Every Good Alpha Deserves A Hobby

A week? Argh, naughty Jackie! My only excuse is that I've been hard at work this week getting in more contest entries. Yep, anything and everything, that's my motto. Gotta be in it to win it etc, etc...

Anyway, it's one of these entries that got me thinking about heroes. Heroes and hobbies to be exact. Hobbies?? Yeah, hobbies. I know, I know, brings to mind stamps and miniature railways and birdwatching (not that there is anything wrong with any of these!) and possibly anoraks. All of which don't seem to be particularly hero orientated. But bear with me.

First let me tell you that there is nothing cuter than a man in the grip of a small enthusiasm. Dear Dr Jax for example. He often has little fancies. Last month it was fish. He investigated EVERYTHING. Tanks, correct water PH, oxygen thingies, the proper food, lights, the works. You would think he was getting some terribly expensive tropical fish but no, it was fresh water guppies. But the kids got to choose a tank ornament each, and now we have a little aquarium in our lounge. Since then he hasn't looked at the fish and soon it'll be something else, but while he was interested there was something so utterly endearing about it that it got me thinking about my heroes and their 'things' (no, not that thing). :-)

A hero with a hobby is a very human hero. A relateable hero. You might have the world's biggest alphole but if he has a passion for teaspoon collecting then somehow, that makes him more sympathetic (or not as the case may be. I guess it depends if you like teaspoons). It also provides a very nice way for the heroine to relate to him. Perhaps she buys him a rare teaspoon for his collection? What a way to show you care! And it can also be a lovely point of similarity - maybe she collects plates?

The plot opportunities for little hobbies can be good too. Perhaps the teaspoon collecting is part of his conflict? He MUST have the best collection in the world because he has to be the best at everything because when he was a kid his father always made him feel second rate. Or perhaps he loves fishing because it makes him feel closer to his dead mother. Or he likes making jewellery because he's actually secretly creative and doing finance deals doesn't satisfy that part of him.

Hobbies can be great ways to set up character as well. What is it about teaspoon collecting that he likes so much? Perhaps he's very neat and has them all ordered and displayed beautifully and then the heroine comes in and messes them all up. Or maybe he's into music and is very techy, and has to have the BEST stereo equipment (come on, everyone knows at least one guy like this, right?), and then the heroine makes a perfectly innocent comment about his stereo which then gets her a rave for HOURS. And she's enchanted by his boyishness. ;-)

Obviously, in giving your hero a hobby, you do have to make it part of his character. I wouldn't give a CEO a stamp collecting hobby just because it was different. The stamp collecting would have to be part of the type of guy he is. Why stamps? Did he collect them as a child? Why does he still collect them as an adult? Etc, etc.

So what's the most interesting hobby for a hero that you've read? I read a Susan Napier years ago where the hero grew roses. It was awesome!

No Holding Back!

Okay, it's official. Jackie is no longer holding back.

I know, I know, I was supposed to do this months ago. But I only really managed it in one chapter and that was my contest chapter. The rest of my mss, I've been dicking around with but not getting anywhere, questioning every action my characters took, every reaction. I told myself I wasn't going to worry about the little editorial voices in my head but you know what? No prizes for guessing.... Yeah, I've been listening to them.

The CPs have had to give me a slap round the head (Robyn and Maisey do an excellent good cop/bad cop routine) and since then, I've made a momentous decision. Ish.

I can write sassy and flirty, and I do it well. But sassy and flirty do not a story make. You need conflict and character and that's where I am having problems. Because I'm holding myself back. I'm trying to keep the light and flirty, but also have the intensity and angst that I love as well and it's not working for me. I keep injecting inappropriate tension and angst everywhere because that's what I REALLY want to write.

So, I'm giving up the light and flirty. I'm going all out on the angst. The intensity. The strong alphas. But I'm keeping my heroines stroppy. I'm doing Presents/Modern conflict and hero with a Riva heroine. I have no idea whether it'll work or not but already the Chessman - which Maisey had already told me was Presents - is benefitting. My hero (who was more Presents than Riva anyway, as I think Janet commented once) is no longer going to do stuff just to make him more sympathetic. If it's not in his character, then he ain't doing it. Like flirting. He doesn't flirt. He doesn't seduce. He has no light and flirty button. Neither does my heroine. She's hot-headed and stroppy and straight up. So Jackie must stop trying to make her light and flirty too.

And the next time I find myself questioning every action, every reaction, I need to ask myself this question - am I holding back? And if so, why?

Anyone else guilty of holding back??

Seven Random Facts

The beauteous Rach (newcarinauthorbookoutinDecemberbuyitbuyitBUYIT!!!) has nominated me for a blog award that means I have to reveal seven random facts about myself. Okay, so here goes:

1. I am a romance writer. Yes, shocking and you totally didn't know it right? Unpublished still but not unhopeful.

2. I have hereditary deafness and as I'm getting sick of being the old lady in the corner cupping her ear and saying 'eh?', have decided I need hearing aids. I don't want them. The thought makes me feel 81 not 41 but I think they'll help. AND they have bluetooth which means I can listen to my iPod without needing earbuds and use my mobile handsfree. From there I shall slowly replace body parts until I'm cyborg enough to assimilate the rest of the world. Mwwwaaahahaha!

