Monthly Archives: January 2011

Jan 31 2011

Character Names and Other Vital Stuff

Ethereal – a short, red-headed and hot-tempered half-fey/half-human.  She can manipulate the elements, although doing so can send her into a coma for days on end.  She’s an orphan, she has a smart mouth, she’s perfectly happy being on her own and thinks she can do anything she sets her mind to.

Requiem – black-haired and blue-eyed vampire, tan skin, a smart-ass in his own right.  Arrogant to the point of being a complete asshole at times, he’s smart and wants others to know he is smart.  As the Prince of the City, he runs his household with an iron fist and takes advantage of his power whenever he thinks that doing so will give him an advantage of the situation or person.

Stealth – of Japanese descent, long black hair and eyes so dark they appear black and glittery.  He was trained at young age to be a warrior, later recruited by the Vampire Council to be an assassin.  His origins and subsequent embracing are shrouded in mystery.  Incredibly smart but distant, seemingly to be cold-hearted to those who have not gotten to know him.

***        ***        ***        ***        ***        ***        ***        ***        ***        ***       

When it comes to creating characters, everything about them, from their name right down to their personalities and dislikes, counts towards making them seem real and three-dimensional to your readers.  If you are going to introduce a character, even if he/she only has a short cameo spotlight in the story, then you are going to have to think about several things in order to make this character feel real.

1.  Feature Characteristics:  We all know that it is vital to know what your character is going to look like physically.  But try to go beyond the usual hair color, eye color, height and weight.  Is this person’s nose slightly too large for the face?  Are they lean, athletic looking, heavily muscled?  If the character is female, is she curvy with rounded hips or does she look more like a young tom-boy?  What about their skin?  Is it soft or coarse, light or dark, are there prominent scars or freckles? 

2.  Personality Characteristics:  How does this character think, act, and speak?  Is he/she intelligent, a bit dim-witted, careless, arrogant, happy, depressed?  Is he/she obsessive, avoids human contact, or likes being around people?  How does he/she speak?  Does he/she use complete sentences, run-on sentences, fragmented sentences?  Does he/she have a large vocabulary or does he/she use slang terms?  How would they act in a specific situation?  Would a specific situation make this character angry, cause him/her to have a melt-down, or would he/she just take it in stride?

3.  Biography:  One very important thing that a lot of authors do not think about when it comes to creating a character is the history behind the character’s life.  A biography is basically the “why” a character acts, speaks, and thinks the way that he/she does.  If the character is arrogant, there has to be some reason for this arrogance.  Perhaps the person was spoiled as a child.  If the character is depressed or withdrawn, maybe he/she was abused as a child.  Thinking about what happened to this character as he/she grew up will go a long way in helping to decide how he/she thinks, acts, speaks, and reacts in certain situations.

4.  Likes and Dislikes:  Another important concept that sometimes gets overlooked in character development is what the character likes and dislikes.  Thinking these things through will help determine how a character may react to specific situations and help the author avoid discrepancies in the storyline.

5.  Names:  Perhaps one of the most important things when it comes to character development is the names that the characters end up with.  Why?  Because a name is what gives the readers the very first impression of a character.  Whether you realize it or not, people have come to associate certain names with certain characteristics.  For instance, when you see the name “Lisa,” what immediately comes to mind?  Often people will think of a tall, shapely blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman with full breasts and rounded hips.  If you want to contradict what people automatically think about when they see a name, you are going to have to work very hard at either making your character have a memorial personality or come up with such a unique name that it does not have any type of stigmata already attached to it.

One of the main problems that I encounter as a writer is my choice of incredibly odd names for my characters.  Since I write in the erotic fantasy, science fiction, and Gothic genres, I have a tendency of giving my characters really over-the-top names such as those at the beginning of this article.

