based on true events

Hovering bedside, the demon started out in a playful mood.  He toyed with ideas of escape from imminent danger, entangled relationships from disparate social circles, and added a smattering of spooks and creeps where appropriate.  His specialty was not so much in blood and gore, but illusions of deformity, illness and the like.  He liked to throw in possessed children, depending on the dreamer.

This time she happened to be an insouciant waste of time.  She was one of those.  One of those who like to write on the side.  On the side, top, bottom and middle of their daily lives, they were unassuming emotional vampires, sucking the beauty and chaos out from any situation, as if they couldn't cope without arranging words to process the things that did and didn't happen.  Getting chills in her bed, she secretly lavished in the scared feeling.  Instead of waking up, forcing happy thoughts, or crying out to God, she seemed to be trying to actually prolong the nightmare.  Could this be this right?  Along the edges of his consciousness, the demon began to suspect that she was working out descriptions of characters and setting from what she saw.  Infuriated that the writer was using even this opportunity to cultivate plot fodder for scenes of her next book, shook her awake with a loud shriek and dissipated out of the room.
The demon returned with new strategies, worse images.  But the woman in her fear, welcomed it and would wake up to begin writing furiously before the details tapered out.  This of course challenged the demon even more....

Sometimes our muses aren't friendly.  I was thinking, that writers make muses out of anything, seizing upon facts, thoughts, events, all the time with a persistent ulterior motive: in part, to exploit them as material for their writing. Whether it be the experience of a nightmare, a loved one's financial or health struggles, romances of all kinds, etc., we are opportunists of all we encounter whether or not we like it.

What do you think?  Are we vampires?

You Noir What You Noir

In this video I talk about my dark, mysterious "noir" writing style. Enjoy.

To learn more about my suspense novel Fulfillment, click here for Amazon or click here for paperback.

For more on this topic, please visit my author blog by clicking here.

Here’s another novel idea…
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Reading Suspense/Thriller Fiction

Writers choose a genre of fiction that works best for them. I focus on suspense/thriller while mixing in elements of other genres. This video covers the types of fiction I blend together to make a story.

To learn more about my suspense novel Fulfillment, click here for Amazon or click here for paperback.

For more on this topic, please visit my author blog by clicking here.

Here’s another novel idea…
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New Series: How to Read Suspense

I'm launching a new series of short videos and follow-up commentary for readers of suspense or thriller stories.

Is this you?
You find a book you like. You read it. You enjoy it. You put it on a shelf, toss it, give it away, return it to the library or wrap the fish in it, but your rarely read the novel more than once. Why not? You can learn a lot by reading a novel for the second or third time. For example, you enjoyed the book so much, you couldn't put it down. Ever wonder how the author kept your attention?

Starting with plot and character
The first topic in my series on reading suspense fiction is character-driven fiction versus plot-driven fiction. What's the difference? Why should you care as a reader? Enjoy the video.

Learn more by clicking here. And be sure to share with your friends by clicking on the social media buttons below.

getting to know your characters

I've always been in awe of how one of my favorite authors Dostoevsky orchestrates such large casts of characters whose voices are distinct and constant (except when he intends to have them break their character mold, which they often do for various motives) and whose personalities can become as real and close to you as your own familys' and friends'.  Give him just one, two or three characters to work with, and he manages to go deeper than you ever wanted into their every crevice.  Your characters were not built in a day.  Remember that they have years of experiences, aspirations, traumas, etc. behind them.  Even if they're brand new, there's history in the world they live and the generations of shoulders they're standing on.

I've heard a number of ways to get to know who it is you are writing through, and about, in your story.  Of course, there is a plethora of inspiration in the real-life characters all around us.  We can draw from our own individual characteristics in different phases of our life.  Often our characters will be a similitude or mish-mash or an extreme version of people we know in real life, or wished we knew, or wished we didn't know...

Last night, our fearless leader Paul mentioned going through a hypothetical interview with each character, asking them questions and thinking of what they would answer, to get a sense for the voice of the characters.  I wondered why I had never taken this idea to paper, as I'm always thinking more about characterization and character development than of plot. (An important side note: remember that setting can also be treated as a character in itself that changes depending on whose point of view we are seeing through.  Setting has been described as simply the opinion of a character of where he/she is.)