3. Many, many moons ago when I was young and dumb, I had an argument with Dr Jax and hit him on the arm. Not hard I may add, but it was enough to break my arm. Yep, drama queen, that's me.

4. I may have mentioned this before but it's worth repeating. I got engaged in Prague, on the banks of the river, with a guy playing 'Autumn Leaves' on the saxophone just a couple of park benches away. It was magical. Dr Jax then rang my father to get his permission to marry me. My father was slightly bewildered. :-)

5. My 23rd birthday was celebrated in St Petersburg during the White Nights. Much vodka was consumed.

6. I have never eaten tripe and have no plans to ever do so.

7. When my best friend and I began writing romances at the age of fifteen, our heroes HAD to have titles and the stories HAD to be set in ancestral mansions. I blame watching too much Brideshead Revisited.

And now I have to nominate ten people but since everyone has already been nominated, I'm going to do something different and get anyone who wants to, to put a random fact about yourself in the comments instead!

Ask Dr Jax - Dr Jax Responds Part 3

Okay people, last Dr Jax post (until next month).

When two people meet, if they are the opposite end of the spectrum to each other, can they ever find a common ground? The situation I am thinking of is the following: If the woman has had major responsibilities in her life, but is now free and just wants to have no-strings attached fun, whereas the man, having lived a hedonistic lifestyle, now has major responsibilities, can there ever be a happy ending?

Dr Jax: Yes, definitely. They would have huge amounts of common ground. The woman knows what it's like to be responsible and the man knows what it's like to be hedonistic. But they've essentially met at the wrong time in their lives. What they need to do to get their happy ending is to synchronize what they want out of life. They are like pendulums swinging to extremes and both out of sync. But if the attraction is strong enough they will stop swinging so wildly and will slowly synchronize, finding a happy equilibrium.
They may also have other interests where they could connect. For example, liking the same authors, the same food, holidaying in the same place, etc, etc.

And this one is from me, because this is a HUGE problem for me. How do we know if our characters are being too self aware?

Dr Jax: A good rule of thumb is if you think they are too self aware, they probably are. :-) Other red flags (though not bad in themselves, they can be indications if taken as a whole that things aren't right): Your character frequently thinks about how events in their past have made them behave. Your character is never surprised by their own actions. Your character doesn't grow. These are the things that from a psychological viewpoint dont't reflect how real people behave. People don't think about events in their past as influencing their current behaviour. People are often surprised by their own actions. And people do change in response to things that happen in their lives.

So how self aware are people about their behaviour generally?

Dr Jax: Dimly at best. Solid research shows that our consciousness runs one to two seconds behind our actions. So we act, then become aware of acting, then we make up justifications for doing so.

Thanks once again for your questions everyone. Will do this again next month!

Ask Dr Jax - Dr Jax Responds Part 2

The good doctor responds to more questions...

Dr. Jax, do you think we're aware of the events in our past which have shaped us? Or is it more common to simply assume you're all right, and that you're more or less 'normal'?

Dr Jax: Yes, most people think they're okay. However, the things that shape us the most are the relationships we have with other people rather than events. And the most important relationships are the ones we have in the first two years of life - these echo throughout our lives. Yet we have no episodic memory of those years - or if we do, then we usually remember them wrong because episodic memory is unreliable. Of course, we are often aware of events in childhood and we may attach importance to those events but in reality single events shape us much less than relationships do.
Jackie's note: Here is where psychiatry and writing fiction diverges a little - as writers of course, we have to attach some importance to events as these are easily read signposts to the reader of our character's conflict. However, I think given how important relationships are to people, it's a good idea to examine an event that has happened in a character's life and make sure to assess how that event related/changed the relationships the character had with others, not just how the event changed the character themselves. As an example, the character with the abusive father - obviously the first time his father hit him will be a big event that will have an impact (no pun intended!) on him, but it's good to think about how that event affected his relationship not just with his father, but also with his mother (was she there? Did she see it? How did she react to it?) and brothers/sisters etc.

I have a question about my hero. He's a workaholic who can't acknowledge that he's capable of feeling love and believes that he doesn't want or need a permanent relationship--believes he's better off on his own. (loss in his childhood, father had stiff uper lip attitude and wouldn't talk about the loss so hero learnt to supress his emotions). The problem is that, going on this, this character doesn't sound much fun (very work- focussed and buttoned up) But I don't want him to be like that. I want him to be outgoing and full of charm. Is this inconsistent with the above? Would a man who's closed off emotionally (and scared to love) have culitvated an outgoing, charming image? What would his unconscious psycholigical motive be?