If you are going to take a gamble on giving your characters some really unusual names, then you are going to have to be prepared for the backlash of opinions that will no doubt come from your readers.  The best way to head off a bad rap for your creativity is to have a reason why your character(s) got saddled with his/her/their name(s).  For instance, with my vampires, I already had the reason behind the vampires’ names written into the storyline.  However, this reason was really only hinted at in the first novel.  I originally had planned to not fully disclose the reason behind their names until the second novel.  But I had such a huge backlash of people calling the names “stupid” and saying that I was “trying too hard” and using “clichéd” names that I went back and wrote in a section in the first book that explained how the vampires in my novel ended up with such over-the-top names. 

(For the record, the Vampire Council names them and they get their names according to what job they held while they apprenticed with the Council.  Stealth, for instance, was an assassin and “Stealth” had been a nickname given to him by his fellow assassins because he was so quiet.  When he was embraced, the name stuck and became his name even after he was embraced.)

Thinking your characters through as completely as possible will go a long way in making them seem real and three dimensional to your readers.  Even those characters who are only making a cameo appearance needs to at least have definable feature characteristics and personality traits that will set him/her apart from the other characters in the book/novel/story.  Bottom line, the more real your character feels to you, the more information you can give your readers and ultimately the more real the character will feel to your readers.

Jan 24 2011

Eloquence Versus Wordiness in Writing

 

As I have often pointed out, and am so fond of doing so, you are not the next Anne Rice or the next J. K. Rowling or J. R. R. Tolkien.  I have made it very clear throughout my articles that in order for you to be a really great writer, you are going to have to first, find your own writing style.  That means stop trying to write like Anne Rice or Rowling or Tolkien or King or Cook or any of the other writing ‘greats.’  Next, you are going to have to practice.

Now, for all those out there who seem to think that a book has to be a certain length and that you simply have to write several thousand, or even several hundred thousand, extra words of “filler” to make it a certain length, then I am afraid you are in for a very rude awakening.  Unless you are the world’s greatest writer, and trust me, you are not, and start filling your pages up with a bunch of “filler,” your book is doomed to be headed for the recycling bin.

In all my years as a bookworm, I have come across exactly ONE writer who wrote so eloquently that I gobbled up practically every word she ever wrote.  And despite this, even I have actually done the dreaded “skipped a few pages” (and in some cases, entire chapters) on some of her novels.  So if you are one of those who it takes 50,000 or so words (or heaven forbid, even more) to write a single chapter, then you stopped being eloquent in your writings about 40k words back and stepped over into just flat being wordy.  After all, not even Anne Rice managed to vomit up that much descriptive nonsense about Lestat, and that character has lived for centuries.   

You may wonder why being ‘wordy’ is so bad.  Remember in one of my articles when I said that as a writer, your job is to get your readers interested in your story and write in such a way that they actually want to read every word you write instead of skipping through whole chunks of text?  Well, I hate to break it to you, but I don’t care how great of a writer you actually are, if it takes you tens of thousands of words to explain an event that most others could tell in 1/4 that many words, then you have done the one thing that you NEVER want to do with your readers, and that is O-V-E-R-W-H-E-L-M them.

There’s a reason why writing teachers hammer the K.I.S.S. acronym into budding young authors.  That’s not to say that you have to dumb yourself down so much that even the 8th grade drop-out could read the text and have no problem following the storyline.  But as a writer, you have to remember that just because you speak two or three different languages and have a vocabulary to rival Merriam and Webster, not everyone out there is going to have that same education and intellectual level.  Now if you are writing for that very small, selective group like yourself, then feel free to take a few million words to tell a story that 99% of the other writers could have hammered out in 75k words or less.

However, if you are actually wanting to make it as a writer and want others to take your craft seriously, then you are going to have to curb your enthusiastic pounding of the keys and take a step back.  Like I said, if you are overwhelming your readers with the sheer number of words that don’t really -say- anything, then you are going to eventually alienate your readers.  After all, no one wants to pick up a book for entertainment purposes and have to carry a dictionary around with them to decipher half the words in the text.  Likewise, no one wants to be made to feel stupid because they didn’t understand 90% of what was going on in the storyline because all the words kept getting in the way.

