NaNoWriMo Week Three

Hey guys, hope things are well. How's NaNoWrimo going on for you thus far? It's been officially three week since this epic event started and man, we are kicking ass with our novels right? (or getting inspired everyday right?). Probably by the time you read this post, it would already be Sunday morning and I'm on track for the word count (35,000). Hopefully you all are kicking some ass with your writing too. :) I wanna hear about it..

In today's post, I felt that I needed to talk about one of the most important things in story writing. No it's not about plot or grammar since that those are the basic stuff in writing in my opinion, but I wanna talk about the way I see characters. Characters are what brings the story to life with their personalities and actions because about 80% of the time we want to go on epic adventures instead of dealing with stupid stuff like being an adult or student in school. When we write, we create these people out of our own minds, usually about what we desire to be or fantasize people that we want to see in real life, but never really do. However, sometimes they don't always get along with us and we can't write their stories until you break their grounds and force yourself to write shitty and revise later.

With my characters, its truly a hit or miss. They traveled with me everywhere I go like work, random trips, or their buddies' stories to examine what will happen to them if they don't behave. I mean, I don't know how you guys get along with your characters, but I'm just gonna point out how I manage to deal with them. Maybe these tips will help ya, but maybe not.

1. Torture: Blast music in your ears to block them from annoying you or torture them with shitty music if you're focusing on one project instead of five at once so they will behave and let you work. When you want to work one specific project, it usually works quite well.

2. Watch guilty pleasure shows: It's gonna help you get inspire to write and gather ideas for writing. In a way, its like your characters are watching the show with you so they can get inspire as well to be more developed once you get down to writing.

3. Eat sweets (Loads of it): If you want to treat your characters like human-ish beings, then you want to treat them with sweets so they can get along with. (It can be use as doggy treat when they're not working nicely with ya)

and finally 4. Have a conservation with them: They need that humanity to meld their personalities and motives because that's one of the most important parts when writing/reading. Characters are vile, we need them to read about them in order to enjoy their story to the fullest.

So there you have it, my odd tips of how to make get along with your characters. How do you get along with your characters while in the middle of the writing process? Let me know in the comments below and I'll be with another post real soon. See you later and happy howling!

Word count as of 11:30 for NaNoWriMo: 35,479 words

When coming up with profiles for your Characters

Throughout my life as a writer, I always fell in love with the characters like many of you out there. When it came to stuff like video games, anime, etc-- I wanted to know more about the character in the most in depth way possible just to understand them personally so I can connect at a deeper level. (And also find myself a few other fangirls that will agree with me on some of the topics). So being a nerd and a person who loves her precious laptop (Jiraya), I went to sites like Wikipedia, fan based pages on were create for people like me, and even when to bookstores just to figure out more about the stuff I became obsess with at the time.

So like them, I wanted to try out a profile for my characters. Wanna know the issues for that? Well I'll give you a couple of reasons.

1.) You have to get to know your characters.
2.) There are so, so, so many examples of profile formats everywhere (books, online)
3.) Things will rapidly change when you keep writing.

Most of my attempts have been successful, but sometimes I have a difficult time coming up with back stories and how to keep the profile 'original' with much depth my characters needs so I can get a better idea of my story. However, you know how sometimes writers discuss how they can't get along with most of their characters in their head or you have random bursts of imaginations for other stories or you loose confidence in your current project? Honestly, I deal with that every single day, and I'm pretty sure you guys do as well.

So my advice to all of us here, just keep working on it. Make your characters so realistic for the readers, and their profiles similar criminal background ones with so much information about their personal, social, mental, physical (etc) status and personal family history. And also do find a few examples to assist you when starting your character profiles. It will be like creating your own child or some form of imaginary friend that can help you write your stories. You can show people the profiles of your characters, but just reveal the short versions and pictures that inspired the character only. It's one of the only ways you can hide some of great detail about your stories. If you have people questioning you about what people you're talking about and calling you weird, shrug it off or say 'yes I'm crazy, but its the new norm.'.

Enjoy yourselves and have fun creating the characters that are ready to take over the fictional world!

Some links for you guys:

• http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun98/lazy2.htm
• http://www.epiguide.com/ep101/writing/charchart.html
• http://www.creative-writing-now.com/writing-character-profiles.html
• http://nanowrimo.org/forums/character-cafe/threads/125155