Michael Kenneth Smith's Blog, page 7

Character Assassinations

Home Again is about two young boys who go off to war. The premise has been around a while, but these two, Luke and Zach, were very special young men who distinguished themselves during the course of the Civil War.

As my writing of the story progressed and each character developed, I fell in love with both. I certainly didn’t love them at first, I had no idea who they were, but they grew on me. Zach was big and mature and not easily intimidated by anybody. Not that he was cocky. . .he had that...

How Writing Calmed My Bi-Polar Disorder

In an earlier post, I mentioned my life changedwhen I read the first 3000 words I’d written of my soon-to-be novel—though I didn’t realize quite how much. While I didn’t really notice it at the time, others saw clear changes in my normal (I use this term loosely) behavior.

Few people know that from an early age, I suffered from depression, which would later be diagnosed as bi-polar disorder. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, my mood would dramatically shift. One day I would be calm and stead...

Getting Comfortable with Conflict and Crawling

This writer had no idea about scene structure, conflict, dialogue or any of the other elements of writing a book. I thought I’d writea wonderful story in which the character(s) would go through experiences ranging from happytoharmonious. This was probably a reaction to mychildhood—where there was a lot of conflict. During those periods of conflict, I would hide in the barn or get lost in the woods. To this day, I have trouble getting through the conflict in a book or movie, even though I know...