You remember the old saying, “I can’t see the forest for all the trees”?  Well, if it takes you a million plus words to tell a story, and I don’t care HOW intricate of a tale it is, then people will get “lost” in the words.  Sure, you want your audience to get lost in your book, but you want them to get lost in the story, not  bogged down by so many words that they forget what the story is actually about.  If it’s taking you more than a paragraph to get a character through the door because you think all those words sound good, then congratulations.  You just overwhelmed your reader, made them feel stupid, had them all give a collective groan, and then they promptly started skipping pages to get to ‘the good stuff.’  And if you are one of the really, really wordy types that it takes dozens and dozens of pages of useless words to get to ‘the good stuff’ then you just lost your audience completely.  They just tossed your book out with the other recyclables.  To make matters worse, they all got on their blogs and started blogging about this author who wrote this book that said absolutely NOTHING and it was so freaking long and boring that after the first few pages they gave up trying to read the stupid thing and just tossed it away.  By the way, they will suggest to others that they not bother wasting the time it takes to try to plow through the text.

On the flipside of using thousands upon thousands of words that do not say anything are those authors who write in such a way that the text reads more like poetry than a novel.  Words of poems are supposed to be wordy, even ethereal-sounding.  Words of a novel, however, simply are not.  Just as most people do not understand poetry because it does not follow conventional writing rules of subject, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, using an excessive amount of adjectives and adverbs to make your sentences sound all “flowery” and “fluffy” is going to cause your readers to go, “Hugh?!” It should not take over a hundred words to write a simple sentence.  And if it does, then don’t be surprised if the majority of your readers get tired of trying to decode the storyline out of thousands of useless words and go on to the next story.  While it may sound good, if no one understands the meaning behind all those words, if it does not strengthen the storyline, if it actually hinders the average readers’ ability to follow along, then in all honesty, exactly what good are all those excessive, “fluffy” words really doing for you as a writer?

The thing to take away from this article is that you want to keep your readers interested in what you are writing.  Bottom line, just tell the tale.  Don’t think that the book has to be a certain word count.  Don’t add a bunch of words just to get the word count up.  And if you are one of those writers who likes the sound of your own voice on paper, then be advised that the vast majority of readers are not going to have the same appreciation for your wordiness that you do.  If you want people to actually read what you have written, then you need to cut out every unnecessary word.  It shouldn’t take any writer a few thousand words to get a character through a door.  No one wants to read thirty pages of ramblings about how a character feels.  There is absolutely no reason under the sun to recount a character’s entire life from conception to death in agonizing detail.  People are not going to be chomping at the bit to read it.  If you can’t recount a short story of two children playing in the front yard in under 25k words, then you might want to reconsider your ventures as a writer.  And if, heaven forbid, you are one of those who seems to think that “flowery” and “fluffery” makes for a great tale, then I sincerely hope you are ready for the vast disappoint that comes from thousands of people saying, “Well, it sounded pretty, but I gave up trying to read it because I don’t know what the hell you were trying to say!”

Remember to Keep It Simple Stupid!  Otherwise, your readers are going to use that massive chunk of bound text as a step-stool for their toddler.

Jan 23 2011

House of Bondage: a Slave’s Tale

I had started writing on 2 BDSM stories a few years back.  I have wanted very much to finish them.  So I have decided to combine the 2 stories into a single book entitled The House of Bondage:  a Slave’s Tale.  The book is written from the first person perspective and follows a young teenager who is kidnapped and sold into slavery as a sex slave.  It chronicles a few of her sordid tales of what she went through over the years before finally finding the Master that she has always craved.  As always, I will put excerpts from the story on my personal website.  Once I get everything going smoothly, I will leave further updates and links once I post the first excerpt.

XOXO

Nicola

Jan 22 2011

Is There Nothing Better on WordPress?