Admittedly, some weak points of mine (somewhat uncharted territory for me), are dialogue and showing rather than telling.  Telling is easier.  There are times when telling is appropriate and necessary.  It's also usually a lot more boring, when it comes to knowing a person.  In this, I have to challenge myself to write longer, write more, to illustrate who this person is through examples of how they respond to life, rather than omnisciently splurging their hopes/dreams/fears and attitudes right away.

Putting it to paper.

      There are many ways a person can write a story.  There is no proper way or way that it has to be done.  Writing just more or less happens.
      I've found that the style I use best is the form in which you map it out first, find out where I'm going with the story before writing too much.  I started out with the 'write by the seat of your pants' style.  I couldn't figure out how I wanted to start my book so I started somewhere in the middle and just kept writing.
It wasn't until I took History of Theater in college that I figured out that I could start my book in the middle of the story.  The professor shared that when you watch a play you are witnessing a snippet of the character's whole story.  What he meant was that you weren't watching the character's entire life ie: birth, childhood, adolescence, and so forth.  So what you are seeing is the portion of the character's life pertinent to story of the play.
      Once I learned that, I decided that I would use what I've written as the beginning of my book.  From there I realized that I wasn't sure where I wanted the story to go.  Some writers are okay with that and it's fine.  My writer's blocks tend to deal with me not writing because I don't know what is going to happen in my story.
So my method is the story boarding style.  I have several white boards that I map the whole plot line of my book out on.  These plot points are not set in stone and I have changed them as I've gotten feedback and found out some plot points are weak or irrelevant to the story or characters.  You just can't set it in stone.  That will limit you too much, especially if your story takes a turn you hadn't anticipated earlier (which happens quite often).
      When I actual go to write, I pick a plot point that I feel like I can tease out into a scene.  It might be a large scene that is several pages in length or it could end up being only half a page just so I get the plot element into the story.  Once I'm done writing it down and typing it up, I go back to my white board and update the point with a little more elaboration so that when I go back to look at the board later I can remember easier how I expanded it.
      I am very visual with my planning.  I've drawn maps of the areas my characters have gone so that I can describe them better in the book.  When creating a new world it helps to remember where all your landmarks are in relation to each other.  Or while writing the second book of my series, I realized that I had a hard time remembering where certain characters were in their own story lines, relative to each other.  So I took one of my white boards and drew out a timeline for each character.  One time line above the other so that when I plotted the points of the timeline for each character, the points then showed, in more readily available format, where each character was.
     I'm not saying this is the best way to write a story, and I'm sure it doesn't work for everyone.  This is the way I set it up though and it keeps me on track.  That being said, I'm always curious about other writer's methods and ways I can try differently to keep the creativity flowing.

The Ending of Mass Effect

(If you haven't finished the game I apologize there are some SPOILERS in this discussion)

There has been this huge discussion about the recently released game Mass Effect 3.  It was a huge hit with game critics and an absolute turn down for players.  The biggest reason being the ending of the game.

I have played it through once and seen the possible endings of the game afterward from people recording their choices on YouTube.  While there are a lot of holes in the endings, particularly pertaining to the scene with the Normandy flying between Mass Relays, there is something that a lot of the people who played the Mass Effect line have left out.  The fact that not every story has a completely happy ending.

I felt fine with my choice and the end of the game.  With a series so immense as the Mass Effect series is, to accommodate for all the choices a player could have chosen while playing would have been astronomical.  But the true fact of the matter is, it is the writers of the story that have planned out what ending it will ultimately be.  The fact that the writers left an Easter egg at the end of one of the choices just means that that ending was the one they had planned the whole time.    Not to mention the possibility for future games and spin offs.  

