Writing Wednesday: Hurting the Characters you love

Visitors to this blog may have noticed that I've been doing the bare minimum amount of blogging for the past month, just my two most popular series Writing Wednesday and Shut-up Stupid Sunday. This isn't because I couldn't think of anything to write about, I've actually thought of tons of topics for the other things but I've got characters I need to torture.

I've been writing MIND THIEF for 6 months now. This is the longest I've spent on writing a first draft since my first novel when I had no clue what I was doing and revised each chapter right after I wrote it 2 or 3 times. In word count I'm actually falling behind that as I am at the 50,000 word mark and on my first novel I was past the 80,000 word mark at 6 months.

What has bogged me down is that I like the characters I've created. I have even started to like the one character that I couldn't stand when I started the novel. That's the odd part of writing you can hate your own creations. I wrote the first act of 30,000 words in a little over a month. Then I came to the second act where every thing goes wrong for my main character. He is a freshman in college and acts like a freshman in college, in other words he's kind of a jerk.

I had a real dread of two things. First, I had to make him far, far from a perfect gentleman. Second, I had to smash his little world to bits and give him one of the worst days I could imagine. I knew it would be a tough 10,000 words to write but I finally just forced myself to write it.

So for the last month I've been plowing through it and I've gotten through 20,000 words of the 10,000 words I forced myself to write and I am almost done (maybe 5,000 to 7,500 word more) and will be on to the grand action scene where everything gets tied together. I expect that I'll zoom through writing that.

I've dedicated two to three hours a day to this and I've been writing about 500 words a day, that's two to three words per minute. The slowest I've ever written something. I'd love to say the quality of writing makes up for the time spent, but it doesn't and I'll be doing major revisions to it.

But forcing myself write the part of the book I didn't want to has been good to me, I managed to write my main character being a jerk, but in a way you can still sympathize with him. I made the character that I hated more sympathetic so I almost feel sorry for her, almost. I made the bad guy into my true vision of a bad guy, which I will probably write about next week.

Although the last month was a tough writing month for me, once I forced myself to do it, it really wasn't as bad as I had dreaded. My characters have come to life and although I had to expose all their ugly flaws it gave me a stronger bond to them.

This month I've learned something about writing. It's an extension to the number one rule of writing: Writers write. To improve your writing it is important to write, good or bad writing, it doesn't matter just keep writing. But the extension to that is even if you dread writing something, or you think it is at level that's above your abilities, just write it. It may have be revised heavily, it may be so bad it has to be set aside for a while, at the very worst it might have to go into the recycle bin, but in the end it will probably be better than you imagined and you'll find it's not as painful as you thought it would be.

By Darrell B. Nelson author of Alien Thoughts

Shut-up Stupid Sunday: Rape

In 2009 Roman Polanski requested that he be allowed back into the United States. He is banned from entering our country because he drugged a 13 year old girl and had sex with her. This opened a storm of protest, rightfully so. Conservative Republicans were the ones who screamed for his head the loudest. What he did was repugnant and he shouldn't be allowed back in our country.

Now the same Conservatives are trying to push a bill through Congress, HR3, that would redefine what Roman Polanski did so that it wouldn't be considered rape.

For the past decade Republicans have been pushing “Health Saving Accounts” so people can save up money to self-insure themselves for health emergencies. The idea behind the accounts is that people can make their own medical decisions. Now the Republicans are pushing a new bill that says Health Savings Accounts can't be used for abortions except in the case of “forcible rape”.

This means that if the 13 year old that that Roman Polanski got his hands on was impregnated by him her parents wouldn't be allowed to use their Health Savings Account to pay for the abortion as Polanski drugged her instead of holding her down.

So much is wrong with this bill I don't know where to start.

First there is the total hypocrisy, besides calling for Roman Polanski's arrest (something I agree with), and then trying to redefine what he did as “not rape”, it goes against their number one argument against the Health Care Act. The Republicans are saying that the government can't force individuals how to spend their money. But in saying that someone can't use the money they put away in a Health Savings Account for a legitimate medical procedure they are forcing the people who use them how to spend their money.

Second there is the “General Welfare” clause of the Constitution, what happened to Polanski's 13 year old victim was horrible and no doubt caused emotional damage. If she had gotten pregnant from it she would face even more emotional trauma, adding another layer of emotional burden on to her does not promote the “General Welfare” in anyway, it makes it harder for the victim to try and get their life back to normal after an assault. This bill is having the government assault the victim for a third time.

Finally it is just sick that a bunch of rich, old men that belong to a group that is known for its sex scandals should be able to decide what a woman considers rape.

So to the supporters of HR 3, I say, “Shut-up Stupid, if you can't see how forcing a 13 year old girl to go through another layer of assault is wrong, then you aren't worthy to be called a human being.”

By Darrell B. Nelson author of Alien Thoughts

Writing Wednesday: Looking at my poll.

Last week I did a poll to see which of my opening paragraphs people thought were the strongest. With 3 votes it was far from the most scientific poll on a completely subjective matter but I was still a little surprised by the results.

The most popular opening paragraph was for EARTH STRIKE with 2 votes. With that one I haven't done any rewriting yet, so that was the first thing I jotted down.

The second most popular was for PROJECT: SPARE RIB with 1 vote. I wrote that 2 years ago and although I spent more time revising the book than I did writing it, I didn't concentrate on the first paragraph like I have with my latter books.

Another interesting thing about the poll is that those two books featured a main character that has mental problems that I exposed right at the beginning.

In EARTH STRIKE, Sam is being told by everyone around him that he is a writer in 2011 which is why the flashes of the mid 22nd century are so vivid, but his invisible friend is telling him they are lying.

In PROJECT: SPARE RIB, Tom suffers from synesthetes and Asperger's syndrome and he stumbles on a conspiracy that covers over a hundred years and three major wars. Synesthetes is a strange disorder where a stimuli that triggers one sense will trigger other senses. So Tom sees colors when he smells things, tastes peoples voices and hears pain. He was a wild character to write and one of my favorites, however between having to write in Synesthetes terms and making someone with Asperger's (A syndrome that is characterized by lacking any social skills) likable while weaving in a hundred years of history the book turned into a mess beyond my skills to repair at this time.

Although I'm trying not to read to much into this poll, it did give me an idea of where to start when I rewrite MIND THIEF. The main character Howie is having a truly evil bastard deposit his memories into Howie's brain so he can take over Howie's body later. The beginning might be better if I show how that is messing with his head right at the beginning.

The paragraph I submitted to the contest wasn't one that anyone picked. I submitted the first paragraph for THE SETTING EARTH, that was the book that I wrote the quickest, 6 weeks from start to finish. It was totally a selfish book, I just wanted to write some great space imagery of Ceres the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt and put a interplanetary cold war around it as the setting. It was totally “the book I want to read” as opposed to anything else. I liked it so much that I want other people to read it so I spent as much time rewriting the very slow first chapter, I had 5 major characters to introduce, as I did writing the book. So I found it interesting that people picked the paragraphs I spent the least time on.

I want to thank everyone that voted. I really appreciate the feedback.

By Darrell B. Nelson author of Alien Thoughts