Jacky Lang's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"

I have this brilliant but temperamental friend who is also an independent filmmaker. He reminded me recently of his "saving the cat" rule for introducing characters. He told me that if you must bring in characters that are hard to understand that showing them doing something good/interesting early on will help readers connect with them. His example is having the harsh looking, tough guy feed or save a stray cat in the early scenes. I find it's helpful to not only talk to other authors and readers but people with a more visual take on stories (like filmmakers) when I'm stuck or stalled. How about you?

Despite what all the fitness gurus tell me, sometimes I ride the elevator instead of taking the stairs. Yes, I realize I'm passing up the opportunity to burn some calories and sneak some exercise into my day, but elevator rides serve a greater purpose. These trips up and down buildings help me exercise my writing muscles. A quiet, lonely elevator ride gives me a few moments to let my mind wander. I can replay the best scenes of things I've written or read in my head and enjoy an escape from reality. When I've got company, elevators provide a perfect people watching laboratory. There they are, people trapped between floors just waiting for me to notice and catalog their every interesting comment, tick or expression. Unknowingly, my fellow passengers are providing me with the raw stuff of character development--those tiny details that make the difference between a character that seems interesting and one that feels real. So, I will have to get my physical exercise elsewhere, because I'm not willing to give up my elevator explorations. Writers out there...what are some of your favorite people watching spots?

This was not a summer filled with ice cream socials by day and long, warm, Margareta filled nights. Weeks and weeks of sizzling temperatures outside and boiling situations in my day job and real life left me dry and drained when September arrived.

It wasn't that I didn't write. After ending a long, but toxic friendship, and struggling through a shake-up at my office, and dealing with the realities of aging and finances, I didn't feel very creative, or romantic, or fun. All essentials for my fiction. Instead I managed to grind out articles and reports and other projects for work, while my notes for stories were buried under the swirling mass on my desk.

Then the rains came. Hours of deep sleep aided by dark skies and the sound of rain, followed by a few days of walking in the cool almost fall air, and I feel that I'm recovering. The crusty, burned, sorrow is flaking away. Underneath is the new, pink skin of a writer.

Everything is tender, inside and out, and the lessons of the scorching summer remain vividly painful. Still, it's time to move forward. Perhaps cautiously and not as quickly as I'd once hoped, but I will keep going. Just one reader--I just need to connect with one reader on each project and it will always be worthwhile.