Writing Update! NaNo & More

Oh, disappeared there for a while. Been working hard on the first draft of Knight. I'm seven chapters (give or take) away from the end of the first draft. My goal is to finish by December 9th, because then life gets hectic as I head to NJ for the holidays and I don't want to potentially leave two or three chapters unwritten for a month.

So, I won NaNo! Sort of, I mean, by there definition maybe not so much, since it was not a brand new idea that I started and completed in 50,000 words. But I did write 50,000 words, most for Knight. But I also started planning the next book I want to work on, as well as Book 2 in the Mist Walkers series. And I also wrote a bunch of little snippets from future books, new story ideas, just for fun, etc.

It was a great experience, especially having my writing buddy to act as cheerleader while she worked on her own NaNo (she also won!).

That's basically what I've been working on, that and eagerly awaiting new episodes of One Piece and Once Upon a Time.

It's so great to see the Strawhats all back together again! Just goes to show how great a writer Oda is (in my opinion), where for 2 years (literally and in the story), we were exclusively following Luffy and only got a handful of scenes to update us on the other characters! Now, I started watching One Piece over the summer, so I didn't actually have a two year wait to see the reunion, and you can bet there were several arcs, the Marineford arc the most recent, that my boy and I watched in marathon runs over several weekends. I was actually the one making us slow down during the Marine/Whitebeard war since I knew we'd soon catch up to the real schedule! And man, does it hurt having to wait a week for one new episode when you're used to sitting down a watching eight episodes over a weekend. Ouch!

Luckily, Castle has picked up it's pace and is back to be the wonderful show it is! I wasn't completely upset with the opening episodes to the season, they were just soo dark, and there were several scenes I knew I was giggling at that I wasn't supposed to, and I just wanted to see classic Castle goodness. Surprisingly, one of the last episodes I've seen was a dramatic one, and wow! Amazing! The way they shot it was perfect. So I know Castle can do great dramatic episodes, I just don't want that to be dragging over several episodes at a time. Castle, at its heart, is comedy first. Maybe that's just me.

Also, Once Upon a Time has been so much fun. I forget the name of the actor playing Rumplestiltskin - and am too lazy to check right now - but he is fantastic! Creepy, and mysterious, and a little crazy, just awesome. And it's been a lot of fun seeing new character unveiled, and getting fairy tale backstories. I'm not sure how it will last more than one season, but that's something to worry about later. Right now it's fun just watching things unfold.

And now that I've talked more about TV than writing, I'm jumping into the next chapter. I would love to finish three today, but I'll be happy with two. I've been stewing on them all week!

Writing Update: Developing Characters, The Misleading Concept of 'Good vs. Bad Traits'

I think I've posted more about reading and TV than actual writing, which is rather sad. So here's something about writing!

I've been thinking a lot about character development. Probably because I've started a new book, so naturally I'm creating new characters to fill the world. But as I talked over some Tex-Mex Egg Rolls with my boyfriend about the motivations and personalities of some of my characters, it eventually turned into a discussion of why we love certain characters over others, or, why some characters feel more developed (real) than others.

For a long time as a writer I always gravitated towards this concept that a character, in order to be fully developed, needs good and bad traits. But I think that's misleading. It's not that a characters needs good and bad traits, it's that a character's traits need to be fully embraced. This is an idea I'm much better at rambling about out loud than on the page, oddly enough, but let's see if I can explain:

It's not that a character is both lazy and loyal. Those two characteristics are not the character. It's that those two characteristics can be words used to describe the actions/thoughts/etc. of the character. And both traits are rounded in their own ways – lazy is often thought of as a bad trait, and loyalty a good trait, but both traits have their own spectrum of “good and bad.”

A loyal person can be someone who always sticks up for a friend. But they can also be someone who too stubborn to recognize that being loyal doesn't mean mindlessly following and agreeing with everything that a friend says/does/believes, etc. Good and bad, and much more. Good and bad are just a part of the full spectrum.

I feel like a lot of writers (and I've done this as well), feel like traits need to be divided. A “good” character gets the “good” half of loyalty, while a “bad character” gets the “bad” half of loyalty. And it's when writers do that, that a character falls flat.

Let me see if I can show some examples, both literary and not, to help expand on my thoughts.

JK Rowling's Ron Weasley is a character who is both lazy and loyal. He's also short-tempered and funny, impulsive and caring, envious and strategic, and more. These traits are not who he is. He is a person with the whole spectrum of those traits feeding his personality and making him logically react certain ways in a situation.

When Draco Malfoy calls Hermione Granger a Mudblood, his impulsiveness, loyalty, short-temperedness, and caring all made him immediately jump into fight mode.

Just because Ron's loyal, doesn't mean that he always sticks by the decisions his friends make.

4^th Year, and during the 7^th book's Horcrux hunt being some big examples.

And just because he left his friends during those moments doesn't mean, at those times, he wasn't a “loyal” person.

Sorry if that was a spoiler.

His impulsiveness made it so he sometimes never thought before acting, and made him quick to jump into fights, but it also fed into his strategic thinking and made him passionate. Being impulsive will lead you to doing “good” and “bad” things.

It's really all how we writers look at our characters, I think. We, more than anyone else, should be looking at them as if the traits are describing a person vs. defining them.

Eiichiro Oda, the creator of the anime One Piece, is probably the greatest person I have ever seen at creating characters that always feel more than just the traits you could describe them as.

His character Luffy is rude, short-tempered, and violent. But the same traits that make him that also make him passionate and inspiring. The Straw Hats pirates, and Luffy especially, ALWAYS inspire me, and they're always growing as characters, taking those initial defining traits and naturally developing as they experience new events that test them as both individual people and a crew.

And no Straw Hat has developed more than Usopp.

Self-defined as a liar, coward, and weak fighter (obvious self-confidence and worth issues feed into these thoughts), Usopp can't see what we the audience (and the other Straw Hats) already know. Usopp may be cowardly, but that only means he runs from danger long enough to work out a plan. And while he may be scared, he never lets that part of himself get in the way of his devotion to his friends. He may be weak, but only physically – Usopp's genius and inventions and long-range sniper abilities has time and again saved the crew. He may be a liar, but it means that he is a great story-teller who often inspires his crew during tough moments. He's not one half of anything, he's everything these traits could make a person, and more. And as they've experienced one harrowing fight after another, Usopp's traits have evolved naturally as he's grown as a person, and the greatest hurdle he needed to overcome – his low self-worth – culminated in one of the most tear-jerking confrontations and character growth moments in the show.

And that's saying a lot, considering how chock-full of moments like that One Piece is.

If you ever find yourself saying,

“My character is too perfect, I need to give them faults,”

Then I don't think you've created a character with traits – you've shoved traits together in an attempt to make a character, and most likely you've cut those traits in half.

'Don't cut traits in half,' is my new mantra.

If I've got a character I would describe as stubborn, I'm going to look at that trait from every angle when my character is making a decision, or saying a line, or deciding what they think about another person. And then I'll probably watch One Piece, or read a well-loved book, to remind myself that a character is so much more than a line of adjectives.

What do you think is the best way of developing a character? Did my rambling about traits make sense? Let me know in the comments!