Dr Jax: Sounds like you want your hero to be two different types of people! However, you can make his behaviour more consistent. If his father was a stiff upper lip type of guy, then you need to decide whether your hero becomes like his father, or consciously tries to do the opposite. Perhaps he has developed a charming, debonair exterior as part of a decision not to let anything matter too much to him. Emotions are painful so he won't let himself feel too deeply, he just wants to have fun, float along the surface of life etc, etc. Unconsciously this is to protect himself from feeling because feeling equals pain, but consciously he perhaps would be telling himself it's because he doesn't want to be all buttoned up and stiff like his father.
Jackie's note: My chess hero has problem with emotion too. But I've chosen the opposite to charming and debonair. I've made him very serious and logical. No, he's not charming and flirty because he views being charming and flirty as pointless and he doesn't need it to get girls anyway. Consciously he is contemptuous of people who are emotional because it's logic that's important, emotion clouds thinking (he's like Dr Spock without the ears!). Unconsciously he is trying to protect himself from feeling because he is afraid of what happens when he lets himself feel - bad things happen when he gets angry. No, he's not the life of the party but that's part of his character arc - what happens when you give him a heroine who won't let him get away with being all serious and logical, forcing him out of his comfort zone?

So, I have a question. An overriding theme present in every one of my books is self-esteem (and I wonder what that says about me!?!). And all of my characters seem to define themselves through their work (or lost job, in some cases). I wonder how big of a role work plays in other people's lives. Is it common for people's self-esteem to be wrapped up in their job?

Dr Jax: Yes, very common, especially if this is the only part of your life that is going well. If other aspects of your life suck (such as love/social life) then work becomes extremely important to you because it helps you feel better about yourself. It gives you validation from the outside world etc.

So big heaps of thanks to the good Dr J!! Hope that was helpful to people. If there are more questions, I can do one more post so let me know. The doc is happy to answer any more - especially as he loves talking and hates the writing up so this is the perfect balance for him. :-)
If not, I'll run an Ask Dr Jax post next month.

Thanks all for your fabulous questions!

Ask Dr Jax - Dr Jax Responds Part 1

Got some great questions for Dr Jax - thanks everyone! I'll post some answers today and then some more tomorrow. If any of the responses prompt more questions, feel free to ask. I'll run this until the end of the week.

Have also decided to make the first Monday of each month a regular Ask Dr Jax Q&A. So if you haven't got a question this time, there's always next month.

Righto, before I launch into the answers, here is the usual disclaimer. Dr Jax is a psychiatrist, not a writer or editor, and any advice he gives is based on what would happen to real people in real life situations that may not be suitable for fiction.

Alrighty.... (Dr Jax's answers have been paraphrased)

Question 1: "I'm thinking oppression could break someone...or strengthen them to fight/rise up....does their personality type of other background play a part?

Dr Jax: Yes, background and personality do play a part. If their early experiences have taught them resiliency - ie good attachments to people, even if it was just one person who cared about them - then they would be more likely to deal resiliently to life's tragedies (fight in other words).

Question 2: Firstly, is it credible for a teenage boy to have a goal to be a volunteer doctor in third world countries, due to an unconscious need to prove his self worth following the deaths of his mother and brother in an accident? Secondly, is it credible for that boy, now a man, to leave Africa and his work as a volunteer doctor (and his unconscious quest for self worth) in order to return to the UK to be a father to a child he never knew he had? Or would he stay in Africa? Note: I've paraphrased this.

Dr Jax: Firstly, yes, it's credible for a teenage boy to have this goal - more plausible if he was the oldest brother (I met many people like this in med school!). To answer the second question, you need to consider what kind of person he is. As a kid was he serious? Or did he like to have fun? Was he curious? Or was he a cautious kind of person? What was he like at school? What were his favourite subjects at med school? etc, etc.
Then you need to look at that in conjunction with his past. How does he view fatherhood? Is being a good father important to him? Or does he put the needs of others before his own needs?
Also, consider how working in an under resourced third world country would have changed him. Because it would definitely change him.

Question 3: How do you start helping someone get over a phobia? Spiders for example.

Dr Jax: There are two ways of dealing with phobias. Flooding - which is sticking the person in a room full of tarantulas and keeping them in there until they're no longer scared. This works but is obviously very traumatic and not as effective as the second option. Systematic Desensitisation is the other way. This involves firstly learning deep breathing exercises and relaxation techniques (no mention of spiders at all). Then the 2nd step might be thinking about spiders as you practise your deep breathing. Third step might be talking about spiders- still deep breathing etc. Fourth might be looking at pictures of spiders while deep breathing, etc, etc. This goes on until you are able to look at real spiders and not feel scared. This process might cover a considerable period of time.
People's background and/or personality doesn't make any difference to the treatment.

Question 4: When figuring out conflict, we often use a character's early experiences with people to determine how they view life when the story opens. What I'd like to know is when they have these early experiences, how do people normally react? For example, if a character had an abusive father, would he become abusive himself or would he be more likely to abhor violence?

Dr Jax: People generally react in two ways to early experiences. They either identify with the treatment or they do the opposite. In this instance, your character may subconsciously decide that violence is okay and go on to be an abuser himself. Or he could decide that violence is never the answer and eschew it entirely. Note - when people do the opposite, they almost always do it in an angry way or in a way that makes a statement. For example, your character may tell his father angrily that violence is not the answer or deliberately not fight back as a way of making his point.

