I've been a writer longer than you have been alive. Being a writer does not mean you follow someone else's path. It means you carve out a path of your own for your audience, your readers to follow. Poe did what worked for him. King does what works for him. I'm sorry you were offended by what I had to say. But don't get your back up and start attacking others because you feel you've been wronged. When you do that, you lose the opportunity to learn. I have made a lot of mistakes in my life but I have learned something from every one of them. And that is what you need to do. Like Thomas Edison, don't look at it as a thousand failures. Look at it as a thousand ways not to make a light bulb. You are quite young and, even though you may be quite knowledgeable for someone your age, you still, hopefully, have a long journey ahead of you and a lot more to learn and experience. Try to keep your heart and mind open to the learning. Don't focus on the negativity. That will only hurt you. You fired off an angry response to my comments with the intent to insult or offend me. You know neither me nor my work well enough to accomplish that. But this made you submit a post with errors because you lost your focus. Don't waste that passion. Put it to work for you. But you can't do that by following someone else's path. You haven't taken their journeys so their paths are only a two dimensional image for you. You can read the works of Poe and King. Take something away from their work that you like and try to apply it to your own. But their approaches are not your approach. Nor should they be. Their words, their ideas, their talents are uniquely their own, as are yours. Stick to your own strengths and don't try to take on someone else's. The Asian culture accepts that we are all fools, we oftentimes just don't know it. The wise man, they believe, is the one who recognizes his own foolishness. So, the question remains, which fool are you?
Can we stop the storm of stale quotes? What thewordsmith is trying to say, if I can put it in a direct, simple sentence, is this: What other people did does not matter. If you try what they did, it will not help you. There is no magic method that makes the writing happen. It just takes work. Lots and lots of work. And failure. Lots and lots of failure. When someone has a great "first" novel, it usually stems from a long series of not-good-enough novels that no-one published.
I'm not saying that I'm following their path only that i want to know how they did it. This is something that people assume in young writers. Sometimes it's true and other times it's false. But in the end, the young writers themselves have to learn how to write. My history teacher said this to me once. "Think about the caveman. They did what they did then started to record it. After the first person drew on a wall. Another person came up and said 'This sucks!' and drew a better picture." This is what i think about when i put my mind to the comparasion of others. I like knowing what they do and how they do it. This way i can overcome what they might have and create a better story then them. I'm not saying that i want to become them. Only that i want to surpass them. But then again, surpassing someone else is extremely hard when there are over 7 million opinions on the subject at hand. So it is more relative then not. Very true. When you look at yourself and only see failures it's a good thing. The problem is if you try to do anything about it. If you do, thats great. If you don't, that's bad. That's why when you look at the failures of others its a bad thing. Since what works for them might not always work for you. But if you look at it in general. Then you are getting somewhere. It has been said before. But maybe.
Drugs worked for Hunter S. Thompson, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles, and I'll be damned if at least one type doesn't work for me. Use whatever you like as a writing aid, there's no rules. Jacking up on experience and life is recommended, empathy and intellect are each optional but you have to have one or the other.
I construct my story world and my characters from LEGOs. It sometimes take up my entire apartment. I sit myself in the middle of it all and play with the LEGO characters and write notes on how the story evolves. This is the only proper way to write a great story and explains why there were no great books written prior to the invention of LEGO. It also explains why George Lucas decided to greatly improve on his Star Wars myth after he got his hands on STAR WARS LEGO.
Now this is a quote! XD Yes, that does seem how it sounds. But for most other cases in the world this is not the option. For writing however, and mystery games, this is the correct path.
Well, being that it is our life experiences that shape the way we react to different circumstances, when I create a character, I just think about what life experiences they may have had. Where they've come from, and what they've done. That way, when I put them in situations, I know how they would react to it.
I normally roughly sketch-as I'm a hopless drawer-what I want the character to look like then outline their personality, sometimes I'll add a catchprashe but not often.
