Writer's Pox

     Χαῖρε! Greetings. I got through the first week of the semester and am on to the second. Today I had breakfast at the caf at 8:00 and traditional grammar and usage at 9:00. I have New Testament Greek at 1:00. I think I'm going to love Mondays.

Free image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

     But not everything in my garden is sunny. If you haven't noticed, I've been rather inconsistent with my posts lately. Some might call it lazy, some might call it writer's block. I'm going to call it writer's pox. I'm suffering from writer's pox. Again.

     Writer's Pox: an affliction characterized by difficulty in putting words down either in pen or pencil or on the computer, often accompanied by an acute sensation of doubt about whether or not one really wants to be a writer

     All the writing advice books in the world will do me no good if I'm not writing. Polished stories and poems don't appear overnight like dandelions. So I crank out words that mean nothing to me because they're so wrong--the right ones slip through my fingers like thrashing, slimy eels.

     *I want to write for the love of it, but I've forgotten how.

Learning to Pretend

   

     The Patrol Tower

     Readers are supposed to suspend disbelief. They're supposed to pretend that the people and occurrences on the page are real. If they don't there's no point in reading.

      After all, I highly doubt J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit expecting people would clutch their bellies laughing, "Ha! Bilbo didn't talk to Smaug. Dragons don't talk. Even if they did, Biblo and Smaug don't even exist! They're just ink on a page!"

     It's pretty easy to pretend when you're reading someone else's writing. But sometimes I have trouble with my own. I'm the one writing them, and I'm the one who sees all the tangled fancies on the inside of my brain before they spill out onto the page.

     Two things I've found out that help me. The first is making bits of my story into drawings or models. My characters and settings feel more real when I can see them. The second thing that helps is detail, knowing everything about the world of my story, and knowing all about even secondary and tertiary characters.

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What helps you pretend?

     

Character Scaffolding

(Free image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)

 I'm sorry readers that the Well you've been wishing in is collecting cobwebs and dust--I'm back to brush them away.

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     There are ten core characters in my Wynna story: the dragon-riding members of the Winged Patrol. For a long time I only really knew three: the Captain (or Ecipol, as Dorinthian rank goes), Wynna, and her friend Filip. The other seven were just empty boots, and I didn't know how to fill them.

     So I looked to a master of character-creating: Julian Fellowes. I made a list of each of his unique and likable Downton Abbey staff members. Beside each name I wrote an epithet that summed up their character or their role as a whole (troublemaker, loyal one, witty one). Then I parceled out some of those tags to the Winged Patrol. That balanced out the group and gave me a scaffold on which to build their personalities. Now their backstories can trickle in, and my story can move on.

From left to right: Sivvan, Justus, Lejn, Oskar, Wynna

Filemus, Ecipol Tannebelte, Filip, Dirkartha, Phoenix

How do you create new characters?