My Novel-Writing Mode

If you are an author, you've been asked before if you are a plotter or one who writes by-the-seat-of-your-pants.  I'm the latter.  Although at first I do have vague ideas about the beginning, the ending, the three try-fail scenes.  But I'm more fluid about sticking with them as-is.  After all, imagination is King and allowed to reign free for the most part with me.  Thereafter, as things jell, my plot becomes more rigid, more set.

I'm definitely a character-driven author (again as versus a plot-driven work).  So I get my stories from people, real-life ones I see in 3-D or ones depicted in magazines or stills--or blogs.  One such photo, that launched itself into my mind and right into a fast blip of a short movie clip, came out of a magazine ad (for what, I do not remember).  But there was a woman in a flannel lumberjack shirt, standing relaxed in front of her open door, coffee cup in hand, gazing at the snowcapped mountains.  That tale still resides in me, awaiting release.

One was a beautiful tan self-assured girl in safari garb driving an open Jeep which passed my DART bus on my way to my less-exciting day job.  I've posted about her before.  I'm still gonna write her story at some time--"her" story in the way my creativity sees it, that is.

I get ideas from TV shows and books and movies, too.  I love Murder, She Wrote (TV series) and J.D. Robb's In Death (book) series.  I love how each protagonist is a good person, trying to do right, amid all the wrongdoing they see.  Plus my first-ever written story, a short-short creation in response to a required homework assignment for my seventh grade English teacher, was a mystery.  So, I definitely have at least one mystery to be written from within my DNA.

While I love my characters I embellish, there are some other loves of mine that I pair with them.  Being an entrepreneurial-author type, I like to choose different careers for my guys in my novels.  So you probably won't find a doctor, a lawyer or an Indian Chief among them.

As for settings, I love my Deep South roots.  So you will see that reflected in my tales.  But I yearn to see Paris, France and other European sites (also found in my genetic makeup), so that is inevitable as well.

Then there are those topics where my own interests lie, so my personal research/learning would end up being info/knowledge used for later books.  Again, I'm tied to mysteries, thus drawn to Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids.  Overlay that with just a general awe over creation itself and you would understand why landscapes pull me so, like sunsets and sunrises, and nature walks and hiking through parks, etc.

If you are a fledgling author, do not despair.  Ideas will come to you as you read a newspaper and ask "What if . .  .?"  What if I took my next-door neighbor merged with my boss and my mother and put this newly created conglomerated individual in this scenario from today's news, what would happen next?  What would the life of my rich (or poor) friend look like from an insider's viewpoint?  What if I took a traditionally male job and put a woman in it?  What if I took a marriage and made the woman the breadwinner and the man the at-home caretaker?

Examine the works of others you love which work on many levels.

I love Firefly (the Joss Whedon TV series--too short-lived!) and the follow-up Serenity movie, not to be confused with the supposed first episode named "Serenity."  I still watch it over and over on DVD.  If you study Joss's character cast, you see a bunch of neat twists and turns just with the makeup of his cast.  You have Serenity herself, the ship, which acts as much as a main character as it does for the setting, the cowboy past comingled with the spaceship future.  Genius.  Double genius.

You have Mal, the ship's captain (a necessary character), but this one is flawed and we love him all the same.  He has his yes-man subordinate, Zoe, who acts as his conscience and will speak up when she feels it necessary.  She's the fighter/warrior married to the wimp-like ship's pilot, Wash, and their relationship is hot and inspiring.  We have the onboard renter, a professional companion, Inara, who secretly loves Mal who secretly loves her, amid all the whore-bashing rhetoric he flails her way, which definitely appeals to the more tormented love seekers who watch the series and may yearn for the Zoe-Wash marriage, but are currently not there yet, still in flux.

To round out the ten-character cast (I'm counting the spaceship Serenity), there is the shepherd, aptly named thus, and this crew is in need of his and His help.  You need a mechanic on any ship, and who doesn't love Kaylee?  She's our naive, sweet, optimistic young girl with the heart of gold.  Her down-to-earth girl-next-door good looks are just as beautiful in their way as Inara in her decked-out, bejeweled, Glamour Shot, model-perfect version.

Jayne is the guy you love to hate.  He's our in-house nemesis that you end up policing even while you are fighting a greater terror, like the Reavers.  Simon and River Tam were a brilliant addition to the cast.  First, it makes for an uneven pairing of the crew/cast, and it certainly added an interesting element to the "Out of Gas" episode.  Second, River is an entertaining conundrum, going from insane-acting person to superior IQ intellect to cockney-accented foible.  She's great.  Third, the brother is a doctor taking care of his patient, but his patient is smarter than he is.  I find him an odd mixture of hero and wimp.  Probably as Joss planned.  Fourth, it adds another element to an enemy to be fought, both within their ranks and from without.

Joss, you are another of my mentors.

Still, for those newbie authors, don't be intimidated by the genius that is Joss.  Follow it like you can do the Eight Archetypes or other external guideposts.  Not to be discounted is the factor of you.  You have no farther to look than inside yourself.  Write about characters that personify your greatest values.  Write about situations where the good guys or underdogs win.  Write about causes you wish to elevate to make the world a better place.  Write about what you love.  Move your readers to care, to shed a tear, to write a donation check, to improve themselves somehow.

