I    [Continue reading]]]> Hi folks. I’d love some of your thoughts here. I’m interested in learning how clearly other writers see their characters when they’re writing them. Do you have strong visual pictures of them before or while writing? Some writers hang pictures of people they think their characters might look like near their writing desks, for example.

I didn’t do that for Just Desserts: Greed. Lust. Death. Tiramisu. I knew my characters pretty well when telling their stories, but I didn’t spend too much time describing them physically for readers – or for myself. I knew their general ages and the kinds of physical activity they might realistically pursue. Other than that, what the characters looked like on the outside was less important to me than what was going on inside their heads.

Shirley was an exception because much of the story depended on her, uh, physical assets. And I described Lizzie’s looks primarily to highlight how she downplayed them in contrast to Shirley (although I don’t think I developed that as well as I could have – mebbee in The Sequel).

When I was doing the final edits, I read a blog post that asked writers to name the actors they would want to play their main characters in the movie version of their latest book.

That got me thinking. I don’t watch television and I haven’t been a big movie goer lately, so my coterie of known actor candidates is fairly limited. I found out what Justin Bieber looked like just last week. (If that’s not reason enough to cancel cable, I don’t know what is.)

Still…

How could John Cusack NOT play Vince? Yes, definitely – John’s the man. The vision of a bemused John Cusack putting on the chicken suit makes me smile.

As soon as I saw John Cusack as Vince, though, my thinking shifted. Not in Just Desserts itself, but in the sequel-in-progress. Seeing Vince as John, John as Vince, opened up different, possibly conflicting, directions for the story and for Vince as an authentic character. What Would John Do? versus What Would Vince Do?

I’m not sure that’s a good thing, at least for me. I think I want Vince to be good ole’ Vince, not Vince wearing a John Cusack mask. So, difficult as it may be, I’m sending John back to Hollywood and recreating my old, fuzzy image of Vince.

How about you?

As a writer, do you have a clear-cut visual image of your characters as you’re writing? If you have a visual image, is it a real person or someone you see only in your mind’s eye? Do you know what your characters are wearing, how long their hair is, their BMI? If so, do you describe these features for your readers? How? Why? Does genre or time frame of the story influence you on this?

As a reader, do you enjoy reading detailed descriptions of what characters look like, how they’re dressed? Do you set up your own visual images of characters when the author doesn’t provide them? Do you get annoyed when an author doesn’t describe what his or her main characters look like?

I’d love to know what you think. Enquiring minds [still] want to know…
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Photo Credit: Free images from acobox.com

Hint Fiction (props to Merrilee Faber for the heads-up on    [Continue reading]]]> I obviously haven’t been in blog-land much lately. I’ve been editing my WIP and frankly, if I follow much more of the (good) writing advice/models I’ve been reading lately, there won’t be much of the damn thing left for anyone else to read.

Hint Fiction (props to Merrilee Faber for the heads-up on this book, featuring one of her stories) arrived in the same Amazon shipment as Elizabeth George’s book on writing, which I promptly discarded in favor of this little gem. The book design and layout rock along with the content.

According to editor Robert Swartwood, hint fiction is built on the idea that “the very best storytelling was the kind where the writer and reader meet halfway, the writer only painting fifty percent of the picture and forcing the reader to fill in the rest. That way, the reader truly becomes engaged in the process.”

Each of the 125 Hint Fiction stories has, at most, 25 words. A lot of the stories are dark, and the best ones are very dark. I don’t know if that’s an artifact of the form itself or of the editor’s taste. But each one tells a full story and draws the reader in, sometimes farther than I wanted to go. There’s way more emotional depth than I thought possible with so few words.

Hint Fiction is a must-read if you want to see how some writers make every word count. Phew.

So I hit my manuscript with a red pen and started deleting those excess words.

Then, I read Every Word Matters on David Kazzie’s blog, The Corner. Basically he reminds you that every word matters, only he uses a couple more words than that and an example from the movie version of No Country for Old Men. David is the mastermind behind the So You Want to Write a Novel/So You Want to Go to Law School videos and he’s a pretty funny writer.

So I hit my manuscript again with a red pen and started deleting some more of those words that don’t matter.

And then I discovered Austin Kleon, author of Newspaper Blackout. He writes poems by starting with a newspaper and blacking out the words he doesn’t need with magic marker.

His blog post How to Steal Like an Artist (and 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me) is awesomely brilliant, so you should read it. I can’t pick a favorite part, so I’ll just go with the tenth thing that nobody told him:

10. Creativity is subtraction.

It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting. What isn’t shown vs. what is… Creativity isn’t just the things we chose to put in, it’s also the things we chose to leave out.

