It’s always an uphill battle.

What is the hardest part for you in writing stories?

To want to write.

Well, I did it.

In spite of three nursing classes, a 6:30 AM clinical and two, small jobs, I have officially finished a rough draft of my story. Yes, it’s just a short story. Yes, it is just a rough draft. But it is something that I have finally finished.

I honestly think it’s a pretty awesome story. I had to change a few things from when I first started. Like, I added a section onto the beginning to more set the scene. And as I wrote, the characters talked to me more, so I learned a lot about their government. (That is particularly of excitement, since the characters are so difficult in talking during the school year.)  For example, the king’s children are elected to be the heir, so that way even though the main character, Avda, is the youngest, she may very well be the heir.

I also know I need to develop things a lot more, since I really want to build up Avda’s loyalty of government and all, and her desire to rule.

On a side note, I began to watch Firefly. That is such an awesome show, to be quite honest. But, the very interesting thing is that it made me start thinking about my pirate story again.

If you don’t know what Firefly is about, it’s basically about space pirates who are trying to survive in the world. Now does that make sense why I keep thinking about it? Let me give you an example as to why this helps. In the show, the people are very poor because they have a hard time getting a job. In my story, they’re actually rather rich, just because they aren’t picky. So the whole entire concept of my own story is being questioned by this show.

What makes that very strange is I didn’t want to watch Firefly when it first came out, because the conditions on the ship very closely resemble that of Shad. I figured that the ideas of Firefly would merge into Shad and I didn’t want that. Now… I’m not too sure.

I like that, because it makes my life actually easier. I might actually start writing it again soon.

On a more personal note, if you are reading this post, that means that I have broken 3,000 readers!

You guys also broke the record last month (September) for the most amount of visitors per month which is the second month in the row, and based on the current stats, we’re looking really good for this month too. So thanks ya’ll!

(And yes, I like the word ya’ll. It makes a plural second person, which we don’t have in English.)

To be carried along downstream, or to fight against the rocks, branches, and everything else

I’ve been thinking a lot about reactive writing. See, I read that in general, a story can be made up of three basic crises, and each one with the possible exception of the first one caused by the character reacting to the previous crisis, and thus causing the next one.

Initially, I thought that was ridiculous. You don’t need a few good crises tossed in to make a story. You need complications.

But what is complication?

Allow a momentary side note on my part. I quoted someone who said that your life doesn’t make a good life story. This is true, and I’m going to explain the reason why this relates.

In writing, we can’t just let the problems and complications wash over the hero, and the hero does nothing. That’s why writing a story about my time n school doesn’t work. Yes–things happen. But I don’t react strongly enough to how they react. So I don’t have the money for tuition this semester, well, I’ll take out a loan. So now I get a chance at a special scholarship, well, I’ll submit the papers and see what happens. I don’t decide to cheat on the applications in hopes that no one else will notice, or sneak into the office and steal the other applications.

This is also why journeys don’t work well in writing. In general, a journey has things happen, but they don’t have things that the character can react to happening.

So my new name for this is reactive writing. A story can’t just be about how something happy happened. It has to be how something happened in which a character overreacted and caused even more of a problem.

Unfortunately,  I’m not doing so well at this in something I’m writing now, but hopefully with much editing it will come out.

So, how reactive is your writing?

hiding the whole picture

Writers have one of the most challenging jobs. Why? Because we see the whole picture and we have to keep parts of the picture hidden until we want the reader to know.

Case in point: I’m working on my new story today. (To be Held.) In this story, we have four doctors trapped in a bunker while they are being attacked. One of the doctors are unconscious for most of it, which brings it down to three. From that, I need every single one of these people thinking that the other one is to blame for this attack.

This is really easy. I know who is in the wrong, who knew about the attack, and who knows nothing. The problem is that the reader doesn’t know. The reader doesn’t know what has been going on, each of the person’s history, or why each one would distrust the other one.

Which means that I, as the writer, need to demonstrate this distrust in such a believable fashion, all the while setting it up so when the reader discovers the truth, they can look back and say that they should have seen in coming.

So tell me again why I like writing when it is this complicated?

It’s actually because it is this complicated that I like writing. And it’s when I get the breakthroughs, like one of them has a gun in his/her possession, and why one of them might distrust this rather nice doctor, that I write for.

So now, back to building up the suspicion.

the real reason finals stink

i don’t want to go into much of what is going on in my life here, but in all honesty, I’m not having a good week. What? How can you not have a good week when the number of days left in the semester is in the single digits? Actually, I think that is the exact reason why.

See,  one thing that I’ve been noticing this semester, compared to last semester, is how easily the plots flow. Last semester I didn’t have anything except Giant’s Wife, took me the whole semester to write, so everything was fine. Once the semester ended, life went on and I came up with plots. (Before that, I feared I lost the ability to come up with plots.)

This semester, I started writing stories and I wrote Dragon Slayers, Miles’ Love, When Darkness Swallows (If you count that one. I also wrote that over Christmas break.), and Samuel Brackborn. Some of those are pretty good too.

But now, I’m just dry.

I’m trying to plot my next story, “To bed Held.” And I figured out far enough to know that there has to be a triangle of distrust. Kenneth has to not trust Carmen, Carmen not trust Edmond, and Edmond not trust Kenneth (and Jeff but Jeff is unconscious most the story.) But how to get Carmen to distrust Edmond is beyond me. What to write for them is beyond me.

What’s worse is that I’m too tired to write. I don’t know how many of you have noticed but writing takes a lot of energy. If you write while you’re tired, you don’t write well (generally). I just feel drained.

So I think that I basically can’t plot anything. Apparently I have too much stress. Which is sad because I don’t feel like I have a lot of stress right now. In some ways, these last two weeks have been some of the most relaxing weeks for a long time.  But finals are next week, two tests on Friday, and an extra shift of work on Thursday. And I’m also trying to find a way to raise $1000 for a trip to Canada this summer as well.

So now, I can’t wait until finals are done. Not because of the stress and excessive studying but because  when I am done, I can write once again. And at least initially, the stress will be relieved.

Until then, I think when I want to work on something I’m going to work on Shad. I haven’t worked on that in a long time and I was suppose to be finished with editing it by the end of the month. (I would be editing Miles’ Love but my sister lost it on me.)

DWU writing contest

It’s official. I am entered into the writing contest at my school. I actually entered in two stories, but in two different categories. I entered in one of them because my English teacher from last semester told me to enter it in essay and then I entered my story for the fiction section.

As it turned out, I was spelling the writing contest all wrong. It’s actually spelled Agnes Hyde. I will fix that soon.

Of course, things couldn’t go completely right for me. I was trying to print it last night and my printer was giving me a little gray line down the side of it. I’m not sure why. My dad, the ex-computer tech repair person doesn’t know why. He told me to shake the cartridge and so I did but that didn’t help, so I had to print it at school. Luckily, that was no big deal. (I also mailed a copy of my story to my grandma, because I figured she’d like it to get a nice big package from us.)

Problem now is, I don’t know when it’ll be over. I honestly don’t. They didn’t us a good idea. But maybe it won’t be too far down the road.

At least now I done with When Darkness Swallows and I can devote myself more to Dragon Slayers (which is probably going to be named Time of the Dragon Slayers but I’m too lazy to write that all out.) and hopefully tomorrow night after shabbat I’ll be able to edit another story called Samuel Brakborn and post it here too. I already did the paper edit.

Anyway, until tomorrow or Sunday. Enjoy your weekend.