I am always scouring the internet for something interesting to read.  With me having my own blog, naturally one of the first places I look for interesting and unusual topics is blogs.  Of course, that means that I spend a lot of time checking out the “Freshly Pressed” page whenever I log into my WordPress account.

Which brings me to my own questions of concerns and personal rant.  I have read some of the most boring and mind-numbing (and I don’t mean that in a good way) blogs known to mankind that have been liked by dozens, if not hundreds, of apparently brain-dead readers who seem to think that whatever gets “Freshly Pressed” on WordPress amounts to interesting blog articles.  I have come across articles on people who want to have specific text fonts banned from use because they don’t like them, editors who seem to think that the entire educational system should be changed simply because using the proper two spaces after an end-of-the-sentence punctuation mark makes their editing jobs harder, articles on people who hate Facebook yet still have their own profiles up and running, new year’s resolutions from bloggers who seem to think that because they use e-mail to deliver bad news that everyone else out there does not know that is a major no-no in the business world…just to name a few. 

It makes me wonder why WordPress seems to think that blogs on recipes is up-and-coming news or that personal rants from teachers who hate their jobs and want to blame everything on the parents is Press-worthy enough to bypass an article on a major plagiarism account in order to plaster a blog about a guy who received a funny look from a security guard in a bank because the guy went into the bank with his face obscured behind massive goggles and a toboggan.  Are there seriously no more interesting articles or blogs on WordPress that such articles as these take precedent over  something of actual use, like how to become a better writer, how to get better rankings in a search engine, what to do when faced with an emergency?  Are we all seriously doomed to be bombarded by blog after blog from editors who seem to think that because they are editors they can actually write, or articles from moms who seem to think that the tale about the mashed peas in the sofa cushions is so hilarious that tens of thousands of readers will flock to read about something that has happened to them a dozen times with each child? 

What is even scarier is the amount of people on WordPress who not only flock to these dreary excuses for blogs, but who cannot seem to stop commenting about how right the blogger is, what a great article the blog is, what a great writer the blogger is, how much they agree with what the blogger said.

Perhaps I am in the minority.  If so, please pardon my unquenchable thirst for actual entertaining reading material that will stimulate my brain instead of my gag reflex.

Jan 20 2011

Attention Whoring and Other Underhanded Writing Gimmicks

Attention Whoring and Other Underhanded Writing Gimmicks

As a writer, I will openly tell you that some authors will do just about anything and stoop to just about any level if it means getting their stories/novels/books read.  I have already covered the widely used marketing ruse of labeling a story “true” just to get more reads, even if a good chunk of it, or even all of it, is actually fabricated.  In this article, I will explore, and you might even say “reveal,” some of the many dirty and underhanded tricks that authors have been known to do all for the sake of squeezing a few more reads out of their work or creating a buzz about a book/novel/story they are writing.

1.  Attention Whoring:  This little ploy takes all kinds of shapes and forms.  Basically it is the equivalent of over-advertising.  It is when a writer is constantly bringing up their work.  On a public forum, they will create thread after thread and make post after post giving “updates” about the work in question.  Some may even go so far as to create multiple user accounts and carry on a conversation with themselves with the alternate account (known as a “sock” account) asking all sorts of questions about the book/story/novel.  Attention whoring authors are usually easy to spot.  They often cannot seem to stop once they start posting either.  I’ve seen them dig up their own threads that had fallen into oblivion just to make a post on them with a sock account.  They usually post on a regular basis, even if it is months in between posts.  But, as I said, once they start posting, they just can’t seem to stop.  If you see a post suddenly pop up out of nowhere, chances are you are going to start seeing zombie threads suddenly being revived as well.

If they have a Facebook, Twitter, or other social networking site, they will start posting statuses that will tell, in great detail, all about what is going on with their work.  They are not content to just say, “Finishing up the final draft” or “Manuscript in final proofreading stage.”  What you will get is extensive, in-depth reviews of how many words the final work  is, how many words have been cut, how many chapters it has, how many words the synopsis is, what all genres it falls under, how many and which publishers are considering it, etc.   And if they should have a blog somewhere, the readers of the blog can expect to get a play-by-play of what is happening along with excerpts and eager replies to any and all comments.