So I’m hitting my manuscript again, maybe with a black marker this time.

If there’s anything left.

Well, Cathryn Grant’s Book and Kindle Giveaway is over – you can find out who won the contest here.

But I gotta say – I really feel like I was a big winner last week. It was fun to welcome new visitors to my blog and to visit those blogs in return.    [Continue reading]]]>
Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.

Well, Cathryn Grant’s Book and Kindle Giveaway is over – you can find out who won the contest here.

But I gotta say – I really feel like I was a big winner last week. It was fun to welcome new visitors to my blog and to visit those blogs in return. I discovered several new-to-me blogs to follow regularly, and that’s a real treat. I learned something about the passions that fuel people’s need to read and to write.

Of course I look at everything through my own lens, but getting into someone’s head – whether a fictional character, an author, or your own head as a reader/writer – to learn a bit more about human nature is a thread running through most of the comments. I get that, wanting to write about characters who climb into the brain somehow, want to read about them.

I’m reading Elizabeth George’s For the Sake of Elena right now. George has an amazing talent for slowly tossing little pieces of a character out like breadcrumbs that you just have to follow, hungry to learn more.

I bought the book at a used book fair last year and when I opened it, I found a little purple card taped on the inside front cover with this written on it: Absolutely the best Elizabeth George. If you like this one, you can go back and read all of them.

oh. yeah.

My post today about my love for reading and writing is    [Continue reading]]]> I’m participating, along with several other bloggers, in Cathryn Grant’s Suburban Noir Fiction and Kindle Giveaway. Lucky winners will receive a FREE copy of Cathryn’s debut novel, The Demise of the Soccer Moms, OR a FREE Wi-Fi Kindle pre-loaded with the novel.

My post today about my love for reading and writing is part of the contest. Read it, read the contest rules below, and then leave a comment on my post to enter the Giveaway. Good luck!

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I’ve always felt inadequate around Top Ten lists. I’ve never been able to hone in on just ten of anything and declare them my all-time favorites. There are simply too many “tops” to pick from in most categories, and “it depends” turns out to be first on most of my lists. Mood, time of day, what I had for lunch — they all influence my choices, which can change faster than coastal weather.

Same thing with developing a short list of why I love to read and write. It depends — there are SO MANY possible reasons fighting for top ten status on my Literary Love List.

Cathryn Grant, indie author of the just-released Demise of the Soccer Moms, and Linda Cassidy Lewis, indie author of soon-to-be-released The Brevity of Roses, had a wonderful conversation yesterday on Linda’s blog. You can read it here. Cathryn talked about the pull of examining “lives of quiet desperation” and how that pull drives some of her writing.

Yeah, I get it. Even those of us with pretty great lives feel that quiet desperation at some point(s) in our lives. Reading gives us a chance to explore that desperation through the lives of characters we can relate to – sometimes with a happy face resolution, sometimes with a resulting pile of dead bodies, sometimes with, well, no resolution at all.

Reading provides an opportunity to get out of our own skins and into someone else’s. A good writer makes that step from one skin to another seamless. A great writer makes it inevitable.

Getting inside another person’s head is just one of the reasons I love to read. I like to think it helps me understand human nature a tad better. Not just the desperation, but the aspirations, hopes, doubts, fears, loves that drive us.

Getting inside another head is a great draw for me as a writer, too. Especially when that other head, that other character, takes risks I would never attempt on my own.

I have more reasons, of course, for loving to read and write, and they are always changing.

But enough about me. How about YOU?

What compels you to read? To write?

Enquiring minds want to know.

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Enter the Suburban Noir contest for the chance to win a copy of “The Demise Of The Soccer Moms”. The grand prize is a Wi-Fi Kindle. Rules for the Kindle Giveaway:

1. Between February 4 and midnight PST, February 11, comment on any one or all of the 7 participating blogs to get one entry per comment. Limit of one comment per blog for a possible total of 7 entries.

2. Between February 4 and midnight PST, February 11, tweet any one or all of the participating blogs to get one entry per tweet. Limit of one tweet per blog for a possible total of 7 entries. Tweets must have @CathrynGrant so I can track them.

3. Participants can have a total of 14 entries between commenting on blogs and tweeting.

4. Ten people will win their choice of an eBook or paperback copy of Cathryn Grant’s Suburban Noir Thriller, “The Demise Of The Soccer Moms”. One additional person will win a Wi-Fi Graphite Kindle (valued at $139) pre-loaded with a copy of “The Demise Of The Soccer Moms”. Please note the paperback copy will not be available until March. Winners will be chosen by a random number generator.

The schedule for entering at participating blogs is listed at Cathryn’s blog.