On Motivation

Hi, everyone!

Yes, yes, late again. I’m not shifting the schedule to a day later (at least, not yet) but here I am running a day – no, two days, now – behind my plan. Of course, none of you know when my planned updates are (weekly, starting on the 15th of September, for the record) but I know, and it bothers me. So, apologies for the lateness none of you were previously aware of.

I picked those dates at random, but I feel like I want to stick to them, and here I am. I don’t have any particular reason for doing so – having missed the first update, surely it would be easier to shift the whole thing accordingly – but I will. Well, I’ll try. Often, when it comes to writing characters, we find ourselves looking for strong motivations to do something, but sometimes – especially with little things – I think it should be acceptable to just let characters do things.

Take, for example, a romantic meet-cute that happens in a shop. Does your character need a deep motivation for going into the shop in the first place? They can have one, certainly. Perhaps they want to get a birthday card for an older relative they’re very close to, one with whom they share hundreds of memories including a joke about, for example, a squash. They are therefore looking for a birthday card featuring a squash, and have tried every other shop in town. In desperation to find the perfect card for this older relative, they end up in exactly the same shop as their future love interest.

The love interest is there because something sparkly caught their eye as they walked past the window.

Both of these are equally likely reasons to enter a shop in real life – the latter perhaps more so – but they’re not equally common in fiction. Authors – myself included – often feel they have to justify every action, to make motivations strong and compelling. But there are often times in life when we act impulsively, without really knowing why, or when even if we sat down later and analysed every aspect of a choice, we can’t quite work out why we made a certain decision. You might take the slightly longer route to work one day, or flop down in the sun at the park, or name your hamster Wilhelmina, and there’s no particular reason for any of it. However minutely, your life is changed by a completely random decision.

Obviously, some decisions and actions need a stronger motivation. Moving to the other side of the world might start as a whim, but you’re probably going to need some strong arguments to actually go through with it. Becoming an airline pilot will probably need a decent motive, because it’s a long and intensive process, but even then the reason might boil down to a love of that feeling you get as the plane leaves the ground, or as you dip beneath the clouds on your descent and see whole countries spread out beneath you like a patchwork of fields and city blocks.

Some advice for writers tends to err on the side of complex motives, but they don’t need to be complicated. There doesn’t have to be a tragic backstory, a family connection, or a careful list of pros and cons. The reason just needs to be enough to compel a character to do something – it’s raining, so she stops for a coffee; he’s rich and bored, so he travels the world; they’re broke, so they share a flat.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for today. Hopefully, I’ll have an update for you on Saturday. Then again, who knows? I may have a good reason not to.

Talk to you soon!

Sorry I’m late!

Hi everyone,

I’m sorry – I completely forgot to update yesterday. Top marks, self. But here I am today to try to make up for it. First of all, I’ve written 4532 words this week, which makes 18556 this year so far. I haven’t missed a day yet! Oh, and my Thursday project this week was Father Doesn’t Dance.

Secondly, Kat commented on my previous post that sometimes, people put more thought into their villains’ motivations than their heroes’. This can have the effect of making the villains seem more well-rounded and nuanced than the heroes! Kat also asked about the motivations for my protagonists in Submerge – which I will try to talk about with minimal spoilers today.

As Kat pointed out, it can be very tempting to leave a protagonist’s motivations at ‘it’s the right thing to do’. There are definitely times when that’s the only reason someone has for doing something, but quite often there’s more to it than that.

Think about all those movie cops. How many of them set out to become police officers purely because it was the right thing to do? There are lots of other reasons – because a crime was committed against them and they want revenge, because they want to make the world a safer place for a loved one, because they want to wear a smart uniform and order people about, because they think the police force is corrupt and want to change it from the inside… It might even be that they want to pull off a perfect crime and need insider knowledge to do it. Each of these motivations affects their actions and helps to develop them as a characters.

Now, I want to be careful about spoilers here because some of you won’t have read Submerge yet, but let’s have a look at some motivations for certain aspects of my various characters.

There’s Gina, for example, who collects discarded items from the ground and makes them into jewellery. She does that to make money, of course, and because she likes shiny things – who doesn’t? But she also hates to see things go to waste, possibly because she has been through times of having nothing. She started making broken and abandoned things beautiful at a time when she felt broken and abandoned, and wanted hope that she’d come out of it as something better. And it’s become something she really enjoys!

Addie does comedy. Is it because she was always the class clown, or even because she decided she didn’t want to be the butt of the jokes any more? Is it because when life gets difficult, sometimes you have to laugh or you’ll cry? It’s probably a combination of all of those things, but mostly a genuine desire to make people smile – not only to see people happy, but to be the one making them happy.

