C.G. Hatton's Blog, page 6

ENTP or ESTJ?

How geeky is it to know the MBTi types of your main characters?If you’re not familiar with Myers-Briggs, the basic theory is that you have preferences ([I]ntroverted or [E]xtraverted, [S]ensing or i[N]tuitive, [T]hinking or [F]eeling, [J]udging or [P]erceiving) and there are sixteen personality types. As I understand it, in situations where you are in control, you act within your type with assurance and confidence. Where you are out of your comfort zone and stressed, you may be forced to act as the opposite that you’re not so well practiced at and that’s not great.LC is ENTP:
quick, alert and outspoken. ENTPs are strong in initiative, resourceful, ingenious and stimulated by difficulties. They hate routine. They tend to be independent and charming.Hilyer is ESTJ: practical, realistic and decisive. ESTJs take care of routine details and base plans on established fact. They are self-confident, aggressive and like to have fun. They have a clear set of standards to live by.When writing them both, it was cool to throw them into situations where they couldn’t rely on their natural preference and see how badly they coped. Cruel, I know, but as I’ve said before, I worked through a lot of anger when writing those books.NG is so down the middle, it’s intimidating. He can be introverted or extroverted with equal ease. He wheels and deals in facts as easily as he relies on his own intuition. He is incredibly logical but is a natural empath. He can be judging and orderly equally as well as he can be perceptive and spontaneous. He can deal with anything. So to test him, the pickles I’m throwing him into are having to be worse, tougher and downright dizzying. For us both.
Briggs Myers, Isabel. 1980. Gifts Differing. Davies-Black Publishing, CA.www.myersbriggs.orgwww.personalitypage.comwww.emdcoaching.com

Focus or go for scattergun?

I’m finding it tough to concentrate at the moment. As well as working on book three of the Thieves’ Guild, I’m also writing a non-fiction book and working through some other ideas. I have two books out there already that I’m supposed to be marketing and selling. Add in my day job of working on other people’s books and the six weeks summer holiday entertaining two toddlers, and chaos ensues.An article I read recently argued the importance of only working on one project at a time to focus. It made me feel bad. I’ve never been able to do just one thing at a time. I’m fickle.A lot more people say to just write. Write and enjoy it. Whatever it is. Be prolific.It would be wonderful to have the luxury of concentrating on one thing at a time, but that’s not me anyway. The non-fiction book and other ideas I’m working on are a lot less fun than sci-fi. They’re serious. They don’t have big guns, merciless bounty hunters, back-stabbing traitors and poison-wielding assassins. I’m enjoying writing NG, especially when Hilyer and LC are involved too, so that’s what I’ll stick to at the moment… in between play-doh disco, checking the Kindle sales and waiting for the football season to start.
ps. buy my books at Amazon(does that count as today’s marketing efforts?)

No stupid bad guys...

I’ve always had it drummed into me that my bad guys should not be stupid. In my tracking back, there was one bit that had always bothered me but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on why. It dawned on me at last that my bad guys were being stupid. They just wouldn’t do what I had them doing if they were as good as they should have been.Something else one of my mentors always says is that there are no bad guys, it just depends which side of the fence you’re on (this is the guy who, at the age of nine, was the only child in the cinema to cheer Darth Vader when he first appeared on that big screen). When I started writing, my bad guys were always stereotypical nasty wrongdoers. I went through a phase of writing in people I didn’t like and making them my bad guys. Since then, by the time I started to write the Thieves’ Guild series, I’ve become very aware that people just look out for themselves. So my bad guys now are simply people with their own motivations. Maybe I’ve grown up a bit.Back to the scene I wasn’t happy with, I’ve had to leave NG, jump to the other side of that fence and run a load of discussions through my head about what exactly they were trying to do and what plan would work. It’s made it tougher for NG but isn’t that the point?

Changing realities...

How cool would it be to have a delete/undo button in real life? You know when you’re in a mess of a situation and you can track back exactly to the moment in time where you made a mistake.That’s why I love writing fiction. If something doesn’t feel right somewhere along the line, you can ditch back, change what your little guy does or says or where he goes and yea, they’re off in a new direction. Usually heading into more of a pickle but then that’s what they’re for.Continuing the saga of how awkward NG is being, I’ve been stuck for a while getting all his ducks in a row, getting everyone where they need to be and in the right place before I can move on. I was nudging 90,000 words, heading for the final scene, and hmmm, something didn’t feel right. Again. This happened with LC. I was writing the end of Blatant Disregard, decided it wasn’t right and dropped 20,000 words to go back, changed one thing and bam, the end of the book just flowed from there.In Harsh Realities, it’s not only NG that’s being difficult; I also have LC and Hil to contend with. It’s really cool to have all three of them together but, boy, are they hard work. I’m just in the process of tracking back to see who shouldn’t have done what, when, so I can fix it and we can get on. Oh, to be able to do that in real life.