Okay, I'll post up Part 2 tomorrow. I have paraphrased people's questions and also Dr Jax's answers (let me know if I've got any of your questions wrong!). Feel free to post if you have any other questions, or use the contact tab just below my blog header!

Ask Dr Jax - Questions Please

All right, the people have spoken!

Bring your tricky conflict questions to Dr Jax! He's a qualified psychiatrist and can give real life advice on any thorny behavioural issues. Would your characters really act the way they do? Or would they do things differently? How do people generally respond to tragedies in their lives? Etc etc.

You can either ask your question as a comment or, if you don't want to post it, feel free to use the contact page (there's a form) just below my blog header and email me. If you're not comfortable with specifics, then just be as general as you like. But don't do the 'my friend is writing this story...' cos that's a dead giveaway. ;-)

Disclaimer: Dr Jax is a psychiatrist, not a writer or an editor. He gives real life advice on how real people behave, not fictional characters. However should your book go on to be published subsequent to his advice, feel free to pass on any royalties (or chocolate). ;-)

Dr Jax Helps Out

Was going to do a long and involved post today but since my youngest daughter broke her leg yesterday (jumping off a bunkbed trying to touch a light!), I am at her beck and call instead!

Still, thought I'd mention that I was talking to Dr Jax over the weekend and asked him if he might like to do a Q&A on conflict. We're told we have to be psychologists with our characters and their conflict so I thought conflict issues from the point of view of a bonafide psychiatrist might be kind of helpful. He was amenable so what do the rest of you think? Got any conflict questions you want to ask? A particular issue or how people behave in general? Let me know what you think would be most helpful!

Jackie Has Some Good News For a Change

Yes, my successes have been few and far between of late but I found out this morning that I have finalled in the RWNZ Great Beginnings Contest! Big woots for me!! I've entered this competition for the past three years with no luck but this time round hit the mark and I'm extremely pleased!

I'm even more pleased because the kind of writing I fluked for the High Five, I put consciously, using all I've learned about conflict and character, into this story. That didn't mean I expected it to come anywhere. The judges could easily have hated my story and my characters no matter how well they were written. But they certainly liked it enough to give it some good scores and I'm pretty damn thrilled about it.

The story isn't a Riva story, it's a Presents/Modern, which made it a nice change for me. Anyway, have no idea how the final judging will go, suffice to say that I'm pretty happy with what I've got already. :-)

Some wise people have told me to celebrate any success in this tough industry, so here's what I'm doing - Hoo is passing round some vintage Krug on a silver tray...please, help yourself. And while you're doing it, share some successes you've had lately. It doesn't matter what it is, big or small, let me know so I can raise a glass!

Carving Michelangelo's David

I feel a bit like Michelangelo trying to carve out David from a block of stone at the moment. I keep chipping away thinking I see the figure inside, but then realise that my David looks more of an ogre than a svelte young man. All the proportions are wrong and he's wearing clothes instead of a fig leaf. So I have to do some more hacking, some more cutting down and polishing. I'm hoping it'll be worth it.

Currently my Chess masterpiece is becoming the new never-ending story. A month and a half on the first three chapters. Longest. Time. Ever. And you know what? I think I may have to can those chapters. Why? Because they are based on an earlier incarnation of the conflict and now do not have any relevance to the rest of the story. They involve the heroine and hero working together. But they never work together again and their conflict is not based on a work situation. So why have I still got them working together?? How does it forward the conflict? It used to, but since I've fiddled with the heroine's conflict, it doesn't anymore. Argh!!

Sigh. This is becoming a watershed ms. I think I've learned more writing this than I have any other story. More about my process, more about what I've been doing wrong in previous stories, and more about how to fix the things I've been doing wrong. At least, I think I'm fixing things. I could be making it worse of course but the only way of knowing that is by sending it away. But I can't do that until I finish the damn thing.

This is why fixing an old ms can be harder than just writing something new, especially if the problem was character and conflict. I mean really, given the amount of rewriting I've been doing, I'll just say that in fact, this IS a new ms. Because changing a conflict or changing a character can have wide-ranging effects. A character that acted one way in the beginning, may not act that way after the change. And if the plot is based on what the character does - which is most category - then what the character does will in turn change the plot. Can anyone say nightmare?

Anyway, what else can I do but keep chipping away? And hope that soon my ogre will start looking less like this:


more and more like this:

Jackie's Year of Surviving Rejection

I've done a post on the Sisters' Blog in celebration of our blog's first birthday. It's on...drum roll.... surviving rejection! If you're keen for a bit of Chumbawamba, then head over. If you're still in denial about the possibility of being rejected then keep away... :-)

Character Lightbulbs!

Yeah, I'm finding I'm having lots of lightbulb moments with my chess ms. In fact, I'm beginning to think that my chess story is becoming a bit of a watershed ms. I am learning so much with this one. I knew at the beginning of the year that it was proving to be quite a learning experience but it's becoming even more of one now. Maybe it's because I'm taking my time with it and really thinking about it. Or maybe it's because my weaknesses are so much clearer now and I am working to fix them. I'm not sure. What I do know is that this story WILL be much stronger than anything I have written to date and that can be put down to the fact that I know my characters. This time round I have thought about their pasts in great detail and if there's something I don't know about them that I need to know, I can actually tell when that moment is and can stop and think about it.