Yes, I know that the game was made to shape the galaxy into how the player wanted to, like deciding which species gets to live and which doesn't or who you want to befriend or not.  But its similar to the saying, "you can't bring money with you".  Meaning that you can't take money with you through the grave.  So whatever you do in the game will ultimately not matter at the end because the threat you have to face at the end will either destroy you or leave you limping and bleeding afterwards.  Yes, limping and bleeding is better than being dead but what I'm saying is even if you've won you still had the crap beat out of you.

As many of the players who really looked into the game, aside from playing it through to romance some alien chick or shoot up space meanies, should know from the Star Trek franchise that there is sometimes a no win situation.  So when Shepard dies at the end and strands the massive fleet he brought with him to Earth that is a no win situation.  Yeah, the threat to the galaxy is gone but sacrifices had to be made to do so.  That's what Admiral Hackett had been saying for the entire game.

You may say you hate the ending of the series but what you're not seeing is that the writers did exactly what writers are supposed to do.  Draw out your emotions and feelings so that they can be felt by you and, if they can pull it off, those around you as well.  What the players are kicking and screaming about is that they didn't get a 'Hollywood Ending'.  Not every story has a 'Hollywood Ending' and that's great. Not having happy endings is something that people remember.

All of this is not to say that writers shouldn't take into consideration what their audience feels.  If they didn't, they would get lazy.  As we've all seen with absurd amount of remakes and reboots of older movies coming out of Hollywood.  If writers didn't take their audiences' views into consideration the literary world would dissolve into too few actually creative books.  Much like what is coming out of Hollywood.  This point may not be pointed at the writers as much as producers not willing to put out movies that are original either way there has to be new ideas to promote growth.  But back to my main point.  What I'm saying is that even though a story is the work of a writer, the writer still writes the story so that other people will read it.  There has to be a trust for the writers to write something that will move the audience, whether to make them happy or sad or even angry, and an understanding that if something is written with an upsetting ending that it will still be well written and not just a cop out.

The true worth of silly stuff

This blog is the joint product of a writers group. Which probably leads you, the reader, to ask: What does a writers group do? Good question.

If you ask members of 50 different writers groups what their group does for them, you’ll probably get more than 50 answers. I base this prediction in part on the knowledge that people differ in what they want from such a group, and in part on my own inability to give the same answer as to what our group does twice in a row.

I enjoy the somewhat free-form aspects of our writers group meetings and our twin focus on encouraging each other and doing 3-5 minute writing exercises. I’d never done these before I joined this group. If you haven’t, all I can say is, it’s kinda the writer’s version of speed-dating, but way more fun. 

For instance, one week one of the prompts had us incorporating the following list of random words into a story: acolyte, tiddlywinks, pickles, galaxy, is, razor. Here’s what I came up with:

Here we sit on the razor edge of the galaxy, where time is slowed by the speed of our rotation, playing tiddlywinks with data chips for the treat of winning one of the few remaining pickles from ships' stores.

Who knew how delightful a pickle could be after months of vitamin drinks, yeast-protein and various processed starches? We, the acolytes of the religion of galactic exploration, had outrun our supply lines in our enthusiasm for discovery. Which might not have mattered except that the Frangle drive broke down.

Or the week we played around with writing prompts about endings. The first was to write the end of a dialog. So I did this to the closing lines of Hamlet…

"We need to get a script together NOW for our next project, you know," said Tim. 

"Yeah, " said Harry, "but the three kings theme has been done to death, and so has the play within a play format." 

"True," said Tim. "Even Star Trek did that one, with Shakespearean actors putting on their play on the Enterprise as subtext for the plot." 

"OK," said Rafe, "so, how about a classic murder mystery?" 

"BO-ring," said Tim. 

"Maybe an overthrow of government with romantic overtones," said Harry. 

"Oh, yeah, set in space," said Tim. 

"Umm, isn't that Star Wars?" 

"Don't be a killjoy, Rafe," said Harry. 

Tim chimed in. "We could have the protagonist die at the end." 

"Hmm," said Rafe, “I guess I could work with that. But no little talking teddy bears." 

Harry grinned. "How about rainbow pastel ponies?" 

"Now cracks a noble heart," said Rafe 

"Good night sweet prince," caroled Tim. 

Harry joined in. "... and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." 

