Thorn Wilde

Adorable! I love this.

I tend to know exactly what my characters sound like, what manner of words they'd use, etc. That being said, I kind of like to toss it up sometimes, have a character use a phrase they normally wouldn't use, or insert the odd big word into the speech of a character who generally wouldn't use them. Because we do that, don't we? Learn a new big word, and you tend to want to use it in conversation. One memorable occasion where I did this was chapter 3 of Nemesis:

‘Yeah,’ agreed Linda. ‘I mean, obviously… I feel so stupid for having fallen for it, really. Now I know what he’s really like, you won’t see me pandering for his attention any time soon.’ She smiled at Nick. ‘You are such a better person!’

The out of character use of a word like 'pandering' is made all the more obvious by the poor grammar in the following line. I love language. I find this sort of thing hilarious.

Likewise, having a person who usually waxes poetic or speaks in big, wide, academic sentences use a really simple or profane word can have a very interesting effect.

On a similar note, in Sam Sykes's fantasy novel Tome of the Undergates, there are a bunch of pirates who attack a ship and they all speak extremely eloquently. The effect is slightly bizarre and very entertaining. 

Okay, I really need a title for this fictional film... Period drama, romantic, set during the American Revolutionary War. British officer falls in love with a revolutionary woman, ends up changing sides. But I have no idea what the movie is supposed to be called!

Brothers in fedoras on holy mission.

I have some guilty pleasures, but I don't think I'm allowed to talk about them here.... 

Bah, you colonials will never understand! I for one am super excited! I think this movie is going to be awesome, and it gets extra points for having Martin Freeman in it because, well, Martin Freeman. *swoon*  <3

that does sound pretty omnomnomy, even for vegetarian food.

We try to change it up a bit. We both enjoy meat, but doing veggie days feels really good. I actually sometimes go periodically vegan, a relic from the time I was religious and observed lent. I know a lot of recipes for really tasty vegetarian and vegan food.

I don't think there's anything wrong with characters having mannerisms. Some of my characters cock their eyebrows a lot, but that's part of their mannerisms (I myself do this an awful lot, I'm proud of my moveable eyebrows). Others tend to bite their lips, work their jaws, scratch their heads, or click their tongues. All things that people do. This is not what I would in anyway consider bad or annoying prose. These are mannerisms that serve to make your characters more distinct and more human. Of course, variation is still important, and how you describe the action from one scene to the next shouldn't always be the same, but in and of itself I see nothing wrong with describing a character's habits.

I have never read a volume on how to write, nor have I ever taken any creative writing classes. I just read a lot, and then I write when stories get in my head. I'm not saying that classes or books or tips from authors can't be helpful (and I have spoken to quite a few published authors who have shared their experiences and their creative processes and the like), but I do think that the most important thing to do is figure out a method that works for you. No one can really tell you how to be a writer, because their minds don't necessarily work like yours does. If you can find other people's tips and tricks and lists and what have you helpful, great. Good for you. But don't be discouraged if you don't. If someone else's method doesn't do it for you, find your own. Writing takes brains, literally, because there's nowhere else for your unique stories to come from. If you can come up with a story, then you can come up with a way to finish it, too. All you need, in the end, is your mind.

Boyfriend requested vegetarian today, so I obliged. Went with pasta for dinner. Capelletti stuffed with grilled peppers and cheese (I didn't make these from scratch, I found them in the shop and they looked tasty). I made a tomato sauce with yellow peppers, red onion, garlic and zucchini. Flavoured arrabiata with cayenne and piri piri, plus nutmeg, oregano and paprika. Om nom!

I think the flaws only work for the hero if they find a way to overcome them.