You CAN make the world a better place for you having been here.  Do it.  Write from the heart.  Start now.

Wisdom Can Be Found Anywhere: Interesting Thoughts from Books and Movies

As a curious and studious seeker of wisdom and knowledge, I find evidence of both everywhere.  Plus I’m a movieholic so it is not surprising that I find pearls of universalisms in big screen productions.  One of my all-time favorite flicks is Sweet Home Alabama which has a great line that goes something like this:  You can have both roots and wings . . . .  I love that line.  Why do we have to choose between the two?  Why can’t we have both?  Why can’t we have it all?

These are not just kernels to create a novel from, although that is something I am likely to do.  However, learning in and of itself is useful.  It adds to our confidence level, can improve the quality of our lives and our world.  Who knows which one of us will assimilate a random collection of facts and come up with something new from that combination’s synergy? 

A new philosophy perhaps.  Ayn Rand did it with her books, novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, not to mention her nonfiction works about objectivism.  How about a cancer cure or a new fuel supply?  What about something so basic like learning to understand and communicate effectively with the opposite sex, or just our siblings and other family members or even coworkers?

We each have such a unique fingerprint—and I’m not only talking about what is under our nails, but more of a soul print.  Something so vast and complex and special and whole, in and of itself, so as to not need 

repeating.  That describes every one of us.

For the record, when the Bible speaks of the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God and that we were fearfully and wonderfully made, I question the translation from the Hebrew that led to the usage of the word “fear” in both these instances.  I find “respect” would be a far better choice.  Regardless, that is my opinion and I’m off on a tangent here.

So back to my original thought:  finding gems to live by or, in the case of us creative types, some topic to paint, research, study or write about whether in a textbook or a paperback novel.  Can you guess where these paraphrased snippets or actual quotes came from?

-         …made everything beautiful for its own time.  [Note:  I particularly believe that this means you and me.  If we are alive in this time and era, we are beautiful as THIS is our time.]

-         Sex should only be delayed by mutual agreement of the married couple and only for the purpose of prayer.

-         A new husband shall take on no public responsibilities but shall instead stay home for one year to make his wife happy.

If you guessed that all three came from the Bible, you would be correct (Ecc. 3:11, I Cor. 7:5 and Deut. 24:5, respectively).  I share this for two reasons.  One, you never know where a good idea can come from, and can be put into praxis in your actual everyday living or in an imaginary work of art—or both.  Two, I think the Bible can scare people away from it sometimes and I want to illustrate that it is full of great stories, humor, poetry and all the possible human conflicts that we depict in movies and books.

So, here we are, roundabout to the beginning of this blog.    Revering the written words found in bookstores, libraries, schools, churches, homes--or resident in our minds until unleashed--as well as the works on film or DVD or Blu-ray or whatever new technology someone else is sure to invent.

Wisdom can be found anywhere . . . you just need to focus your sights on finding it.  And the addition of YOU may be all that is needed to create something amazing.

Where do I get my novel ideas? And other mental wanderings . . .

As a novelist, I know it may not seem like “work” when I watch a movie, read a book for pleasure, study an author’s work by reading and rereading and dissecting and evaluating and diagramming, or while flipping through a catalog or magazine.  Or just by staring out my window at the beauty of nature.  But it is.

However much my career is not “work” to me but pure pleasure, the above motions feed my imagination.  I fall in love with a movie and I want to know:  Why?  What about that movie touched my soul?  I need to know this so I may replicate that emotional pull on my readers in my own stories.  Ditto for books I read that move me and engage my feelings.

Studying the masters or having a mentor is key to learning, improving.  I happen to be an avid J.D. Robb / Nora Roberts fan.  In more than one of my personal library’s How To books on writing, a common homework assignment is to take your favorite author and actually copy down by hand a passage from his/her book.  This is NOT to endorse plagiarism.  This is to get your mind and fingers in tune to great writing.  Sometimes I have to listen to an audio book twenty times before I begin to see a little glimpse into Nora’s patterns in her usage of the English language, because no matter how often I read her stories and know them by heart, she swallows me whole into her tale and I’m lost in it.  I yearn to be able to do that with my writing.

As far as catalog cruising or magazine meanderings, I get great ideas for characters that way as well.  Same goes for people watching wherever you are.  I remember taking the DART express bus downtown to work one day and an athletic-looking young woman in an open Jeep dressed in safari gear drove by with the sunshine raining down on her flawless natural tan.  THAT book that she initialized is still percolating in my mind.   One story idea of mine came from a paper ad with a full-page photo of a woman in a flannel shirt sipping coffee in front of the open door of her cabin high in the snowcapped mountains. 

Sometimes I just write about people I would love to surround myself with, in a world that I would like to inhabit.  It is okay to let your imagination run wild and consider various scenarios.  I also love mysteries and will write at least one in my lifetime.  Research into Stonehenge or the Holy Grail or the Bermuda Triangle would be great fun and I would love to tackle any of those subjects and see what kind of a tale I could wrap around those wonders.

Anything that interests me is fair game:  cell memory, transplant recipients taking on new habits and loves, our sixth sense, other dimensions, powerful forces we cannot see—just to name a few.

Speaking of powerful things not visible to us, I am overwhelmed with a sense of good tidings coming my (and your) way.  It’s been with me for three days.  I can’t wait to see what it is . . . .