What do I mean? Well, for example, whenever I am introducing a bit of conflict and find myself writing the same thing over and over again without really capturing what it is I want to get across, it's usually because I don't know what it is I'm trying to say! A specific example may be: 'He reminded her of her parents. Their lies, their judgements, the way they made her feel small'.
This does tell you something about her conflict. She had issues with her parents, they lied and judged her and made her feel small. But there are some questions unanswered: what did he do to make her think of her parents? What lies did her parents tell and did they tell them to her or to each other? What about their judgements? Did they judge her or each other? And what made her feel small? The lies or the judgements or both? And why did that make her feel small?
Obviously you don't answer all those questions immediately, they are revealed as the book goes along, but what you have to do as a writer is know the answers to the questions. And what I think really builds the characters, and what I have NOT been doing, is having an example to illustrate the answer.

So if her parents had lied to her, thinking about a specific lie at a specific time by a specific person, can tell you so much more about a character and their conflict that some vague generalisations. Example: When she was ten, her beloved cat went missing and her mother told her that the animal ran away from home. However that night, when she was supposed to be a asleep, she got up to get a glass of water and spotted her father in the backgarden digging a hole, her cat lying dead on the grass next to it.
Doesn't that tell us so much more about her and her parents and their relationship? And also gives us insight into the motivations of her parents too. It tells us she had a pet she loved. That her mother lied (to protect her maybe?) to her about what happened to it. That her father was in on it. And that by burying it at night when they knew she was alseep, they were trying to hide the cat's death from her. Perhaps this is a terrible moment for the heroine. Perhaps finding out that her parents are not always truthful causes her to subconsciously be suspicious of anything they might say. What is certain is that it gives us more information than 'her reminded her of her parents. Their lies, their judgements....etc'.

It's those little snapshots of pivotal moments in the characters lives that really - for me at least - build up a great picture of who that person is and what in their past might had led them to think the way they do. Of course, what I'm missing from that example and what it is just as important as the situation itself, is how the heroine acts in response to it. Did she not say anything to her parents about her cat or did she confront them?

So what helps you build character? Anyone got any useful examples?

Character Traits vs Conflict

Janet asked me an interesting question about my last blog post and since I'm scraping around trying to find things to blog about, I thought I'd actually give my answer as a post. This comes with the usual caveat that my answer is my thoughts about the subject, thoughts that could be totally erroneous, sadly misguideded or plain old wrong. On the other hand they could be so totally brilliant that you will want to bow before the power of my awesomeness (presents and small tokens of thanks are always appreciated). :-)

Okay, so Janet ask me to give an example of the difference between a character trait and conflict. This was in response to me saying that what I thought was conflict in my heroine, turned about to be a character trait. So what do I mean?

Well, we're told that asking the 'why' questions are really important to figuring out conflict. And it's true, you do need to ask those questions. But my problem is that I didn't know when to stop! My heroine - I thought - is an emotional girl so I kept asking myself, "This is her conflict so why is she emotional? Why? Why? Why?". I kept looking for a reason for my heroine to not hide how she felt but there wasn't one that fitted with the idea of her I had in my mind. So there comes a stage where the 'why' comes down to 'well, they were born that way'. And if they were born that way, it becomes a character trait, not the conflict. So one of my heroine's character traits is that she has no problem with telling everyone exactly how she feels.

Where the conflict comes into it is how this character trait makes the character behave in response to certain situtions in their lives. Not hiding how she feels is NOT the conflict, but it does affect how she responds to the conflict. Does that make any sense?

My hero, on the other hand, is emotionless - which of course is a big lie because he's not really. But being emotionless is his response to his conflict. He's actually just like her, feels things very deeply, but unlike her, his experience has taught him that such emotions are dangerous and he won't have a bar of them. So he's shut himself down.

Here's another example. Perhaps you might have a hero who really, really likes cars. He likes the way they look and the mechanics and the speed, he's just right into them. And perhaps there's no reason for it, he's just always been the kid who loves machines. So his liking of cars is NOT his conflict. It's part of his character. But say he had a car as a teenager he lovingly built from the ground up, spent years on it, spent lots of money on it, it was his baby. And say his father decided he spent too much time on his cars when he should be in school and so sold his beloved car without telling him.... This is where his love of cars interacts with what could potentially be some great conflict, because it's not really about how much he loves cars is it? It's about how he views his Dad. How he responds to this would be a character trait. Is he the type of guy to head straight into a confrontation with his father? Or is he more of a restrained, quiet type of guy, who would say nothing but spend every resource he had finding the car and getting it back...(no you can't have this example, I've decided I'm going to use it. Hehe!).

So that's how I view character traits and conflict. Anyone got any more advice cos God knows, I probably need it. :-)

Heroines Do My Head In

Ah crap, nearly another week has gone by. I do have an excuse though. I have been...drum roll....writing!

