Will you READ it already?!

This past week in my life has been almost a literal whirlwind. In short, I was dropped from the nursing program at school and that sent me on a quest to find a new career goal between runs to the business office, professors, financial aid, and fighting off waves of sadness. Currently, I’m thinking education and I’m stuck between English for secondary ed or elementary ed. I’m trying to convince myself I don’t need to decide at this second, but that’s hard.

When my teachers first told me they needed to dismiss me, one thing they brought up is that I mentioned to someone I like writing. Obviously, I love writing.  If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here and I wouldn’t write the blog. However, I kinda dismissed that suggestion because a) my school doesn’t have the creative writing program I would like and b) it’s too competitive a field for a career and c) I’m too nice of a person.

All fine and good. I move on.

Then I discussed  my mermaid paper with my professor, Dr. D.  In spite of his doubts on my topic, he likes it. It has actually rather impressed him and Dr. D has, once again, mentioned publishing. I’m kinda like, “Okay, whatever. That might be cool.” I’m still staring at the chapter three section and trying to figure what to write exactly. Or even outline!

Moving on to announcing my dismissal on facebook and telling my nursing partners. (Obviously, some are shocked, because as someone put it,  I dominated the tests.) Someone in all of this asked me if I’m going to change my major to writing.

After that, I posted Just Trust Me with the hopes that people would read it. I got one person liking it and two people at least clicked on it. But no comments otherwise. Nothing.

Then I go back for this final nursing thing about administer withdrawal to protect my GPA and such. Blahblahblah. Anyway, I just mentioned to my teachers that I was writing a paper comparing mermaid folklore across the world. They asked me how I came upon this idea and I explained that I wrote the story for the writing contest at my school (no clue how I placed yet) and I decided to write it as a novel. I wanted to do some research about it first though. They thought it was awesome.

Then the provost of my school (less than 800 students) has never met me before. No big deal. But she recongized me AND she made comments about how I have really made a difference in the TRiO writing center and that Dr. D  has said that I write really well.

I only write for the student newspaper at school and to be honest, I’m not pleased with how my articles are coming out. I really wish I had someone to help me just iron out the little things and let me brainstorm with them. But I keep hearing about how good of a writer I am, or if I’m going to go into writing, but you know what?

But no one has read my fiction!

I think I write good fiction. I have come a long way in the eight years that I’ve been writing. And while some of my stories may not be up to the standards I would like, and I am a little on the slow side when it comes to editing, I really like the stories I have.

I even randomly started reading the ending of one of my stories that I haven’t touched in over a year because I randomly thought of it.

Everyone else knows that I write fiction too. Almost  everyone understands that this is a passion of mine.

But no one reads it!

For once, just once, I want someone who has read what i have written in fiction to tell me that I’m a good writer, or ask me if I am going to look into writing, or something like that, I don’t want these people who don’t even know I wrote a novel to be suggesting I write as a career. Because for all they know, my writing stinks!

*end rant*

As it is, because I mentioned that I want my mermaid story to become an novel, I have now promised my nursing department a signed copy of it when it is published. I suppose it should be if, but I prefer to be optimistic.

Just Trust Me

I’ve talked a lot about my mermaid story. I’ve talked a lot about how I’m writing it into a novel, and how I think writing short stories to develop characters help.

Blah blah blah.

I’m going to now let you read it.

Here is my story, Just Trust Me. I hope you enjoy it. If anyone does care, I did submit this to my college’s writing contest and I have my fingers crossed.

Read Just Trust Me Here.

What I consider before writing any story.

I’ll be presenting a workshop on creative writing at my school in about two weeks, so I came up with these things that I always look at before I start writing.

What is the goal of the character?

I don’t say plot because that implies that I know the plot. I’m finding that I typically cannot pinpoint a plot until I finish  and I can look at the whole picture. But my character needs an initial goal and a plan.

How does goal and plot differ? In Shad, one of my stories, his goal was to win in the intragalatic race. As such, he worked towards that and kept struggling to make it through the race. However, the plot actually turned out to be Shad trying to break away being a sweeper and establish himself in the real world, something I didn’t even realize until I looked at the finish product and saw that, based on where the story ended, that had to be it.

What is the ending?

I will not start writing a story until I know the ending. Period. Because either a) I’ll never learn the ending or b) it’s not a good story. Either way, I need to have a clue on the ending.

Now, sometimes for me that ending is vague. Like, I know they are going to run the aliens off of earth, but I’m not quite sure how. Sometimes it’s quite concrete, like, the story will end with Kayla comes to the new home and Shad meets her.

