the writing process. I'm use a very free-style way of writing, so-to-speak, preferring to let the words just “come-out,” rather than thinking too much about them. I I've found that with me, if I think too much about the story while I write, everything begins to feel forced. I eventually came up with what you see below ruled onto a legal pad:

Month	Characters	#Days	Plot	Title	Narrator	Notes
Apr-May	Mattes Kai Mica	Flashback <1	Intro main chars minor back-story; the tattoo; build maerick's emotional connection for later	Gathering	Mattes	Maybe start with the tat spell? Kinda solemn, serious tone, an older mattes reflecting

With this, I can keep track of what time of year it is, the characters I'm working with and where they are, as well as approximately how many days need to be covered in that chapter, there is a place for me to write down the gist of the plot, I also know the chapter title (or a list of contenders at least, although sometimes they're blank (shh!)) and there is a spot for my notes or thoughts about the chapter. In the above example I used the first chapter of The Prophecy for example, because I can't exactly use a current chapter, now can I?

This method of outlining keeps me on-track, but allows me the freedom to create the story more fluidly. I've also used time lines a lot throughout, mostly to lay out the back-story for events that happened a long time ago but I still may need to reference because they're important to what is going on now. I need to keep everything aligned so that the dates and times are consistent throughout the series. I recommend time lines enthusiastically to anyone who has similar needs.

Keep in mind that, as I mentioned in the beginning, there is no de facto method for outlining or planning that works for everyone. Having a good understanding of how you think and work will make finding a method that works for you so much easier. The easiest way to figure out how you're working and thinking and what your “process” is could be by listing exactly why a standard MLA outline doesn't work for you, or what's wrong with it, along with other things you try. Experiment. After all writing is an art-form, and even though art isn't a science (though science can be art), at the heart of every artist needs to live a scientist because experimentation is so important in our work.