What you say? Jackie Ashenden actually writing? Unheard of!

Yeah, yeah, I'm being sarcastic. I never really stop writing to it's no surprise. But lately I have been turning off the net to concentrate wholly on what I'm doing. And good thing too because my poor Chessman needs the attention. His issues are turning out to be waaaay bigger than I thought. He's a very closed off guy, very cerebral and, naturally enough, there is a reason he's like this. Yes, that's right, ONE reason. Not fifty million in the way I usually always overcomplicate stuff, just one. And that's where the whole keep it simple, dig deep stuff comes into it. Taking that ONE reason and exploring it, not chucking in a whole lot of other stuff like I did, say, with the heroine...

Women. Honestly, why do I have such problems with women?? Maybe it's because I'm a complicated girl myself, I dunno, but some heroines just give me gip. I think it's due to the fact that I've focussed on one character trait for this particular heroine and turned it into conflict, whereas it just should have stayed as a character trait. Does that make sense. Anyway, thanks to awesome CPs, I think I've ironed out that little kink. Like the hero, I've taken ONE thing she does (not one aspect of who she is) and focussed on that as conflict instead. Which may be a breakthrough for me. Anyway, Comic Book girl now lives! Woohoo!

So, anyone else mistake a character trait for conflict or is it just me??? :-)

Jackie Discovers The Holy Trinity - Character, Conflict and Plot.

Wow, slack blogger Jackie! *slaps hand* It's been a week - nearly. Groan. In my defence, I should say that I'm not online so much for a reason. Being obsessed by writing hasn't been good for me so I'm reconnecting with non-writing things, and that means less time at the computer and more time doing other stuff. So apologies if I've been slack at visiting blogs. On the upside, I am gaining some much needed perspective (slowly) and that's got to be a good thing, right?

Anyway, so my new process is actually going quite well. If you can consider spending three weeks on the first chapter 'well'. My usual modus operandi is to write like the dickens until the whole thing first draft is done, so as you can imagine, 3 weeks on one chapter is torture. On the other hand, it does mean that instead of getting halfway through and figuring out what my characters are like, which means another round of rewriting, I am getting a really good idea of them beforehand. And, what's more, when I run into a problem, instead of pushing through and writing it out, I am stopping and thinking about it. This is working for me, I gotta say. I have about four stories in the planning stages and all this character groundwork is proving invaluable. Normally I begin with the characters as people without pasts, their pasts only becoming clear to me as I go along, but now they have pasts right at the beginning! I can't tell you the difference it makes to the story, and to my writing as well. Doh!

Because it is all about the character. At least, the kind of stories I want to write are about the character. I don't think I truly appreciated before quite how true this is. I saw the conflict, the character and the plot as three separate entities and I treated them as such. But of course they're not. All three are inextricably linked. And, in my opinion, character comes first. You start with your protagonist. You decide who they are. What type of person. Then you give them some conflict - and the type of conflict that will provide the most friction given the person they are. And after that comes the plot - the story is driven by the choices the character makes and the actions that they take. That's a character driven story.

Now the above is just my own musings and how it makes sense to me. I don't know whether it's right or not and since I have been waaaaay wrong in the past, I could be waaaay wrong now. But I'm putting this into practice with the Chessman. Yes, my lovely chess player who fell by the wayside. I learned quite a bit while writing that particular ms, most of all about moving your characters to suit your plot and not the other way around. It was also the ms that gave me the first intimations of what a dog's breakfast I'd made of my Hammerpants ms. As you can imagine, I have a love/hate relationship with it because of that. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I re-read it last week and discovered it's actually not sh*t. The heroine's conflict needs tweaking but the hero's is all there. And I'm also at the best bit - the black moment! So I've stopped labouring over rewriting the old ms for a while and I've gone back to my Chessman to finish it. Not sure what I'll do with it when I finish it but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. The main thing is though, that it's character driven.

I think. :-)

So how about you? Like character driven stories? Or are you a plot person?

It's Not A Rolls Royce

Just got back from an Easter trip to a place called Pauanui, where all the nobs in Auckland go to spend their holidays by the beach. Strangest place. You might get a vast mansion with a helicopter out the back and a huge boat in the garage and then right next to it will be an empty section with only a rusty caravan parked on it and tents with people sitting in deckchairs. Presents possiblities perhaps? :-)

Anyway, got some great thinking time in. Have come to the conclusion that I need to change my process. Yep, the way I write has been great for twenty years but if I want to write something for publication, I need to do things differently. Not radically so, I hasten to add. I'm still a pantser at heart and probably always will be. But the thing I need to do is concentrate on my characters before I begin to write. Normally I have a scene in mind and I dive right in, only to come up against the 'what would he/she/it do now?'. And I stop right there because I don't know my characters well enough to know what they would do. For months I've been thinking that it's the conflict I haven't sorted but it's not, it's the characters. I know who they are in the present - when the story starts - but I don't know their pasts, what made them the people that they are. And when you're writing character driven stories, you kind of need to know those details.

