Tag Archives: 30 days of writing

30 Days of Writing #9: How Do You Create Characters?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

9) How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.

Ah, the dreaded ‘where do you get your ideas for such-and-such’ question! For it, I have the no-doubt equally-dreaded answer: ‘they just sort of come to me.’ I don’t know that any writer has all that satisfactory an answer for questions like these. Generally, of course, it starts with the story. Now, the story idea can come to me in a flash, as in I see something on TV, or a friend talks about something odd, or I read something that intrigues me, and a ‘what if’ occurs to me. More often, I won’t be able to point to anything specific as a trigger, save a number of thoughts that have been fermenting in the back of my mind for who knows how long. (This is, of course, why people who want to be writers should be voracious readers — the more you pour down into that murky hole, the more you have down there that can connect and gel and transmute until they jump out of the hole and stomp around in your forebrain until you are forced to get them out through your fingers into a story.

Once I have the story, the characters tend to follow. Frequently, the story I want to tell will be central to at least one character, so that’s where I start. I generally sketch out some ‘facts’ about the main character, who they are as the story begins, and who I see them being at the story’s end. If interactions with other characters are important to the story, these other characters will get sketched out as well. I don’t load on the detail too much, just enough to gain a starting point.

More details of the characters emerge as I write the first draft. I try to note specifics (such as appearance, background, relations with other characters, etc.) as I progress, but in the main, the personality of the characters emerge through the telling of the story, and these get refined through rethinking and redrafting. Doesn’t sound pretty, I know, but in the end, it gets me there.

30 Days of Writing #8: Favorite Genre to Write and/or Read?

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8. What’s your favorite genre to write? To read?

Historically it has been, for reading, science fiction. I cut my teeth on Asimov, Clarke, and Herbert (but not Heinlein or Tolkien, strangely enough — at least not until I was past my teen years and less prone to, shall we say, ‘exuberant overidentification’ with the worlds they created), plus rather more Star Wars and V tie-in novels than I would care to admit. And while SF is still a reading staple of mine, it has been eclipsed in my later years by fantasy and horror.

When I say ‘fantasy,’ I generally mean what I guess you’d call ‘urban’ fantasy – Simon R. Green’s Nightside series and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series being examples. Also some works from the more eccentric wings of fantasy, such as the books of Avram Davidson and Hal Duncan. Plus, of course, Terry Pratchett’s wonderful and expansive works, both Discworld-based and not. Horror has drawn me in as well, including works by Clive Barker and Stephen King.

I think what draws me to such material in reading is the visceral nature of dark fantasy and horror – the way a good writer can draw you into the moment, despite (or because of) the sheer weirdness of the situation. It’s also why I don’t read all that much of traditional ‘high’ fantasy – there’s nothing in it that really calls to me. Viscerality is also a key component of works I enjoy outside SF and fantasy, such as the mystery/crime works of Michael Connelly (the Harry Bosch series) and Jeff Lindsay (whose Dexter series is a concept I dearly wish I’d come up with).

So it should be no surprise that my favorite genre to write, these days, is ‘dark/urban/fantasy/horror.’ Insofar as I might be expected to shoehorn Brutal Light into a category, that is where it would go. Visceral (and sometimes bloody) action, philosophical and metaphysical weirdness, and characters that (hopefully) show depth and some degree of realism as they try to deal with it all.

Scheming into 2011

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

Looks like we’ve made it mostly intact into 2011. Hope everything went well for you and yours over the last couple weeks — it certainly did for me and mine. I thought I’d take a break this week from the ’30 Days of Writing’ series to talk about my writing plans for the first half of 2011.

I’m aiming to produce a couple new short stories — one all new, and currently under way, and one a full-scale breakdown-and-rewrite of an old one I think can be made saleable. Additionally, I’m determined to produce a detailed outline for Minions, my next novel. (Well, unless Brutal Light finds a publisher, in which case I’ll switch gears and start on the sequel to that one.)

I’m also working on worldbuilding for what I hope will be a long series of fantasy/horror short stories and novelettes and novellas, set in a lush and bizarre world populated by… but that would be telling. I’ve been sloppy in the past when it comes to worldbuilding, I’ll admit — I’ve always preferred to write, see what falls out of my head, and adjust my story to fit it in. But for this particular series to work, I’ve got to nail some things down, or at least come up with a sketch of what these things, and the nail, might look like. I’m quite looking forward to playing in this sandbox.