Rafe raised his notebook and cracked Harry over the head. 

Harry ducked and yelped, "Why does the drum come hither?"

  

But the followup prompt that week was to write about the end of everything, which really ups the ante.

Everything the priests told us was wrong. The poets came much closer with their talk of destruction by fire and ice, but that's only because anything this ... universal ... fits poetry better than plain prose. And fiction seems more plausible than the entropic death of the universe. 

Well, the universe may have millenia or even eons left before that time but our corner of it will come to an end soon enough. The larger star of this binary system, about which this planet orbits, shows daily greater instabilities, surface and subsurface. 

So tonight, the interstellar research institute sends this message out, both broadcast and engraved on the inner skin of a rocket. I'm not sure why, but someone might find it.
 

These things crack me up, but more than that, I look back on them amazed that they came out of my brain. Turns out, having to write something on a totally random subject can produce unprecedented subjects & styles. The other amazing thing is how completely different each writer's speed-writing efforts can be. As we read them aloud around the table, we run the gamut from mystery and suspense through scifi/fantasy, humor and romance to bad puns. Maybe some week we'll gather a sampling of just how different the writing-prompt products of different writers can be and post them here.

The Multiple Perspective Approach

There are various ways to write a book, and they all have their advantages and disadvantages.

For instance, a first-person perspective book is great for character development but the problem, as I see it, is that that is the only way a writer can show things happening in the story.  It seems to me that characters end up hearing things or being present to events almost haphazardly.  I know there are writers who do this well and can pull it off amazingly, but that's the case with all writing.  Some authors can pull off writing styles amazingly.

The omniscient third person where the narrator can tell the reader everything they need to know about the character the first time the character is introduced.  This makes it easier to describe things that happen that are pertinent to the story without forcing, in some manner, the main character to be there.  The drawback to this style is that it tends to give too much away to the reader.  Some readers like this, of course, because some people like to know what's going to happen or they enjoy the feeling of what I like to refer to as 'Game Show Syndrome'.  What I mean by that is, when someone watches a game show and they know the answer but the person on the screen doesn't, they sit there yelling the answer at the person even though they can't hear them.  This same thing happens with books and movies.  The classic of course being, "Don't open that door!"

There are many other ways to write than the two I listed above but those are two common ones.

The perspective I use and personally love is the multiple perspectives.  This approach still is kind of a meshing to some of the others.  It allows the writer to still be able to draw the reader in and influence their opinion of the character while allowing the freedom to show things happening in other parts of the story that may still be important to the overall story.  If done well, the story will come together and mesh well while still providing some good intrigue.  If done poorly, like when I first started writing my story, all the characters just end up seeming like the same person or different character attributes of the same person.   To me it seems that using more than one main character allows the writer to toy with the reader's emotions and get them to second guess who the 'bad guy' is in the different character relationships.

About my first book.

   I realize in my last post I spoke of my book, He Came Around the Corner, and that was the first mention of it anywhere.
   So who cares?
   Well the hope for all writers is that people will care when they write a book and I, like most writers, write to influence those around me.  The purpose of writing is not always to make someone think about something profound and philosophical, although that is sometimes the case, particularly with some classic novels.  Sometimes writers will write just to make the reader feel enjoyment from what they read.  This is why I write.
   The funny thing about writing fiction is even though books are put into archetypes, they will often fit other archetypes as well.  For instance, a mystery novel could have a strong romance element in it.  My book is a Young Adult (YA) Fantasy but it still has other elements in it.  The next secondary element, after being Fantasy, in it is the romance.  The romance of the book actually causes one of the profound questions to appear in the story: What exactly are we capable of?

   My book is about two teenagers, Drake and Athena, at the end of their senior year of high school.  On the night of a school dance, what they know as the world they live in changes.  They find themselves alone in their town, everyone they knew and who lived in the town vanish.  The power is gone and only things on batteries and generators will work.  On top of all that, the two of them have to fight for their lives because where ever they go in town, there are orcs who want to kill them.  The only thing keeping them alive are Drake's new magical ability to summon a sword and their knowledge of the town they grew up in.