It’s all in the name…

My characters’ names are very important to me. Some of them turn up with their own names right away, some are more difficult.It always seems that if the name’s there, it works – if I try to force it, it doesn’t feel right and it’s best to wait for it to appear in its own time. I like using place names for people and people’s names for places. I like nicknames, especially if only certain characters are privileged to know and use them. I collect names and a lot of my characters are named after real people for no reason other than it being a name that caught my attention and was stashed away for the right moment. Some of my characters, however, have names that are really significant to me…LC, as I’ve said, is based on – and named after – someone who was very special to us. The origins of the surname we adopted for him date the beginning of the writing of this story and can be tracked back to the Tottenham team of the early 90s. That was an awesome line up at the front.Hil turned up out of nowhere. I always thought that Zachary was a cool name and love the fact that Hil hates it so much. I also love the way everyone calls him Hil – that nickname also reminds me of someone very special.Hal Duncan is named after someone special that I never met. He was my husband’s best friend at school. They both joined the army at 16, went into different units and Duncan (Tiny as he was known – he was 6’4”) died at the age of 17. I knew both of them by reputation before I met my husband. I wish I’d had the chance to meet Tiny. My husband still misses him.NG has only recently revealed his name and even then, it had to be dragged out of him. That was always part of his appeal. He was the character, the new guy, who turned up out of nowhere, without so much as a name, as a breath of fresh air to nudge everyone else into action when they were playing up. I had no idea back then how complex he’d turn out to be, how much there is to him that he hides from everyone behind that veneer of easy confidence. I think that’s why it took so long to learn his name.

When characters don’t behave…

Writing Residual Belligerence (Hil) took me a year, Blatant Disregard (LC) took about a year and a half – I’ve just found my notebook with the first scribblings of Harsh Realities (NG) and it’s dated exactly three years ago!I used to think I could write a book a year, pretty much, but here I am three years later and still working my way through the complexities of NG’s story.I know that partly the increasing time scales are due to the fact that I started writing LC while I was editing and finishing up Hil, and then writing NG whilst editing and finishing up LC. I find it hard to switch between writing and editing, and when I’m polishing and editing one story, it’s tough to click back into that place where I can get into a different character’s head to move their story on.Editing feels like work. Writing is fun. Writing is what I do to go somewhere else, to be someplace where I have total control, mostly, over what happens. Where I can play. Where sometimes I don’t know what might happen next and I get surprised by my characters when they do or say something unexpected. Editing is what I do to make a story right, to tie up all the loose ends, weave through all the threads and intricacies of plot and character development and check consistencies, not to mention the whole proofreading process at the end. Work. No wonder each book has taken longer.My characters have also become increasingly complex. Hil is very straight forward. I worked through a lot of anger issues when I was writing the first book (long story). I listened to Linkin Park, very loud, and drove too fast with conversations and arguments between characters always buzzing in my head. But the Thieves’ Guild books are really about LC. He’s always been my main character, and I’ve been writing about these characters for almost twenty years, but I was always in awe of him. He was supposed to make an appearance in Residual Belligerence but when it came to it, I couldn’t write it. It ended up as a flashback. Hil was telling LC’s story and it was that that got me to a point where I finally felt I could handle reckless, unpredictable, incorrigible LC. The second book didn’t just take longer because I was finishing up the first. LC is hard work. He’s based on someone who was an incredible character and I always feel that I have to live up to his legacy. I hope I’ve done him proud.But if I thought LC was difficult, being with NG is proving to be exasperating. When NG first appeared in my short stories a long time ago, he was always cocky, bright, mischievous… Now? Now, I’ve thrown so much at him, it feels like he’s reeling from it. All that anger from a few years ago hasn’t gone but it’s changed. I feel changed and NG’s story is very much about change. I’m sure he’ll come through it in the end. That has to be the point, doesn’t it?

welcome to my new blog!

As if writing and working, and juggling family, isn't enough, I've decided to blog! I'm not much into writing personal stuff, so it'll be about books, writing, what I'm working on and what's coming soon.
More to follow...!