Midweek links- characters

Characters are the people animals or objects that stuff happens to in your book. Yep sorry I just stated the obvious.

(Note this mid week links might be pretty short since I'm doing it while I'm on vacation and because as soon as I get back I have a two day long meeting I need to do)

Donald Maas in Fire in your Fiction has the first section of his book dedicated to characters, a protagonist verses a hero. A hero has MUCH higher stakes. And he has great chapter on secondary characters, go check it out.

YA highway has a few good links about characters.
The bad boy-- why we love them oh so much
Parents in YA-- why can't anyone have a happy family?
5 protags in YA- The 5 big ones.
Character description---- THIS ONE IS AWESOME and exactly what I needed, who cares about anyone else.

Mary Kole asks What Makes a Character?

Querytraker.net Blog gives a GREAT character interview sheet. If you don't know what these are, it helps the writer dive in deeper in the character's mind and get to know them better. It also gets it all out on paper which you can use as a resource later. This is on my to do list before I start my next set of revisions.

Another interview sheet comes here, from writer's digest.

Here's a great one that Lynda uses (I got it from her blog yesterday)


Oh Mr Bradford, what wisdom do you have for us this week? Do you control your characters or do they control you... A great question when it comes to writing.

Words of wisdom from me-- well there's really words from Meghan but stolen by me.
Be kind to your characters, they are people too, imaginary people, but people none the less. You've created a world in your novel and you've got to populate it with SOMETHING. Don't just kill off a character because you're in a bad mood. It's not fair to you, the characters or your readers.


I'm sort of running low on ideas. What would you like next weeks midweek links to be about?
Let me know in the comments.

Road Trip Wednesday- My prefect writing place

Sorry it's late, I had to go to a 6 hour meeting-- SUPER LAME, then feed my family, then the power went out, then I had to read for writers group. Anyway it's been a rough night.

Welcome to our 36th Road Trip Wednesday!

Road Trip Wednesday is a "Blog Carnival," where YA Highway's contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on our own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.
We'd love for you to participate! Just answer the prompt on your own blog and leave a link in the comments - or, since this week's topic is a short one, you can include your answer in the comments.

This Week's Topic:

What would your ideal writing desk look like? Right down to the perfect pen or laptop.

Ok because I'm a geek. My desk would be something like this:


Yep that's Han Solo in Carbonite...


Or something like this because I LOVE things that look regal and it's got LOTS of storage space and I'm a sucker for storage.


My Desk Lamp would be AWESOME, artsy but cool and funtional.



My laptop would be gold and awesome:

My Pens would be the only pen that ever works for me.


Yep, a bic pen.

My chair would be a love sac... I own one and I love it. Mostly I like saying Love Sac... it makes me giggle.



My Poster


My USB Hub


My mug



There you have it, the tackiest, geekiest and most awesome desk ever.

Write your own Metaphor

Okay I hate gardening. I hate weeding, I hate getting dirty. But I do like that feeling visual acomplishment gardening gives me. Where there was once no plant, now there is a thing of beauty.

When I was planting back in May, one of my flowers lost half of its roots when I tried to take it out of that plastic black container thingy
.
I thought it was a goner. It didn't die. But it didn't grow either.
It's the one in the middle.

Here's another view. Also please note the green plant thingy on the right.

The green plant thingy I didn't plant this year. In fact, it's a zombie plant. I planted those last year, they are supposed to be annuals (which means it doesn't come back from year to year) but poof there you have it. It did the impossible it grew back.

I have more of these impossible plants.

So writers, I ask you this, write your own metaphor for this little gardening story. I'm sort of a snarky writer so I don't do well with inspirational stuff, but I can see where something inspirational should come out.

I'm still on vacation, but when I get back I'll respond to comments and stuff.

Music and Writing

I love music. I hate silence. Serious, it freaks me out. As a teacher I get panicky when I hear NO noise, it means something BAD is about to go down. I need sound, music or the screams of a child to make me feel at ease.

When it comes to writing NEW material I found I can not listen to music I love. I can't do it. I start off writing about the character's mother and her relationship with the mailman and the next thing I know I've got Green Day Lyrics filtered through out. Or worst of all, I start to sing. No one needs THAT in their lives.

I can listen to the music I LOVE when I'm revising and doing line edits or doing a Seek and Destroy... that's what I call going through the entire document and cutting all the adverbs, that, just, pretty, all the empty words. I normally do a find and replace sort of thing in Word.

When I write, I need music I've never heard before. Normally I bust out my i-Tunes and start listening to my recently added list.

I won't lie, music is my biggest expense. I buy a lot of music. Why? Because the music is hurting more than the publishing industry. I know the band only makes 10% of the CD sales, but the band has a lot more people they have to employ.

Sometimes I use music I don't even like very much, artisy folk music where the musician isn't singing about sex and drugs, but about real life. I sort of hate that crap. Sorry if I offended anyone.