Don't know about how successful authors do their thing; I suspect it would vary enormously. I don't usually use a "eye color: foo" "favorite candy: taz" "favorite shirt: bar" approach. I do, however, sometimes write out a page or two with vital information. I frankly don't give a tinker's damn about eye color, but this is somethng some characters would notice, so I will frequently have a section on "general appearance" and another on "specific appearance," plus whatever else is needful for the story. Note, though, that I do a lot of book-plotting. (I can do short stories, but they aren't my "natural" story length. I go to worldbuilding automatically.) In my opinion, these character sketches are useful for books, but I don't think they'd have any real use in a short story. Anyway, some of the info I use in a standard sheet for a book character. Name or Names: Self-explanatory, although I may also include name meanings if relevant. "Charl, short for charlie." Name context: The reasons for each name. "Named after a friend of the family, Charles Godfrey Shamendoil. Charles hated the name and wasn't about to go by Godfrey, so he started asking friends to call him Charl instead." Place in society: Their job, their background, their wealth, their function. "Charl is a jobbing magician on weekends, but works at a local supermarket as a cashier on Mondays through Thursdays. Has a bit of brass stored away. The child of a librarian, Charl is educated but has been a bit of a disappointment to his parents." Status in society: How do others regard the character? Who can he boss around? Who bosses him around? Is there anyone who hates / admires him without knowing him personally, because of his job? Is his job illegal? "As a solid worker, Charl is not particularly hated nor admired. As a magician, he has to be careful not to offend any of the gods or the guilds, and mundane society thinks he's a bit of a kook at best." General appearance: Characteristics that you'd notice easily. Height, girth, hair and eye and skin color, freckles or not, muscular or fat. Specific appearance: Subtler characteristics. Small scars, gaps in teeth, broken bones or twisted limbs, minor deformities, minor perfections, pockmarks, tattoos, hair style, anything embedded in skin, anything else that might be plot relevant such as whether his skin has a metallic green sheen in the moonlight signifying that he is a willing demon-host for the evil god Tranfey. General resources: Wealth or lack thereof, education, a house or storage space of their own, land they own, skills they know (particularly career or job related) Specific resources: Contacts with useful people, unusual skills (or skills you wouldn't expect a person of that job to have, such as Atticus Finch being an amazing rifleman despite working as a lawyer), unusual hiding places for resources, any sort of unusual larder or resource that you have to mention in order to avoid a seeming Mary Sue or deux ex machina General relationships: How does their employer see them? Their family? Do people know and respect them, or is the character more obscure? Any groups the character is favored by, hated by, targeted by, or similar, appear here. Specific relationships: Specific people the character knows, and the relationship. Not just "on bad terms with head of Westlinga Bank" but "Was caught deflowering daughter of head of Westlinga Bank. Daughter was sent to a nunnery. The parents have threatened to have the character's thumbs and worse cut off if he ever steps foot into the small port city of Westling." General wants: Any loose goals the character has. This could mean "Wants a decent job," "Wants to woo a girl," "Wants to become famous," "Wants to become rich," "Wants to live a long time." Specific wants: Any serious and specific goal. "Wants to become an understudy for the great opera singer Vioni Carrando" or "Wants to acquire a piece of gemstone fragment from the Queen of Sheba's crown, in order to use that fragment in an important crop-growing spell." General personality: What would you notice right away? Smiles a lot, usually looks neutral, has dry humor, likes to mock cruel people, keeps to herself, outgoing or shy, nervous or calm or chill. Specific personality: What might you notice over time? A good person who is nonetheless cynical about himself and about the world. Actually does enjoy mocking people, while pretending to be making fun of those who would mock people. Hard to read. Can lie effortlessly. Is shy but can be outgoing among close friends or in a controlled social situation. Is not actually outgoing; gets nervous in crowds, and talks more to hide the nervousness, and has enough charisma that this is mistaken for a gregarious personality... Now. You don't need a character sheet, and even I don't use them all that often. So why would you use something like the above? 1. To remind you of how other characters, the minor ones who do not know your character and who will not care about his "secret inner self," might see him. This is what the "general" sections are for. 2. To remind you, the author, that your character is a person put down on paper. It is really easy to think, "He's a hero, so he has this neat skill and this neat ability and everyone loves him." No, experienced writers don't usually do this, but this site is chock full of folks who are still writing their first 100,000 words. 3. It encourages worldbuilding. This is great for me; I make a neat character or an odd scene, and then I build a world for it to fit in. If I have to outline my character's place in society, then I get to make up some details regarding a society -- but there's no pressure to make everything perfect. It's just a few bits of data, focused on the character's life. 4. It breaks down "appearance" into things that are unusual and things anyone can see from ten feet away. This is amazingly useful when working out multi-character scenes. Writers enjoy "revealing" scenes where someone discovers -- gasp! -- that the main character is secretly winged or hairy or half-dragon or something. Sometimes, this works. Frequently, though, the author fails horribly and leaves me as a reader wondering how they could possibly have missed the scales or the snout or the wings. And at least for me, it is easier to plan out a better, more subtle reveal -- "wait a minute, you cry blue tears? Don't fallen angels have something like that?" "Yeah, well. I wouldn't know. I never met my dad, and mom says it's his fault I cry like this." -- based on somewhat more subtle features.
Ooohh dear. Preparation for a character before the story starts is like prepping the ingredients for a large feast. If you leave that cheese out without using it for too long, by the time you need to grate it, it will have gone all hard and nasty (or watery and mushy, depending). I cannot stress how quickly character charts can have you accidentally limiting your character. I can't remember who said it, but someone on this forum once posted: Characters are like watermelons. If you have a full, round watermelon it is perfectly possible to cut it into such a shape that it would fit neatly into a box. But if you grew it in a box, it would become box-shaped. It would never grow to full size, nor would it ever be well-rounded. Don't depend on pre-writing prep to define something as dynamic as a main character. Let it grow as the story grows and work from there. There's always time for revision.
