Hello everyone and happy summer! I hope you’re indulging in copious amounts of down-time and an abundance of good books. Today, I’m blogging about Heartless by Marissa Meyer. For those of you in a hurry, today’s content can be summed up in four words:
This. book. DEVASTATED. me.
Read more here.
Although my to-be-read pile will outlast me by several years, my older son (who is also a reader) is never more than two books away from needing something new to read. This leads to the question of where to find that something new. My top three sources (after this blog, of course) are:
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A few Writer’s Life posts ago, I began a series addressing the question that I receive the most: What do I do with my story idea. In the first installments of this multi-part answer, I talked about writing down everything you know about the idea, beginning a social media presence, and giving structure to your story.
Read more here.
Welcome back to Lands Uncharted. For this week’s Top Three installment, I was going to discuss the best moments from Avengers Endgame, but if you’re like me… you haven’t seen it yet. So I decided it was still too soon for spoilers and that picking the top three moments would be best left to one of my fellow bloggers.
With all the Avengers excitement going around, it might be possible to forget another important day that’s coming up soon. Mother’s day is on May 12 this year. While that may seem a way off yet, it’s closer than it appears. The time to think of how to honor Mom is now.
Read more here.
I recently had the opportunity to connect with Tony Eames from NFReads. We discussed books, creativity, writing, and a few quirky facts about me. Read the interview here.
As I mentioned last month, I have this thing for how-to resources about writing. There’s something about studying the craft of writing that makes me feel content and inspired, so much so that I have to be careful to make sure that any extensive studying I do does not become a thinly-veiled form of creative procrastination.
Because of this, I’ve read enough that the basic advice is becoming ingrained and is beginning to sound repetitious. You know, in the same way a sunrise becomes repetitious because there’s never a day when the sun doesn’t rise. It’s not that each sunrise is not uniquely beautiful; it’s just that every dawn contains the same basic elements and follows a pretty standard process.
This is why I was so surprised by Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn from Actors, by Brandilyn Collins. I began reading it with the expectation that I would find basic ideas about character development. However, I was delighted to find that, while the book does deliver those ideas, it also does so much more.
Getting Into Character approaches character development through the system of Method Acting, a set of techniques formalized by Constantin Stanislavsky. In this system, method actors use the techniques of Personalizing; Action Objectives; Subtext; Coloring Passions; Inner Rhythm; Restraint and Control; and Emotion Memory to delve deeply into a character’s emotions and motivations so that they may portray characters in a fully-developed way. Brandilyn Collins identifies each of these techniques very briefly, then spends one chapter per technique discussing in detail how to apply each to developing story characters.
I am only one third of the way through this resource, but already I have learned so much. For example, I have known for a while that, in order to build a rich plot, characters should have internal and external goals and those goals should be somewhat related. However, in the chapter on Action Objectives, Collins coaches readers to state these goals as a two-pronged Desire in which a plan of action is followed by an ultimate goal. To demonstrate how this works, Collins gives the following examples:
“I want to never again lie to my husband so that I can rebuild trust in my marriage” as opposed to “I want a happy marriage.”
“’I want to hurry my roommate out the door so I can have some time to myself’ rather than ‘I want to be alone.’”
Collins then goes further to detail to discuss how this two-pronged Desire helps create scenes of conflict that are organic to the story and fight the dreaded mid-story plot sag.
These tidbits alone have helped me streamline my writing process, transforming the plot development of my third novel in such a way that, by itself, this technique makes the book worth what it costs. I can’t wait to see what the rest of this resource holds.
What about you? What new writing tips or tricks have you learned in the past month?
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