Miles and Jamie – well, their motives are perhaps best shrouded in mystery, for now. Hopefully, Submerge gives a good idea of many of their reasons for the things they do!

What do you think makes good motivation for a character? Let me know in the comments!

Talk to you soon!

Villains and Motivation

Hi everyone,

Well, it’s been a week and here I am with a new blog post. First things first – so far I have kept up my resolution to write 500 words each day (I had to cheat a bit on Monday night, when I finished at ten past midnight, but it still counts).

In the last week, I’ve written 4528 words – which brings me up to a total of 14698 so far this year. It’s not NaNo levels of productivity, but it is consistent. For Thursday’s secondary project, I went back to A King’s Ransom because I have more ideas for it than for anything else I’m working on, and sometimes you just have to follow the ideas. I’m still working out a few finer details of my submission for Call to Arms (such as, er, the plot) so that will have to wait for a while!

Today, for no particular reason, I thought I’d write a little about villains (antagonists), and how we approach writing them. You can, of course, write big cartoony villains who come in and make a big noise about how evil they are, bragging about their plans with no shame whatsoever. You can also write very subtle villains – sometimes, they don’t seem villainous at all, but they say or do things that are insidious and make the world a worse place. And, of course, you can have a story with no villain at all – either your antagonist is a perfectly reasonable person who just happens to be working at cross purposes to your protagonist, or the obstacles in your protagonist’s way aren’t actually caused by any specific person.

One thing, however, unites all antagonists and villains, and that is that there has to be a reason for what they are doing (or are) and the way that they feel. It doesn’t have to be a good reason, of course! Sometimes there are no good reasons. But there are always reasons, or at least intentions.

When we write protagonists, it’s usually very easy to get into their heads and pick out the reasons that they want to slay the dragon (to save the princess, or to protect their sheep) or find the hidden temple (to use the healing waters there, to learn about an ancient culture, or for simple bragging rights). It’s harder, sometimes, to get into the head of a cruel or evil character. After all, the reason they’re stealing kittens and turning them into food for the super-rich is just… that they’re the bad guy. Isn’t it?

But the truth is, nobody thinks they’re the bad guy, and people rarely do things (big, complicated things, at least) just on a whim. Perhaps, in the truly heinous example above, they think they’re taking the strain off the animal shelters, or providing a service people really need – or perhaps they’re just trying to make money (whether they desperately need it or not). It doesn’t have to be a good reason, as I say – and for the record, I don’t believe that there is a good reason for anyone to steal kittens and/or turn them into food – but there has to be some sort of internal logic as to why they do what they do. Sometimes, that logic will make no sense to the reader, but as an author, you have to know what that logic is and be able to convey it through the character’s actions. As a reader, it really makes a difference to understand what led a character to do the terrible things they’re doing – even if you can’t excuse or accept them.

At least, that’s my opinion. What do you think? Does knowing an antagonist’s motives diminish their villainy, or add more depth to a nuanced character? Do you often find yourself sympathetic to antagonists based on their reasons for what they do? Let me know in the comments.

Talk to you next week!

Plans afoot

Not much to report today – I got home from work exhausted and spent the evening doing some preliminary character creation, mostly on The Sims…

No writing – I thought I’d take a day to cleanse my palette, as it were, after finishing BH2’s first draft yesterday. NaNo approaches, and that excited feeling is beginning to take over from the nerves…

Talk to you tomorrow!

My poor characters

So, here’s the thing; writing to a brief is good for me. It means I have to put certain plot points in, inflict a certain amount of eventfulness on my characters’ existences, and that’s good. It’s great practice for my other original fiction, too, because I sometimes get so caught up in the characters that I forget to give them anything to do.

On the other hand, it means I have to be horrible to some of my characters. Well, technically not my characters, in this instance, as they belong to Caladria, but I’m writing them, so… Anyway. I’m being cruel to these absolute sweethearts I’ve fallen a little in love with, and it’s making me sad. Hopefully, it will make you sad too.

And hopefully I can do something a little more light-hearted for my next story, just to balance it out.

Oh – and before I leave you, one of my favourite comments about my Caladria stories so far: a friend informed me that First Hunt Is The Hardest made him snort with laughter so hard that he got Bovril all over his guitar. Success!

Total written today: 358 words.

March total so far: 10695 words.

2015 total so far: 68238 words.

Talk to you soon!

Visualising your characters: Part Three – Rounding out existing characters

If you’ve been following along with this little tutorial experiment of mine (see parts one and two if you missed something) then you’ll be either sad or relieved to know that this is the last section. Well, I suppose there’s room for indifference in the world, too, but I prefer to think that my posts inspire at least some feeling.