The ways you can get to know your characters are many and varied - character sheets and interviews and writing out scenes from their lives - but I've tried them before and they've never actually worked for me. Thinking does though. When I'm in the shower or folding the washing or just tidying up, I've found that thinking about my characters, their childhoods, their relationships with others, the kind of people they are, really works. For example, I'm rewriting a story I wrote two years ago but the conflict never gelled and neither did the characters. But I spent a lot of Easter thinking about the hero and heroine, trying to figure out what their conflict was and whether it fitted with who they were at the beginning of the book. Normally once I'd got one aspect right, I'd quickly whip onto the pc and start writing. But I couldn't this time round and it's a good thing, because I thought I had it all sorted and then realised I hadn't considered another aspect of their backstory which then didn't fit with the actual premise of the book. Sigh.

I don't find this easy. I'm a very impatient sort. I want to get to the good stuff, the real, emotionally wrenching stuff. I love the torture and the black moments. The joy and despair. I don't want to write the set-up and introduce the characters and their conflict. But of course that part is almost the most important part of it because if you don't do it properly, how are your readers ever going to be invested in these characters? How are they ever going to care about what happens to them and their story if they're not fully realised people?

Dr Jax has a great saying that he is fond of when he's building or preparing something:
"It's not a Rolls Royce." This basically means not to sweat the details, it doesn't have to be perfect.

I've always really liked this saying - it suits my impatient personality. But I think that if I want my stories to be good ones, I'm going to have to change my thinking around them because when it comes to writing, the details do matter. And when it comes down to it, I want to write Rolls Royces not Daihatsu Miras.

Anyone else ever changed their process? Did it work for you?

Trying to Get Back Up Again

Well, I did think I would do a few more posts than this but my inspiration to write continues to go up and down like a lady of the night's underpants. Plus, my direction and confidence are wavering all over the place. It's frustrating. The worst part is not having anything else out there. If you haven't got anything on submission, it's like there isn't any hope and I hate that.

I do actually have a good many finished mss all stacked up on my harddrive but they all suffer from the same problem - chronic lack of coherent conflict. Yes, it's a medical condition. Incurable. Or given that the course of treatment is rewriting them completely, pretty much incurable. Am I being too hard on myself about them? Possibly. But I don't want to send anything that I'm not happy with. True, I'll always have doubts with whatever I send, but when I can see glaring faults, I just can't do it.

So what I'm left with is starting something new or rewriting. And at the moment, I am too daunted to do either. It all feels too hard. Especially writing plain old contemporary romance. Category makes this easy because that's all they publish. But if you don't write category or paranormal, or urban fantasy, or steampunk, or erotica, or suspense, how do you make your contemporary romance different to eveyone elses? Do publishers even want plain old contemporary, internal conflict driven romance? Or do you have to put a spin on it?

Sigh. Some days it's easier just to take to one's bed and eat chocolate. Happy Easter everyone.

Getting Back Up Again Or How Buying a Handbag Is Always a Good Thing

Okay, so I've been laying on the mat after the big KO for a while now. Plenty of you guys have told me to take it easy and be good to myself. Now, I'm not very good at doing that. My solution to feeling crappy about writing is just to keep writing. This is not a good solution. Not only does it only reinforce my feelings of crapness, but it doesn't help my writing either. Who writes well when they feel they suck? Not me.

So what did I do instead? I bought myself a handbag. There are two good things about my Hammerpants ms, the main one being prize money. Hehe. Here is a pic of the Handbag of Hope (Purse of Hope if you're American). It is blue, slouchy, soft and best of all, my phone doesn't get stuck waaaaay down the bottom so I don't hear it.

Oh and I said there was a second thing didn't I? Well, the second thing is that I'm pretty certain that I did something right in the first five pages of that ms. And I know what it is. I think I've said before that I suspected it was my conflict and character that was at issue and, yup, it is. The first five pages of the ms certainly sounded like I knew exactly who my characters were and what sort of conflict they had. The problem was, I actually didn't. Because I didn't think about it enough.

It's like when you do a mosaic. You set out some parts of it beautifully and it all looks good. But then you find some blank bits you didn't really see before. So you try to find bits to fit but they don't quite. They're the wrong size or the wrong colour. You jam them in somehow and from a distance it looks good but when you get up close, it's all wrong. The bits of you've jammed in don't work with the ones that are all set out beautifully. And the worst part is you kind of know you're wrong but you don't know quite why or how to fix it.

All my stories have been like this mosaic. They all look fine from a distance but when you get in close, there's a lot that doesn't fit, that doesn't work, that doesn't hang together nicely. So I have been trying to sort out all my pieces BEFORE I start the mosaic. This is - for me - extremely difficult because it's changing the writing habits of twenty years! Argh. Even the Handbag of Hope doesn't help much with this.

The result has been me spending at least a week on the first chapters of a number of stories. It's agonising to be honest because I'm desperate to get to the rest of the story, but I have to say, once all the bits of my mosaic have been worked out - the characters, the conflict, at least the inciting incident and a vague idea of the plot (pantser, yes, that's me) - it's amazing how much better that first chapter is. And I've come to the conclusion that if something doesn't quite feel right with a character - a bit of the conflict or an attribute or whatever - then I should NOT write until I've figured out what it is and put it right. Sigh.

