A poll

Interesting Secondary Characters

I wanted to share a particularly helpful bit of information I recently learned from an editor I follow.

As you know, I've been revising a MS for my agent, per request. And she had some very instructive, insightful things to say about it, but she pointed out (and it was immediately clear) that certain aspects of some of my characters were not fully imagined.

As you can think, this filled me with chagrin. Those darn secondary characters. They played good parts in the story, but I only showed the parts they played, and not their motivations. And this was hurting the story more than I ever suspected it could do.

So I thought. And thought. And finally I came up with how I could deal with this solution. I made a character sheet for each. I know. Uncool. I always mocked those types of things, but here I am using it. And you know what? It helped enormously.

In fact, I think it improved the story beyond what I had already thought was a darn good one. It was fantastic!

So just for reference, I'm including my main questions here for my secondary characters in case it might help you:

1. Character name
2. Character motivation in story
3. Character conflict
4. Character conflict with POV
5. Character resolution

Hope this helps you as much as it helped me! And tell me - do you do something like this at the end, in your revision process?

Literary Daydreams

Writing sometimes makes me feel weird.

Scratch that. Perhaps writing makes me weird.

It is a known literary phenomenon that some people, after reading a great character-driven story, will start daydreaming about the characters in the book, putting them in new and different situations. People’s minds will start to wander, and, in essence, these books are literally imagination fuel.

I’ve talked to several people who sheepishly admitted to this, and read about it a few times on the interwebs. I used to think this was a writing side effect of letting one’s ego run amok. Now, I know better.

Fan Fiction, the honest kind, not the creepy sex kind, is a good example. Some people just get high on words and can’t come down, so they write on others intellectually property and share it.

That’s awesome, by the way. Many people pooh-pooh fan fiction. I would love to be in a position to pooh-pooh fan fic off my intellectual property.

But I digress.

This internalization of characters is now driving my writing process. If I don’t think about the main characters like this, this is my mind telling me I’ve boofed it. Boofed, by the way, is a technical term.

In a way, I feel blessed. I have an internal boof sensor. If I’m not daydreaming, the main character isn’t working. As a reader, I’ve also started recognizing I’ll daydream about great literary characters, but simply enjoy a “good” book and move on.

Is this making sense or did I go off the deep end?

Daydreaming, by the way, is the brain acting normal in the absence of problems to solve.

So maybe I’m not so weird after all.

Capturing Light: Details from a Camera

Details rock my world. I love the feathered edge of parchment, the steam from my breath when out in the cold, the glimmer of light on a cloudy day. I snap a zillion photos of details, zooming in to catch the prism of a water drop on a lotus, the texture of roots poking up from rich blackness, the sheen of polished wood. I always promise myself that I'll include the details in my WIP.


I rarely do. The photos rarely see the light of day. Embarrassingly, several thousand are up-loaded to my computer but unprinted. Another 1000+ reside on my camera. Yet untouched. There's always something more to see, something else to capture.


Tomorrow I head for Philadelphia for a conference. I'm excited. I know I'll spend the rest of the week snapping pictures -- and all for what?


My hope is that all of those views and angles and shimmers and flashes reside somewhere in my head. I may not pluck one out, pristine and unsullied, to insert into a scene -- but the things I see, hear, experience all bubble & simmer in my brain somewhere, ready to be used when called upon. I may not spread the photos out around me, waiting for inspiration, but the act of catching the last leaf on a tree leaves me with something inexplicable. And that's what I try to insert into my WIP.


Where do you get your details? How do you reveal a scene or find inspiration? On another note, what do you do with all of your photographs? (And no, I don't scrapbook!)

I Love Audiobooks

Most of the books that I have read lately, have been of the audio persuasion. Why? Well it wouldn't be good if I had a book balanced on the steering wheel as I drove to work. Never mind that it is illegal here in California to do so, it's also not a smart thing to be doing anyway. It would be very embarrassing to rear end someone because you were entranced by an exciting scene, and not only that, it's extremely dangerous. You could cause an accident that killed yourself and possibly others. So instead of reading a real book in the car, I listen to audiobooks.

It really is a different experience. Most of the books that I read (I still call it reading) are read by professionals that make the reading a performance, not simply reading the words. If there is emotion in a sentence, they provide that emotion. If a passage is conveying a quiet scene, they will read softer. When they change from character to character, they modify their voice, so that you the listener can easily distinguish whom is talking. The effect for me, is a greater enjoyment of the work.

You might argue that the emotion that the reader puts into the work, might be different than what I might experience if I were reading the book myself, and that's probably true. But I know that the reader discusses the book with the author before the performance, to get the true feeling of the book, so in some ways, the experience could be a richer one.

What audiobooks does for me is to enrich what would normally be wasted time, with entertainment and learning. Listening to fiction, I learn how another author dealt with scene, characterization, pacing, and flow. Listening to nonfiction, I learn something new about a topic that might never have explored before. The point is, I get a lot more done with time that previously was used only for mundane tasks such as commuting to work, or working out at the gym.

There are a number of places to get audiobooks on the internet. There are free sites such as librivox.com, but these are usually read by a bunch of different individuals and the quality is spotty at best. Your local library may have some audiobooks that you can borrow, and you can get books from most of the MP3 providers such as iTunes, Amazon.com, etc.

The best provider of high quality recent books is Audible.com. They have different plans for one or two books a month, and there is a monthly cost, but they have an excellent product. I highly recommend it.

So what about you? Do you listen to audiobooks?

Writing as an Investment and Opportunity

According to Rick Frishman and Robyn Spizman, who wrote Author 101: Bestselling Secrets From Top Agents, "80% of books that are published fail. In addition, 1 percent of all books sold account for 50 percent of all publishing company profits" (p.6).

This fact shows that publishers are gambling when they put out a new author. Who would gamble with the odds being 80% against success? This begs the question of why bother. Why should we, individual authors, go for it, and why should publishers believe in us?

Well, one word comes to mind--investment.

My brother-in-law and I attended a publishing seminar awhile ago and afterwords I made a comment about how seminars and conferences just seem to drain money, even if they are good. His response was that they are an investment and that any new business would have to put up a similar investment.

Given that he is a successful nonfiction writer and editor, I took his advice to heart. I think the question then becomes one of what kind of an investment are we as writers making. Given the odds, I'm not sure that it is wise to bet everything on the financial investment piece paying off. Perhaps there is something beyond money that we as writers are investing in.

I invest money in marathon events. Why? Because it's a great experience and it makes me a better person. The training and the racing combines to make me a better person than I would be if I did not run.

I think that writing is similar to that. Now, it may be that you want and/or need to make money at writng. Perhaps you even feel a moral obligation to make at least as much money as you have spent on paper, ink, coffee, pastries, and conferences. I sometimes feel that way.

I don't suppose that I have any great answers today, but I am interested to know what you are investing in with your writing if it is something beyond money. Don't get me wrong, money and an author's life are worthy goals, but it seems like there needs to be something beyond that to keep one going when the going gets tough and the money is not rolling in.

What if you did get published, but the amount of money that you made was still less than the amount of money you invested in conferences and the like to get your book out there? Would you still be happy? If the answer is yes, what is it that you invested in that paid off?

Writers and their (lack of) money

Are writers especially prone to money woes?

Well, it depends on which writers we're talking about.

But in general terms, with writers one often finds: low and irregular pay, lack of money skills, poor financial planning, occasional creative-type flakiness and risky financial behavior.

That's not only writers, of course... but anyway, here's what John Scalzi has to say in his very interesting blog post on the subject of Writers and Financial Woes.

Read and weep.