Character’s Point of View (POV):

That seems strange. Well, of course I’m going to tell it in the character whose story I thought of. However, when I began to systematically think about the POVs, I realized that sometimes the obvious character isn’t the best.

For example, I’m going to post a story this week where a mermaid (Avi) has to convince her sister (Nessa) to join an underground liberation movement. Instead of writing it from Avi’s POV though, so Avi keeps having to tell Nessa everything that Avi already knows, I wrote it from Nessa’s POV, which ended up making a very interesting story.

This time also makes me realize whether I really need to tell it in one or two or five people’s POVs.

Person:

This goes slightly into the POV, but something I sometimes decide later and sometimes I don’t even decide until after I pick up the story. In general, I will write in third person. However, some stories call for first.

(Then you have the annoying stories that you write that you intend for it only to be a short story and so you write it in first person only to have the characters tell you its a novel, but you don’t want to write it in first person the whole way, so you need a new way of presenting the information without rewriting the whole short story/prelude.)

Character’s personality:

I think this aspect is a fundamental part of any story. However, I have discovered through a long and tumutious road that a personality doesn’t just come usually. If it does, it is usually perfect. As such, I automatically want to have a clue about how this character acts, is she/he shy, determined, stubborn, brave? And what is the character’s weakness?

Where is the story best told?

Generally, this is obvious. However, not always. And sometimes the setting doesn’t make a difference. But it is something to think about.

I should probably mention that I don’t look at tense. Typically, I’ll write in past tense. If I happen to start writing in present, it’s by mere accident but usually because I hear the voices so well that I just write as they tell me. (No, I am not schizophrenic.)

Folklore and Mermaids

I have been writing a research paper this semester on mermaids.  Possibly a strange topic, yes, but I’m loving it.

As such, I have found many, many links of credible mermaid tales. Now, I am defining mermaids as any creature that can live in the water; just a woman with a tail and two arms. However, here are some of the best ones.

Humanity.org has about ten stories from around the world.  Beautiful Mermaid Art has quite a few from around the world as well. However, none of them have references as to where he found them, and there is no way to contact him to ask for his references.

The story of Ne Hwas is a native American tale and probably the only one on the site.

Google books proved almost invaluable, as they provided complete text of some books, such as Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish Peasantry and Myths of China and Japan. For any Irish tales, you want to look for merrows. For the China and Japan book, look at the Island of the Blest and The Kingdom Under the Sea. I also used it to access Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, Legends and superstitions of the sea and of sailors in all lands and at all time, the Mermaid of Loche Lene and Other Tales and some partial texts such as Magickal mermaids and water creatures.

Sacred-text.com provides extensive texts from many cultures. Among them, I found Of the Pretty Girl and the Seven Jealous Women,

Surlalunefairytales.com also has a listing of many folktales. Those related to mermaids include: Fortunio and the Siren,  The Mermaid of the Magdalenes, and The Story of Urashima Taro, the Fisher Lad. It also includes the text of The Little Mermaid and other mermaid tales.

D. L. Ashliman collected a number of stories on water spirits. Quite a good place to go look.

Lastly, Gutenburg is almost just as good of a source as google books, if not better. There I have found The Mermaid of Zennor, The Water-Nix and The Nixie of the Millpond.

The History of Mermaids has hundreds of mermaid sightings recorded, many of them with sources.

So that’s about all I have.  Hope you enjoy. Do you know of any other great sources for folklore?

Edit: I have found another source for mermaid research called Wonders of the Deep. Haven’t read a whole lot on it, but the little bit I did get is very good. This entry about Liban (or Li Ban or St. Murgan) is one of the best I have found as well.

Edit 2: I uploaded my paper that I wrote using these sources. Please remember that if you copy it for your paper, it’s called plagiarism and is worth a failing grade in most English classes. It compares mermaids from different cultures of the world, including Europe, Asia, Africa and America. It briefly looks at mermaids’ appearance and personality variances. It also includes my biography. You can find it in my writing tab as a PDF near the bottom.

And we did this and this and this….

I mentioned recently in passing that I hate skimming in writing. By skimming I mean I pass a significant amount of time where the reader needs to know that things have happened but I don’t want to show it. It would just take too long.

So my question for you this week:

How do you handle skimming in stories?

Let’s remove passive sentences.

We all have them. They sneak into your writing and are evil little things that make the writing boring and dull. Passive sentences, namely ones that contain the words was and were.

The problem is that we don’t see them. They are invisible as well as evil. So how do we get the removed?