As far as established works go, I’ll be submitting True Places to another publisher, and see if I can find a home for the short story Fabulous Beasts as well. Plus I need to find somewhere to submit Onyx Fire, and maybe Brutal Light if it gets rejected by the publisher that has it now. You might think this doesn’t belong in a ‘goals’ post, but I’ve been lazy about keeping my momentum with submissions in the past, and that’s got to change.

Stay tuned, and I’ll keep you updated as to how these plans are going. Hope 2011 rocks, for all of us and ours.

30 Days of Writing #7: Music While You Write?

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7) Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?

I used to listen to music while writing. In the days when I lived alone, it was common for me to write while a lineup of CDs played in the background. Generally, it would have to be music that related to what I was writing, in tone if not in lyric–in fact, the less distracting the lyrics, the better. It was rare that I would write in silence.

After marrying, I started writing more in the mornings and on weekends, usually without music or any other noise-maker in the background. True, I could have listen to CDs (and now, MP3s) with headphones (or ear buds, now, which I loathe to use), but that, too, is a distraction. Sometimes what I’m writing gets me so wound up I have to get up and move around. And silence, as it turns out, works pretty well for me. Better, I think, than filling the world with noise ever did.

Songs that would usually make it into the background, when I wrote with music, were freuqently ones that applied to characters, or at least what they were faced with. During the time when I was writing a lot of Superguy material, this tended toward the bombastic and over-the-top, which suited the plots I was coming up with just fine. During the writing of some parts of Brutal Light, I favored music that was on the darker edges of elecronica/trance, including discs by Philosophy Major, Massive Attack, and Thievery Corporation. Which is not to say I don’t like a variety of music–it’s just that it’s harder to write some things while jazz music is playing, and harder to write others while bands are rocking out in the background.

30 Days of Writing #6: Writing Where, When, and With What?

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6) Where are you most comfortable writing? At what time of day? Computer or good ol’ pen and paper?

These days, I’m most comfortable writing at home at the PC in the guest bedroom-slash-den. When we moved to the townhouse we now rent, I set up my old iMac in the basement with the idea that I would be writing there, mostly in the morning before my day job commute, or on weekends. But whereas the finished basement in our former house was perfect for that sort of thing, the unfinished basement in the townhouse is not. So I write upstairs now. Still mostly in the mornings, and on weekends. Not too often in the evenings; that time sees me either exercising, having dinner, reading, or spending time with family and friends.

I try to stay flexible as to the when and where of writing, as even limited opportunities are better than none at all. Or worse, opportunities wasted–of which, regrettably, I’ve had my share and then some.

I know there’s a school of thought that suggests that writing using pen and paper encourages better work by discouraging needless verbosity and unnecessary scenes. That as may be–I, in attempting to write this way, find it only encourages my hand to hurt. And if I’m thinking about my hand while I’m writing, I’m not ‘in the story,’ a zone my brain has to be in if the story that comes out at the end is going to be satisfactory. Writing at the keyboard–any keyboard, though ideally one connected to a computer–lets me forget about my hands and get on with the storytelling. Which is worth all the additional editing in the world.

(Luckily, carpal tunnel has yet to find me. Hopefully it will stay that way!)

30 Days of Writing #5: Youngest and Oldest Characters?

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5) By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest? How about “youngest” and “oldest” in terms of when you created them?

My youngest character would have to be Luca Blackwood, the seven-year-old protagonist of Onyx Fire, the children’s book I co-wrote with my wife (which is also In Search Of… a publisher). It was an interesting experience writing her, as I’m not ordinarily disposed to write pre-adolescent characters–partially because most of my works are aimed at a more mature audience, partially because it’s hard for me to orient my brain toward such a perspective.

My oldest character, as near as I can estimate from a brief survey of my memory, would be Cyane, the siren antagonist of my as-yet-unpublished short story Fabulous Beasts. She hails back to Greece of mythological times. A bit easier for me to work with; that is to say, her age was not her most challenging aspect.

In terms of creation date, my ‘oldest’ character of consequence is likely Rad, protagonist of a self-titled series set in the Superguy shared-universe humorous superheroic fiction list. I essentially lifted a persona and character I created for a Villians and Vigilantes game and ran with it… and somehow, it worked.

‘Youngest’ in terms of creation date would be a character from what I’m working on right now; as such character is still in flux, I’d rather not talk about him too much–save to note that he’s a right bastard. Right bastards are always fun to write.