When finishing Penny and Hank I listened to Arcade Fire and the first Manchester Orchestra EP.

So what do you listen to when you write?


BTW- I've been away in BOSTON since Thursday. I've been writing the blogs ahead of time. I'm not snubbing you and I promise to get back on track when I get home.

Book review: The Hunger Games

Note: What I'm about to say many people won't like... I'm sorry. Don't throw stuff at me.





One line review: I liked the Japanese version better.
Why did I read this book?:
I read this book for a couple reasons.
1) it's been on EVERYONE'S Must Read list.
2) about 75% of my students read it and loved it
3) A lady at the scbwi yelled at me, literaly I was sitting next to Mary Kole and this lady started to yell at me because I hadn't read it yet, it was like I didn't belong at the writers conference because I didn't read it.
4) One of my students said, "out of a rating from 1-10 I'd give it an 11."


The book:
Girl has to fight against 24 other kids to food for her home town.
Here's the thing, it's not a new concept... in fact it was a book, a comic and a movie back in Japan, and it was call Battle Royale. But the kids weren't strangers they were classmates, they had a long and deep rooted history with each other, which made the events that more horrifying.
The main character wasn't highly likable. What I did like about her was she was a girl who kicked ass, and she was smart, but everything else about her was sort of meh.

What I did like about it:

• Fast read
• I liked the reality TV aspect and that she was hyper aware that everything she did was going to be broadcasted. I thought it was a nice statement for how we are currently living out lives in a hyper media word. Even now I'm blogging, sharing my thoughts with whoever will read it.
• I liked how well thought out the world was, I could tell Suzanne Collins spent of time playing around in this world in her head.
• She wrote great action scenes.
  

Downsides.

• The biggest one for me was, not once did I read it and think, "Damn I WISH I could write like this." Possibly the problem was I had literally finished On Writing ten minutes earlier and I LOVED that book. When ever I read something by John Green nearly ever page makes me want to beg the Writing Gods to make me a sliver as talented as he is.
• It was a little too "telly" and not enough "showy".
• Did we really need 2 pages about the back story of her sister's goat?<-yes I know character development, time needed to pass so the characters could heal, but still 2 pages?
• The "rule change" half way through the game was BS. It was a cheep plot device used to get to characters together, but it didn't cause any tension, in fact, released any tension that was there in the story. Lame.
• I know the book is called The Hunger Games but there was WAY too much description about food.

Overall Review:
Was it entertaining? yes. I finished it in a few hours. But in all honesty I felt that Twilight was more entertaining.
Maybe it was because I had such HIGH expectations for it. And there's a frenzy around the book that I thought it would be better. Maybe it was me and not the book.

Note: I can't imagine the unreal pressure that must be on Collins right now, with the final book coming out. While I didn't love the book, I know millions of people do, and I hope she can live up the pressure and hype and I wish her all the best.

Rating 7 out of 10

OH NO!!!!

I started reading The Secret Year today (awesome by the way--- or at least the first 130 pages are) and I had a terrifying realization.

I've written a YA book (two of them, in fact) where the main characters are NOT supernatural creatures and NO ONE DIES in the books.

Death toll= 0

CRAP!

Can my books even BE YA?

Maybe I should kill off a character just for the hell of it, after all, I want to be published and there's a certain mold I need to fit...

I'm kidding.

sort of.

No I'm totally kidding.

Right?

Midweek links- description

Hello, my name is Erinn and I SUCK AT DESCRIPTION.
I would say besides spelling, grammar and telling a good story, description is my weakest area of writing.

This week's Midweek Links will be about Description.

Here's what I know about it. Describe what's important, the shoe laces of the MC isn't important when he or she is running away from a bear bee hybrid. (I just scared the crap out of myself with this one)

Don't spend lots of time describing clothes... why? Because it's useless and BORING!!!! It's safe to assume the character is wearing clothes. Walk down any high school, every kid is wearing the same basic thing, a shirt and pants... maybe a girl will wear a skirt, but she's only doing that to impress one specific boy.

Books to read about description:
On Writing, by Stephen King, Section On Writing, Chapter 6.

Blogs who write about description.
My go to blog for this little segment is Mary Kole's blog Kidlit.
Every writer's guide says "Show don't tell." Sometimes it's important to tell, and Mary talks about when it's good to tell. But she also talks about "showing and telling" here.


More on showing not telling here by Blood Red Pen. Do you know what fills up a lot of books? People. Here's how to describe them.
Here's one I know I personally struggle with, describing and showing emotion.

Querytracker.net blog
Wanna describe a character, try the dramatic approach.
Top ten mistakes writers make...

Writer's Digest:
Writer's tip of the day- exposition--- too much. How to enrich your descriptions.

ok it took me an hour to find these few links, that's it, I'm googling now. So much easier---
All kinds of writing: Three parts of writing
Six quick Tips to writing description- POEWAR
How to write a character description. Ehow

You would think there would be a lot more information about this, but after an hour and 15 minutes this is all I've found.