My technique is different than most. I propose that you do a find and replace for all your wases as 1234567890. Change were to 0987654321. This way it is an obvious thing to your eyes. However, once you go through all of your rewriting, you can immediately change them back to was and were that showed up in dialog.

That’s just how I do it. Maybe you can try it and tell me what happens.

Where to start with world building.

One of my favorite elements, and I’ll admit, the hardest element as well, of writing science fiction is the chance that I have to create a world. It is just awesome to  be able to put all the ideas I have of how society can develop into a little place all my own, without having to live in it. (There are some of my worlds that I don’t really want to live in.)

However, that’s all blah, blah, blah. The important thing is how to build it. Like I said, this is one of the hardest parts. I start to write a novel, stop half way through, or worse all the way through, realize that something pivotal doesn’t work, and so have to fix that up or figure out how it works. That’s just plain frustrating.

But perhaps I have figured out a solution.

See, I just wrote a story which has been running around here with a couple names; mostly you’ll know it by Ethical    or mermaids. Now the title is Just Trust Me and should be appearing here shortly.

This story, although a short story, can be expanded so this is the prologue of a novel. It’s just set up for that. At first I thought that I will never write her story. However, the more I began rewriting it, and polishing it up, and making this world a decent world, the more I wanted to write it into a novel.

See, it’s a lot easier to write something tiny. I’m only playing around at the moment with 8500 words. That doesn’t take that much time to work through. However, by creating the world at the moment, and figuring out how it can function in a reasonable way, I happen to have myself set up for a very good novel world with not that much difficulty.

Not only that but I already know four of the main characters in the novel, enough that I think they’ll start to speak to me on the first draft.

Now, I don’t think this novel is going to show up in bookstores any time soon. I probably won’t even start writing it until July or August. But–I also think that it does work to write a short story about all of your main characters before you write the novel. Not only does it give you something smaller to work on, but it lets you know their world and their thoughts.

Have you ever tried to do this? How’d it turn out?

All the more reason why to keep writing.

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

The biggest challenge in writing.

Rewriting is a challenge. All writers know that. The problem is that it takes so long.

So, I wrote a story in October. Edited it. Edited it on paper. Then I sent it to Critters to be critiqued by a bunch of other writers and asked an English teacher friend of my to critique it too. The English teacher saw it before critters and she thought it was pretty good.

However, Critters came back with a few comments. And we’re not talking minor problems here either.

• The character motivation doesn’t make sense.
• The POV character’s arguments look like straw.
• The only action is in the beginning, and that hardly makes it worthwhile to read.
• The POV character doesn’t seem real.

That’s only a few of them, along with a numerous grammatical mistakes.

So I started rewriting it. I

I took all the critiques, highlighted the important things, and fixed those. Then, I made my paper outlines of all my problems and made sure I got bullet points of all the things I want to include and how I knew the characters better.

However, in order to edit this story in a more satisfactory manner, I basically need to completely rewrite the middle scene. This is hard. I did it yesterday, but it was so hard, because I don’t debate well, nor do I have anything to debate with. My brother’s method of debating is repeating the same arguments time and time again, because he is convinced he is right, until I just get so tired of it that I say I’m done. Although he thinks he knows how to debate, he really doesn’t. Anyone else in my family doesn’t debate.

So I’m hoping that I came up with a suitable and believable arguments. Unfortunately, this is for the writing contest at my school and I figured out today that I have no chance of getting this sent out again before the writing contest is over. :(

That’s what makes it so hard. Sometimes, even though you don’t even realize it, the story doesn’t make sense and if you don’t have anyone to check that for you, well, that’s a problem.

When I began writing, I didn’t have anyone to look at my stories. Well, I only had my brother, but he was so young that it didn’t count. That was okay though; I needed the encouragement to keep writing then I think. But when I got the point that I turned out pretty good stuff, in my opinion, then that is when I need the help of others.

So what kind of experiences have you had with rewriting?

Ethical Dilemmas

I recently got my story, Ethical Dilemmas, submitted to Critters, a critiquing place, and already, I have gotten back two critiques. Personally, I think this is awesome in a depressing sort of way. I thought it was really good. So far, other people think there are some problems.

As such, because you are my loyal readers, I am opening it up to anyone who has a chance. Although I’ll get all the Critters’ reviews back by the eight, I’m going to keep this available through the 15th, just because I won’t get around to seriously editing it until then I don’t think. As such, this post will stay sticky until the 15th, and after that, I’ll take down the story and you’ll have to wait until the official version comes out.

This has now been edited to remove the story. It’ll come back in its completed version hopefully in January.