We’ve now looked at using The Sims (or any other game with a character creator) to generate characters, and using those characters to get some character-driven fiction written. Today, we’re going to look at visualising existing characters and rounding them out a bit, using the same software.

Step Three: Build up your existing characters.

You may remember that yesterday we had three characters –  James, Miles and Angela. We knew what they looked like, and we knew what their key traits were. And then we threw Gina into the mix. We know nothing about Gina! Where did she come from? Well, from what we writers know as our imaginations. I’m as guilty as anyone else of forgetting those are there.

That said, that little bit of text from yesterday does give us some information about Gina, our mystery girl. This is what we know:

• She’s Angela’s girlfriend.
• She seems to know Miles.
• She’s got blue eyes.
• Her hair is long, and at least some of it is pale.

I’ve taken the liberty of whipping up some pictures on the Sims 4, to show some of the variety that’s encompassed in those descriptions. (Where relevant, custom content is credited.)

One possible interpretation of Gina. Hair by skysims on thesimsresources.com

Another version of Gina, this time using standard content.

Yet another version of Gina that would fit the bill – again, all standard content.

That may be pale purple hair, but it’s still long and pale. To be honest, I’ve only tweaked the hair and clothes here because I had actual writing to do, but you can see the basic idea. Of course, what with editing being a thing, you can also change your mind.

Maybe in your head, Gina starts to have dark hair. This is another hairstyle from skysims on thesimsresource.com (I’m a fan).

So, that’s always an option, too. And that’s her appearance dealt with, whichever one you prefer. Personally, I like option 1, for now, so let’s go with that.

Now, what about personality traits? Here we can use the Sims or go out on our own. I’m going to do a little of both. Here are some options for her:

Option 1 – Lifetime Wish: Curator. Traits: Collector, Cheerful, Creative, Commitment Issues. This Gina is the kind of person who’ll stop to pick up an interestingly-shaped rock, then work out a way to fashion it into jewellery. She’s also likely to keep hold of beautiful things – probably including Angela – but might not be so keen to hang onto one job for too long.

Option 2 – Lifetime Wish: Friend of the World. Traits: Gregarious, Hot-Headed, Active, Outgoing. This Gina just wants a lot of friends from a variety of backgrounds, because as long as she’s got friends, she’s happy. She also has no problem making those friends, but she can get a bit snappy with them sometimes.

Personally, I can see Option 2 bringing Gina into contact with Miles quite easily, and with Angie, too – but Option 1 is equally interesting and as these aren’t comprehensive profiles, there’s room to add ways they might have met. Maybe Gina and Miles met in costume at a zombie crawl (Miles would, of course, still have been wearing his bowler hat). Perhaps Angie and Gina like the same music and met at a gig. They might both be working the same job when Angie’s not doing comedy. Who knows? That’s writer’s choice. Let your thoughts run wild.

Just remember, the more you know about even minor characters, the more well-rounded and realistic everything in your stories will seem. Besides, they might take over and surprise you.

Alright, your turn:

Go ahead and use these characters, if you like. If you’ve worked through the whole tutorial, you may well have a completely different interpretation of Angie and some completely different pieces of fiction. You can use those, or any of my ideas – and feel free to throw in more characters and scenarios, too. Obviously, I’m not setting you homework here, but I’d love to see what you guys can make of what we’ve run through over the last few days – leave things in the comments by all means!

That’s it for my tutorial – which I hope you’ve enjoyed and maybe even benefited from (and thanks to K’lee L for suggesting it) – but I’ll be posting a short story featuring these characters on (hopefully) Monday. In the meantime, please do let me know if you have questions, comments, or fiction to share!

Oh, and while I’m here – my word counts for today.

Total written today: 1045 words.

2015 total so far: 19256 words.

Visualising your characters: Part Two – Writing with new characters

In case you missed yesterday’s entry, I’m running through the ways I sometimes use The Sims (or other games’ character creation tools) in order to craft and visualise characters. Yesterday we generated three random characters, and some of you may have had a go at pulling information out of the limited details the game’s framework gives you. If you missed it yesterday, feel free to go back and give it a try. If you’re all caught up, let’s move on to…

Step Two: Write something with your new characters.

You might have some ideas of what you could write based purely on your characters’ ideas or traits. If you don’t, and the game you’re using allows it, you can always run the game for a bit and see how the characters interact. For example, when I was playing The Sims 3 a while back, I found that a Sim with the Neurotic trait unburdening herself to a Sim with the Mean trait would end in general unhappiness all around. If I was going to make characters based on those Sims, I might use the idea of the neurotic character refusing to share their worries with the mean character, for fear of being laughed at or otherwise upset. This, in turn, would create emotional distance between the pair. However, since I’ve created my characters in two different programs, I can’t do that with this lot. So, what can I get out of these characters?