2.  Talking with Myself:  This is an extension of the attention whoring author.  Whether it be on a public forum, a writing forum, in a writing group, or their own website, some authors will make endless sock accounts for the sole purpose of “chatting up” their own work.  They will post comments on their own threads with praise, leave comments on their own works from “fans” who will be very quick to tell the author how much he/she just loved the story and how the author is the best writer of all time.  They have even been known to create sock accounts and “review” their own work, being sure to leave lots and lots of praise, toss in a few comparisons to some of the world’s greatest literary writers, and, if the site allows any type of rating, they will consistently vote up their own works.

3.  Sabotaging the Competition:  in addition to “Talking with Myself,” some authors will use their countless sock accounts to systematically vote down other authors’ stories in an attempt to keep their own stories with a higher rating and subsequently a higher read count.  They will leave negative comments on other stories, give bad reviews, and tell other readers just how horrible so-and-so’s latest story/novel/book is.  They may or may not toss in something along the lines of, “Now if you want to read something really good, you should read such-and-such’s latest story.  It’s awesome!”

4.  Upstaging the Competition:  instead of, or even in addition to, using their countless sock accounts to vote down the competition, they will use their endless supply of sock accounts to vote positively on their own stories, giving their stories higher ratings than they normally receive and thus bumping up their own stories in the rankings.  Usually if you will start looking at the names of the accounts that have voted positive on the author’s stories, you will notice a lot of the same names appearing on their stories over and over again as having given a ‘positive’ vote.  It is usually very easy to tell who is doing this rather underhanded trick.  There are, unfortunately, a LOT of authors on the XNXX site who do this on a regular basis, giving their normally low ranking stories a very unethical advantage over those of us who actually earned our rankings by writing quality work that other readers actually wanted to read and enjoyed.

5.  Arguing with Myself:  a slight variation on the “Talkers,” some authors will create sock accounts with the sole intent of becoming their own arch nemesis on their stories.  They will leave hateful comments on their own stories.  They will post their stories on an open writing forum and then use their sock accounts to create an argument back and forth between the “members.”  One or two of the accounts will be used to leave insulting comments while several other sock accounts will come to the aid of the author in defense of how “awesome” the author is and how wrong they are for saying such horrible things.  It’s a way to create quite a buzz on a writing forum.  Soon people will go to the threads just to read what is going on and/or to find out “what all the fuss is about.”   People may discover themselves reading something that they would not normally care for just to see what is causing such a stir on the forum/site.

6.  The Blatant Thread Bump – in addition to carrying on conversations between sock accounts, authors have been known to blatantly bump up their own threads in open forums to keep the thread alive.  The difference between this and more subtle attention whoring is that the thread usually does not leave the front page of the forum in question.  Instead of allowing the thread to die out into obscurity only to be revived by a sock account a few months later (and usually from page 10), the Blatant Thread Bump authors will not let the thread drop off the front or second page in an effort to increase the exposure for the thread.  They will do anything to keep the thread alive, including, but not limited to, posting with sock accounts and under the primary account name in order to answer and thank every single post that has been made on the thread.  And, of course, there is always the pure Blatant Thread Bump where the author of the thread will go through and simply state ‘bump’ or ‘bumping this thread.’  Some authors make no pretenses at what they are doing. 

These are just a few of the devious little tricks that some writers have resorted to in order to keep interest in their stories/novels/books alive.  While these little tricks may create quite the buzz, once someone points out that the author is engaging in such activities, the once helpful buzz may very well become a buzz about how underhanded the author has become just to drive more traffic to their stories/novels/books.  Use at your own risk.  They say that even bad publicity is good publicity, but not when everyone is warning people to stay away from your work at all costs.