Anyway, the main thing is that yes, I have been writing. I have a chapter ready to go for a contest that dear Dr Jax and my CPs think is better than anything I've done recently (yeah, I wanted to put that in there because God knows, you have to grab those lovely compliments when you can). I have another ms that I will rewrite for Carina. And then another couple of stories that I am just going to write and see where they take me.

I have my mosaics all laid out and right at this moment all the pieces fit. It's a good feeling to be able to fix that particular problem. Of course there will be other problems, others I don't know about yet but that's the wonderful thing about learning eh?

So for those of you who are looking for some positive stuff after you've had your heart cut from your chest while it's still beating. By a spoon. Here it is: there is life after rejection. It may take a while but there is still creativity. And there is a lesson to learn from it. Pretty much what you choose to learn is up to you but mine is this:



Yep, I drink a whisky drink....;-)

A Murder of Crows

It's been a while since the last post - I usually blog more than this. But to be honest, I'm trying to drum up some enthusiasm. I've got a cold, which doesn't help, but there's also a murder of doubt crows sitting on just about every available flat surface in my office. Some days it's just not even worth going in there.

I think the hardest thing about this particular point in time is going ahead when there is no glimmer on the horizon, not even a tiny spark. You hear people's miraculous stories about how, when they'd decided to give up writing for good, something would magically happen - a lost sub becomes found or a ms they'd forgotten they'd sent gets the nod - but you know, those things only happen to the lucky few. It's when there isn't the prospect of even the most minor of encouragement that it gets very, very tough.

My last blog post was pretty positive. But positivity is one of those wonderful things that seem to come and go - at this point, it's mostly go. You can't stay positive all the time. It requires a conscious effort and to be honest, it's bloody tiring.

It's probably not the best day for a blog post actually. Because if you're looking for some brave examples of how to pick yourself up after getting the big KO writing-wise, don't look at me. I still haven't managed to regain consciousness let alone pick myself up.

I guess the thing with being on the ground is that you can't fall any further.

Anyone got a scarecrow I can borrow?

Kicking Fear's Butt

So I've been contemplating this mountain thingy here and while I have, I've been thinking about my writing and all those bloody rejections. Especially the last two. I found it very interesting that in the ed's opinion, the Hammer Pants ms, the one I'd written 18 months ago, was stronger than the one I'd written 6 months ago. At first I was gutted about this - wasn't I supposed to be getting better not worse? But then, after I'd thought some more about it, I figured that actually, she was right. Why? Because I remember writing that first chapter. And I remember how I felt when I was writing it: I wanted to write without worrying about stuff, without worrying whether I was showing vs telling, without worrying whether the hero/heroine were sympathetic enough or whether I had enough conflict etc, etc. So I stopped worrying. I wrote it just for fun. And lo! it was good. Of course, by chapter 2 I realised my conflict problems had raised their ugly head again and I couldn't seem to untangle the difficulties, so I put it aside. But that's a whole other blog post. :-)

Writing without fear. That's what I was doing. And that's what I HAVEN'T been doing for the past year. Nope, the past year, I've been writing scared. Scared of getting it wrong, scared of messing it up somehow. Certainly all the Rs I'd got seemed to indicate that I wasn't getting something right and sure enough, that little belief kept getting reinforced and poor Jackie kept getting scareder and scareder. Her writing lost her spark. All the life got drained out of it. And, most important of all, she lost her joy. Nothing like a self-fulfilling prophecy huh?

Fear will do that to a writer. It'll suck the creativity right out of you. And it's a b*tch to overcome, let me tell you.

The good thing is that at least I have an idea of where I might, potentially, be going wrong. So at the moment I'm trying feel the fear and write it anyway. :-) I'm trying to recapture what I felt when I wrote the Hammer Pants ms. I'm trying to just be in the moment with my characters and not think about whether this ms works for Riva or Presents. Or whether my hero is being too alpha. Or whether my heroine is being too unsympathetic. Or what to do with it when I type The End. I just need to switch all that off, immerse myself in the story, and start enjoying it again. I need to stop writing for an editor, for a reader, for my CPs. I need to write for me first.

This is something that a lot of people have been saying to me. And it's not that I haven't listened, it's just that I haven't understood why it's important. Well, I do now.

So goodbye creepy fear. There is no place for you when I'm writing. You can haul your sorry skeletal carcass out of my study and you better do it before I go all Chuck Norris on your hide. Sure, I know you'll be back when I hit the send button again but hopefully by the time that happens, I'll have so many subs out that you won't know which one to attach yourself to. So asta la vista baby!

And while fear is making itself scarce, I shall leave you with the words of wisdom my five year old daughter gave to me. When I told her about my R she said, 'Were you writing quietly and carefully, mummy? You must always write quietly and carefully."

Anyone else writing quietly and carefully? Or alternatively, giving fear a good roundhouse kick to the head? :-)