All people have flaws. They don't have to be catastrophic, but we all have them. I am, for instance, very lazy when it comes to house work. I love to cook, but I hate to clean and as such leave kind of a disaster area in my wake that I only feel a little guilty about leaving for boyfriend to clean up. This is a character flaw with me. I'm also prone to stress and anxiety, to sudden bursts of anger and to poor self-esteem. All of these are what I'd call character flaws, and all of them are things I try to work on, but completely overcoming all of them is highly improbable, and either way, perfect people aren't interesting. I try to never let my characters, heroes or otherwise, end up perfect at the end of the story. They always retain some of their flaws, and oftentimes their flaws aren't even the issues they have to solve for the plot. And I love a good anti-hero.

My town finally got a Starbucks (I know, we're behind), I walked past and the queues went AROUND THE EFFIN BLOCK! Just for a cup of coffee and not even a very good one, there's better coffee to be had in a 100 metre radius in almost any direction. People are weird.

Seems everyone's given up... Oh, well. It's a movie called Event Horizon, starring Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill, among others.

Should I go again?

I wrote a screenplay about a guy in depression and I personally did not like him because to me he kind of gloried in his sorrow and pushed people away. Difficult to explain that without sharing the screenplay but the net effect was that the character came off passive. All the action in my plot was getting driven by other, more interesting characters.

Sounds like a friend of mine, actually. Clinically depressed and completely unable to get off his arse and do anything about it. Sadly, apathy is one of the most common symptoms of depression. It's not his fault. Still very frustrating to talk to him sometimes, though.

Shepherd's pie!

So, same as Isaac, then. Seems weird to me, double consonant usually means short vowel.

Oh noes, I killed the thread!  

I'm making shepherd's pie today! Om nom!

So, I got curious about the name Issac (like, is it pronounced the same as Isaac, or is it like Iss-ack or what?) so I looked it up to see if it was a real name or whether you made it up, and I found the following on Urban Dictionary:

You turned a guy with fiction? Dude, props! *knuckle bump*

Well, he's certainly gone bicurious, if nothing more. And I am most proud. *brofist*

(Actually, now that I think about it, he's not the first. There was this impressionable youth on a forum where I posted the old version of Nemesis. Let's just say it helped him see some... tendencies within himself he hadn't thought of before.)

Yeah, it's tough to write characters (especially lead characters) you dislike. But I've often found that it's the characters' flaws that make them interesting: maybe they have a bad temper, or they tend to criticize others, or they're impatient and snippy. Maybe they're overconfident, or they have a bad habit of being so arrogant, they step on other people without even realizing it.

 

What can be fun is when they have their comeuppance over time, and by the end of the story, they're sadder but wiser, even (hopefully) changed people who are much more rounded and more human. I did this with a novel a few years ago, and I had a few people write in and say, "hey! I hate this guy! I don't want to read this story!" But the longer you stuck with it, the more you see the guy was guilty of making several bad choices in life, pretending he was somebody he wasn't, and eventually beaten down by a tough adversary and forced through circumstance to accept who he really was.

Flaws are ridiculously important in any character, but just because a character is flawed, that doesn't mean you necessarily dislike them, depending on the flaws, of course.

Alan is a bully and a homophobe, but I know that that's because he's struggling with things within himself, so I can't hate him for it. 

Ben, from the new story I'm working on, is over-confident and slightly arrogant, and is an actor who never takes off the mask, but I love him anyway because I know that through his relationship with Mark he can break those habits and become more human, and because he's charming and super-hot.

Craig, on the other hand, has few redeeming qualities, and as much as I pity him, knowing what made him the way he is, what he's been through just isn't enough to weigh up for all the horrible things he's done to other people and therefore I cannot like him.

I think it would sort of stifle my creativity if I were to break down my stories into lists like this. I might be able to do it as an after thought once the story is actually finished, but if I did it while writing I believe it would demotivate me.

Nope. to this day he has never read anything i've ever written. 

Boyfriend doesn't really read my stuff, either, but I've occasionally force-read him passages I'm very pleased with.

I make my friend Paul read almost everything I write. At first I think a lot of it made him uncomfortable because he considered himself to be straight, but he no longer does so.

I so wanted to write something not explicit you know. after all, it would be nice if Cris actually read this one

Aww, Cris isn't comfortable with the pr0n?