Visualising your characters: Part One – Generating a character

K’lee L. commented on my post yesterday to ask me for a bit more of an explanation of how I use The Sims to get a bit of a visual handle on – and sometimes even create – new characters, so I thought I’d do a bit of a walkthrough. And, because I’m a dork, there are opportunities for you to join in, too. So, notepads or word processors at the ready!

NB: I’m not just endorsing The Sims here, though it is one I use often – anything with a character creator can be used for nefarious writing-like activities. In this tutorial of sorts, I’ll be using both The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 (I have more expansions for one, and the other one loads faster).

Step 1: Generate a character (or several).

When I first created my characters for The Perfect Garden, I had no intention of writing anything about them. I just wanted a family with a lot of potential conflicts and therefore an interesting gameplay experience. In this case, I’m deliberately hoping a character I can write a short story about will leap out at me, but I’m still going to start off just messing about and making a character that visually interests me. Then, for the purposes of this demonstration, I’ll randomise that Sim’s traits a few times until I see something I can work with.

Very little writing today…

…Because the cat spent last night at the vet’s and came back this afternoon, so most of the time since then has been spent giving him smooches and cuddles. He seems a lot perkier now, apparently took a chunk out of a vet nurse (sorry!) and is sporting a simply fabulous leopard-print bandage, so that’s nice to see. Hopefully he’ll continue to feel better as the week goes on!

A quick writing thought, while I’m on the subject: do your characters have pets? Think about their relationships, not only with other members of the same species, but also with animals or other creatures. This is especially true of a reclusive character – you may not be able to show much about their personality if they never interact with other people, but you can see a lot in how they treat their beloved dog. By the same token, an extroverted, popular character may seem like one person on the surface but admit to their true feelings, dreams and insecurities only when they’re alone in their kitchen, opening a can of kibble and talking to their cat.

Animals are important, in real life and fiction. So I’m off to see if ours is still hiding in a paper bag now, and give him some snuggles.

NaNoWriMo – Day 22

Hello, blog readers!

I’m pretty happy today – I’ve written 2491 words today, bringing my total to 45200 exactly. That’s the 45k mark passed! I’m nearly there. Very exciting. Amazingly, I’m still not sure if Cold Light will see me through to the full 50k, so watch this space to find out, I suppose.

In other news, thanks to a very generous donation from my friend Andy (the one who was going to donate if I did 50k in 5, and apparently has done so anyway because he’s lovely) I have reached my modest fundraising goal for NaNoWriMo14. Since it’s a good cause, I’ve bumped the target up by $5 – which is really hardly anything – and I’d still really appreciate even $1 (60p-ish) donations. It’s not per word or anything – it’s a one-off donation and it all goes to encourage future novelists, young and old. If you want to get involved, the link is here. Thanks for even thinking about it!

Now, in case you’re curious about the characters involved in Cold Light, I thought I’d give you a chance to ask some questions. I’m aware that these are more or less completely unknown original characters, and you may have no burning questions about them, but if you do, here’s your chance to ask. So here are the rules of this little game (which may well be a bit embarrassing with the lack of comments, but we’ll see):

• Pick a character (or more) from the picture below (there’s a list below it with their names). Some of them have featured on this blog before with their basic Charahub profiles, and some haven’t. It doesn’t matter – ask away, even if you think it’s been covered before. Write their name or the number next to it in a comment.
• If you like, add a topic or a prompt – for example ‘hobbies’, ‘ambition’, ‘happiest memory’ or ‘favourite food’. If you leave it blank, I’ll just give you a random thought about the character you’ve picked. Put that in the comment too. Then send it!
• I’ll reply as soon as I can with one of my personal thoughts on the character. I’d usually refer to this as a ‘headcanon’ but I suppose since I’m writing this one it’d be a sort of unofficial optional canon? I don’t know. Either way, I’ll probably tell you something I think about them that won’t be in the book as it stands at the moment (I reserve the right to contradict it in the actual book if and when it gets published).

So, that’s the idea. Give it a go, make me feel important? Alright, here are the characters (pictures made in The Sims 4 Create-A-Sim demo).

Names below go left to right, starting at the top row!

1. Maya
2. Ross
3. Steph
4. Charlie
5. Title (wildcard – ask me about the story in general, whatever you like!)
6. Kristian
7. Leigh
8. Tina
9. Rahim

Right – long post over, I’ll see you tomorrow (and do please ask me your questions if you have them)!