Tag: Writers Resources

Musings

Weekly Musing: How May I Help You?

DH Hanni

Writing, like any other career, has lots of information and resources designed to help. Information about the mechanics of writing, quotes from famous writers to help motivate and inspire, writing prompts for when creativity is low, etc. Various types of software, books (a gazillion it seems), websites (gazillions raised to the 10th power), and people are available for writers at any level. Since I consider myself a green writer, I’ll only list those resources I’ve found helpful so far for someone at my experience level.

People – One of the biggest sources of help for me has been other writers. Being part of my local writer’s group has helped my writing tremendously in the few months I’ve been attending. It’s a great mixture of published authors, those close to making the leap into publishing, people writing for fun, and optimistic beginners. The group works because of the supportive but honest environment. It’s also been a great information hub for informative books on all aspects of writing from The 10% Solution to character motivation and goals. And then there are the wonderful discussions about books read, favorite authors, and just life in general.

Another group that has been extremely helpful to me has been the local chapter of the PNWA. Each month we meet to discuss a variety of topics from character archetypes to upcoming conferences and to celebrate our successes. This group has provided me a much more formal type of education set in an informal atmosphere and also gives a glimpse into the career of a published author.

Websites – This is a tricky one for me. About 2 years ago when I more heavily considering becomes a writer I went overboard, I think, with bookmarking every website related to writing. But this year I’ve noticed I’ve become pickier about which websites I find useful.

The websites I keep going back to are Writer’s Digest (which I also subscribe to their magazine), Author Magazine , GoodReads, CritiqueCircle(I submitted work here first before joining my local writers group), and WritingForums. GoodReads I go to log what books I’m reading, write a review after I’ve finished reading one, and to see what other people are reading. I enjoy CritiqueCircle because of the daily quote they have as well weekly polls. The other websites I go to because of great information and that connection to other writers.

I’m also using a variety of websites like the local library, Amazon, foreign libraries, and museums for my research. Too numerous to list but as a beginning writer, these have been great tools for me.

Books – Oh boy, where to start on this one. There are the basics every piece of writing advice I’ve ever gotten have recommended: On Writing by Stephen King, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, The 10% Solution, a good dictionary, thesaurus, and recently, a good synonym/antonym book.

In addition I’ve started a small collection of books on plotting, writing a novel, character development, a thesaurus filled with unusual words, books to help describe emotions and character traits, and a book to help flesh out descriptions in general. I plan to add more books as I pinpoint deficiencies in my own writing.

Software– This is one area I don’t use a lot of specially designed for writers software. I’ve heard of Scrivener, StoryCraft, MasterWriter, and others but those seem be above my current level of experience and goals. At this point, I’m content to use Word but I’m open to trying software that will make my life better.

What I’ve been using the last few weeks that is fun and helpful is EverNote. I’ve tried using OneNote and found it cumbersome. EverNote is great for me because I can ‘clip’ pictures from websites, individual webpages, as well as search terms I’ve entered in. Although I haven’t needed this function yet, I can also search everything I’ve already got saved. EverNote stores this information into different workbooks.

Another neat feature is I can insert notes into these notebooks. EverNote has been awesome to get a visual of whatever research I’ve collected and allows me to brainstorm. With saving search terms I’ve entered into Bing or Google, it makes it so much easier for me to go back to something. Personally it is beneficial to me to have a visual of a place or article of clothing so I can describe it as best I can. In the past, if I’ve found a picture, I could never remember the correct phrase to bring up the picture again. Thus the visual is gone.

Finally, a piece of software I’ve discovered recently is Google Earth. I stumbled upon this via an article I read by a historical fiction author who mentioned using Google Earth. He used it to get an overall view of an area he was writing about. He could zoom onto streets, jot down street names, and compare the current streets with historical documents to see if they were around in the time period he was interested in. If they were, then he could see exactly how streets intersected thus lending more authenticity.

What’s really slick about Google Earth is you can click on a city and get directed to Wikipedia with info about the city. What’s also nice for me since I need visual points of reference is I can map out the distance between two towns and see what the terrain looks like. This is valuable when terrain and weather will play a significant part of your story.

These are just a few of the resources I’ve found helpful so far and I’m constantly discovering more. When I first started writing, I had no clue how much information was out there. It’s still quite a bit to take in and I suffer frequently from information overload. While I’m getting better at weeding out what is useful the biggest challenge for me is getting my hands on those resources which are valuable for a historical fiction writer.

Musings

Weekly Musing: I Must, I Must Develop My Character!

DH Hanni

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on developing the four main characters for my first novel. Since the novel is in the historical fiction genre, I’ve been working on research, a LOT of research, over the past 1.5 years. Even before I sit down to formally write even one sentence, I’ve begun reading up on novel structure, plot, setting, emotions, POV, and character development.

As I’ve been learning about character development, one tool in particular has come to my attention: character sheets. Characters sheets are a series of questions designed to help a person create a character, to get further inside the mind, body, heart, and soul of a character. When I was first researching character sheets, the top results that popped up were character sheets for role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Eventually I was able to find some for just fiction writing. Characters, Emotions & Viewpoint by Nancy Kress has been a great help to me because it includes mini-bio sheets as well as advice on what questions to ask.

A lot of questions on character sheets are the basics such as age, birthplace, appearance, family background, etc. But the meat of the questions, what motivates the character in life, what kind of person does he see himself as, what’s her happiest memory, what’s his worst memory, etc. are to focus the writer to dig below the surface. To transform a character on a page to some living, breathing entity.

After collecting various character sheets from the internet and from books, I noticed a lot of the questions asked presume the character is a modern one. What kind of car does he drive? What high school did he go to? What’s his favorite movie or TV show? But what about those of us whose minds and characters like running around in the past? I have yet to discover character sheets geared at historical fiction so I just highlight relevant questions or adjust others for the time period I’m in.

But this has gotten me to think; why aren’t there character development sheets for different genres? A modern day character is different from an 8 armed robot designed to look like an octopus. Granted the ultimate goal of both these characters could be the same but it does feel silly asking an 8 armed robot designed to look like an octopus who did they take to their senior prom. Different genres have their own tropes; conventions if you will, so would it make a bit of sense for each genre to have their own character sheets?

For example, the needs of a romance writer are different from a western writer. A western writer is going to what to know what kind of horse(s) are my characters going to ride? What kind of gun(s) do my characters use? What time period? Location? Are there going to be Native Americans in the story, which tribe(s)? What building materials are available? But a romance writer, unless it’s a historical romance writer, isn’t going to be worried about this information so a guide more tailored to the romance genre convention would make sense.

I think having character development sheets by genre would really help writers’ lives easier. Having to comb through general questions to find relevant ones or rephrase others, adds to my workload. Time that could be spent getting to know the character and transforming them into a person.

But that’s just my view on it. Like everything else with writing, there is no correct approach. This has been an interesting experience for me since I don’t really do a whole lot of character development prior to writing a short story. Short stories by their nature, are supposed to be much simpler and deal with a single character’s journey. I let the character guide me more than actively spending hours a day, like I’m currently doing, thinking about them.

If anyone knows of any websites or books that contain character sheets more genre specific, feel free to wave your hand and let the class know!