Characters and details, my way!
Well this week as been a very different and challenging one. Not one I would wish to be repeated for numerous personal reasons but I suppose that would turn this blog into a personal as opposed to professional related blog which is what this is aiming to be. Something where I can share my journey as a writer and author and not pollute it with stuff that detracts from that.
Although on the other hand I am human. I suppose sometimes the personal stuff influences what I do so you’ll have to forgive me if it bleeds into this a little on occasion. For the most part though I shall keep you in the world of imagination and creation that is my writing side and out of the drama and events of my everyday life!
Alongside my working week I haven’t had much chance to write and so have left the pages of Whispering Shadows alone for a few days. I have been monitoring my Giveaway progress and general sales which still continue to grow so I am more than happy with that as my audience continues to grow as does my Twitter, Facebook and WordPress followings.
This evening though I was left an hour to myself before work (night shifts) and the family out so I decided to see if I could write something. Thankfully I came up with a chapter and still they all remain first draft I can indeed see the basic story developing. I’ve started making my usual notes and done my usual character naming trick which is taking the first name that springs to mind – I always find first names easier to generate spontaneously over surnames. Then from there every character has two have a first and last name in my stories, even I they are only mentioned once, it’s important as I feel they are a more completed entity.
When I write and create my stories I have my little things I like to do. Full naming is one of those things, everyone has to be a “complete” person and that way I can invest myself into them all the more. If I just give them a first name then I don’t feel as connected to the characters.
So this week I have introduced three new characters to the growing story and they are:
Cassandra Fox – Metropolitan Police Sergeant and lead of their task force
Colin Green – Newly introduced antagonist
Both characters will be introduced alongside some of the recurring characters from the original story and allow me to develop both those characters we already know and the new ones.
It’s always funny with characters I do like to sit there and get a mental image in my head of what they look like. If it is one that will form part of the integral story and recur more than just a few pages then I need to invest in them. Building them in my mind lets me put them into the wild scenes I generate within the story. Like I’ve said before I am very visual and so I need to be able to play scenes and events in my mind before, during and after I write them. A lot of my ideas over the years have been ideas I have absent mindedly played out in my over-active imagination. They themselves embed themselves and eventually I remember them and they form part of the stories I write.
As a reader I’m not sure people realise how difficult it is to create everything that goes into a story. For me I can read a decent book in a couple of days and then its done. Most of the time an author will pour themselves into those pages for months, years, decades and who knows how long. I’m as guilty as the next of just reading and running but than in itself is still a compliment to the author. As long as you’ve invested in and enjoyed the story then all that heart ache, all that hard work and development means it was worth it.
Hopefully by throwing my journey out there in a blog it will inspire others or else maybe explain how and why I do the things I do.
There is always a critic and for the most part the hardest critic is yourself. For me with my story I have to ground it as much as I can. Long gone are the days where I could make things up and leave plot holes as big as the book itself. Over the years I’ve understood that the more effort I go into with details (such as full naming my characters) the more I get invested and try to perfect the story and produce something that I feel is a proper offering to people. With the quantity of self-published authors out there it is easy to get lost in the mix but by being the best I can and working to make my stories something a little different I hope to eventually break through the barriers and become one of the names people come to for more.
So instead of sleeping before nights I have spent time writing another chapter…..hopefully some caffeine and a gym session will wake me up at the right time!
