Tag: characters

Full moon darkness

Posted on by Ashlee Scheuerman in Thoughts, Writing

I notice that we get to see the moon a lot during the day around here. There is something haunting and beautiful about it sitting in the sky, the pale grey of clouds, but round and still where it waits for the planetary kind of spin that pushes it to other skies. And of course, when night falls, the brightness! How it reflects the sunlight lets the darkness become its own kind of beauty. The contrast is all it takes to change the moon from a gentle addition, to the centre of your attention.

I think that most feelings, emotions, are at their peak when something is there to contrast them. When writing horror, the scary bits need to fall inside reassuring moments. Romance comes with a helping of distrust and heartache. Dark fantasy is contrasted when there is a bright, vivid moon shining down upon it, the beautiful moments that show you just how twisted everything else really is.

Even in shorter fiction, there has to be particular contrast, so the readers, and indeed even the writer can see just how poignant the central theme is. And sometimes that theme can blend into its surroundings first, waiting for the moment of contrast to truly show how important it is.

These thoughts come to me when I feel like I’ve perhaps deviated too far from course. When the scene runs on into characters sharing love and laughter in the lead-up to a challenging moment, I stop and realise that without these moments of brightness, the dark would not seem so expansive.

~A

I didn’t write, because I was writing!

Posted on by Ashlee Scheuerman in Blogging, Writing

Yesterday is a haze of words and writing and tapping away merrily. Obviously that doesn’t include creating a blog post, but I’ve declared my efforts yesterday a rousing success!

I don’t like the idea of measuring things too much. If I wrote this amount of words, or kept at it for that amount of time. We all know there are days when you slave away for hours, and your pour out thousands of words, then find out that they are part of a scene you scrap entirely. That’s okay! Those hours and those thousands of words were just part of the practice that turns us into better writers. They aren’t a waste! They aren’t really lost! But it puts the achievement scale into a different perspective to me.

Other days, you might jot out a handful of lines, and that be your only writing work for the day. Or the whole week! But those words might be a pivotal point in your story, and the enormity of it all has to stew for a while before you can really put it together.

So instead of making measurements (don’t worry, I still glance at the “words added today” bar when I’ve saving and closing down for the night!), I just celebrate the effort. I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking about these stories. I tried to plan them a little more thoroughly, but it got to the point where I just needed to get them out from sheer excitement. So I’m back to my usual, “I know where this is going, but how we get there is a bit murky for now”. I guess this is just how I write!

I also happened upon the relieving success of finding the right name for a character. It had been evading me since the beginning, but I have something going here that seems to be pretty awesome. Now I can just charge through the rest of the story with a carefree demeanour, and see how we arrive at our destination!

~A

When one scene won’t go away

Posted on by Ashlee Scheuerman in Writing

I’ve been getting to know my newest characters. We need time to understand each other, and find out what direction their story will go. But it hasn’t been a simple process, because one single scene has gotten all stuck in the tubes of my mind. It’s causing a blockage with all the other ideas backing up behind it, inaccessible until I’ve cleared this scene out.

The problem is, I don’t know where the scene goes. I don’t know when it happens in the plot, and I don’t know how they get there. I don’t even know the entire reason these two people are in this situation together. How can I write a scene if it’s floating around by itself? How can I create a disconnected piece of an overall work?

My solution will be to just write the damned scene and be done with it. Later, when I’ve sorted my ideas through, I can either adapt whatever comes pouring out to fit with the overall established story, or I can scrap it and re-write the scene in a way that works. Because right now, all I’m doing is circling this one moment over and over, and it’s not going anywhere.

I can only imagine other writers suffer from similar issues as this. Where something outside of the canon needs to be written right now, without you even getting a chance to think it all the way through. Not in a good way, where your words are in a state of flow and everything is happening effortlessly, but in the way that you are completely preoccupied with something that isn’t helpful at this point in time.

~A

Voice (not the way we usually talk about it)

Posted on by Ashlee Scheuerman in Thoughts, Writing

“Voice” is a term used in writing to convey the unspoken personality of the author. The part which makes your writing definably and obviously yours. At least, that’s what I think it means. For an industry based 100% around using words, the professionals latch onto some seriously strange lingo at times, so maybe after all this time I’m still misunderstanding what a “voice” is.

But that’s not what I’m interested in talking about. I mean the character’s actual spoken voices.

I’m Australian, born and bred, but I default to a vaguely proper British accent (the Queen’s English) for many of my characters. It could have something to do with the fantasy genre which I write for most frequently; we’re kind of indoctrinated to having medieval fantasy, with British accents on all the characters (especially when pictured in film). It seems to be my standard fall-back option, but it works well enough. It’s different enough from my everyday to be interesting to me.

There have been times where my characters are from a specific real-world location. Those characters always happily exist with their proper accents. Australian, Japanese, or locality-specific locations in the USA (who do have some of the most amazingly varied types of accents I’ve ever experienced, next to the Brits) have made their appearances in some stories.

I think I stick to familiar accents, just for the simplicity of it. As amusing as a Welsh character would be to create and read (I’m looking at you, Jacob), I just have that much more experience with Aussies or Americans.

This, of course, all makes the “read it out loud” part of editing my work into a very humourous exercise. I try to do it privately, to save my family from the bad accents I’m putting on (and save myself the embarrassment!). I’m no voice actor. But I know my character’s voices.

~A

In the beginning, there was an idea

Posted on by Ashlee Scheuerman in Writing

I’m always getting ideas. Whether they fit into an existing story, or fall under the category of “write it down, save it for later”, or even come out as semi-complete new plots, I’m constantly creating new things in my head. But when it comes down to actually taking those ideas and fashioning them into something, that’s when things can get murky.

For instance, I’ve been tossing around this notion recently: a brand new collection of shorter stories, set in the same world to one of my epic novels. These ideas tie together some of my existing lore, and expand upon other little details here and there. When a novel has the potential to be so expansive, it seems like there are just endless possibilities within that realm, and the people and magic can all tell their own version of events.

Of course, I’m currently free to explore these possibilities, and it’s now when I’m not sure where to go with them. I will sit down with a blank sheet of paper, and write out all the important information. Who are the main characters? And the minor characters? What is the central conflict? What kind of dynamic will there be? And of course, what’s keeping the characters from reaching their goals?

These are just a small handful of the questions which I will eventually need to answer about these stories. The fact that I am planning on making this a series of shorter novels (no 100,000+ words for these!) means I need to decide if there is an over-arcing plot, or if they are simply snippets from the lives of individual characters with a matching theme. If there is an over-arcing plot, what are the mini-conflicts in each book? How do they relate to the ultimate outcome?

Before all of that, I will have conversations with the characters. Get to know them. Make them interact with each other, see who they are and what really drives them. Where their biases lay, where their weaknesses hide, what they fear, and what they believe in passionately. I can’t write without knowing my people. They are the whole reason a story exists. If I don’t know them, I can’t write what they will do, and how that will shape the eventual ending. If I want to reach “Point H”, I need to first know if the characters can get there organically, or if it will just turn out forced and awful with the personalities I’m working with.

~A