Fantasy

This is a genre I don't know much about, so if you like it, feedback would be appreciated here.

First I tried to analyse common elements. To do this I watched cartoons with my grand kids all morning, and played army video games with my hubby all evening. Finally I had to read something. I chose The Hobbit, pretty much because I already had it in the house, and I'm cheap. Ain't research rough?

This is what I learned. Structure: Even with the cartoons, your are facing a series of tests, challenges or levels. Each test, or battle will give you a clue or item to help you solve the main purpose of a quest(the journey). The quests are seldom on earth, or if they are on earth, the characters are from somewhere else. They will either be looking for some type of power, or they are defeating someone with power in order to maintain the staus quo.

This means your protagonist will always be the 'good guy'. A bad guy will not be facing the same obstacles ie, no one is trying to stop him because he's doing everything in secret. While he certainly has challenges, writing them out will read like a smooth rise to power and make for a boring book.

So you have exotic landscaping and altruistic protagonists on a journey to save the world, or some variation. But you know that, that's the research you don't need to do because you've read lots of them, and are ready to attempt your own story. Now you need to put the fantasy down for a bit.

Things you need to do. First, have fun. Don't get bogged down with the perfect exotic sounding name just yet. It will come. Remember this is a journey. You will need a map. Take some graph paper and put several sheets on a wall so you'll have space for a large map. Don't write on it yet. You'll be working on this at the same time as your outline.

Your first task is to decide a goal. Why do you have to leave leave The Shire anyway?
Now go to your graph paper and design your own homebase. Don't make it large and put it off to the side because you won't be staying there.

Love, Hope, and Faith

People seem to confuse these words.
Love is always a verb. It means you need to show an action. Love is getting up at 2 AM to change your baby's wet diaper even though you have to get back up at 6am to go to work. It's not a typo or whim that the KJV Bible translates the Greek word into charity in Corinthians chapter 13.

You have to know this when you are writing a love story or reading one, such at Twilight. There- I said it. Stephanie Meyers is either loved or hated, it seems. Seldom do people say they can take it or leave it. If you understand that she wrote a love story rather than trying to classify it as a fantasy, you'll be able to wirte something similar without copying her, even you have vampires in it. What is the struggle they overcome to be together? Change the basic conflict and you will have a different story. Keeping it about a clash of cultures even if you change the character into a werewolf, and it will still sound like copying.

Hope is usually an adjective, sometimes a verb. "I love him but he doesn't know I exist" is a post I commonly see on Yahoo Answers. Hope is what you want to happen. Why? What do you know about him if you gaze from afar? You need hard facts to make someone else happy. Does God approve of your actions? Is your baby comfortable? Does your guy have a hobby? If he doesn't know you exist, can you let him know? Books and real life are similar here, don't tell, show! Watch him play football even if you don't understand the game. Bring him a drink or a snack. You understand working out in the hot sun. If it's not worth the effort, do you really love him? If you want him (whether it's in your own life or a character you're writing) to treat you a certain way, is there any indication that he will do it? If there isn't, you will end up constantly trying to change him, creating conflict. If his mom cleans his room for him, he will not suddenly become a neat freak when he leaves home. Something needs to happen outside of the relationship to make him want to change, like his uniform is nasty right before the big game with the talent scouts in the stands. -Ah, the subplot-

Faith is a noun- something you have. Do you want a bigger one? Do you want two of them? This makes no sense even to dedicated Christians who commonly pray for it. Besides, God said my grace is sufficient for thee. So what exactly are we praying for? Faith is the substance of things hoped for. (Heb 11:1) Faith is the warm fuzzy feeling people are trying to describe when asked about what is their definition of love. What the prayer means is we'd like to be able to see it. We want to see our love returned, whether it from God or a potential boyfriend. Faith is what tears the heroine up when she has to choose between the rich, but authortarian boss who nevertheless pays her dying father's hospital bills (and has secretly loved ever since she saw him cry at his own mother's funeral) meets the poor poet who has claimed he is her muse and inspiration to keep going. Whew! Long sentence there.

This post is dedicated to my Composition teacher in college, Carolyn Horner, who showed us how to break down a piece into it's elements, as really I don't read love stories or fantasy either for that matter. Hope I got this one right.

Passion

I keep seeing online the idea that passion is a qualification to be a writer. Sure it is, but don't misplace it. Writing is work. A good wordsmith puts a lot of skullsweat into finding the best way to take the pictures in his head, and put them into the reader's head.

In a quest story, the genre of LOTR, you could say something like:
The group of lost explorers huddled in their camp on the mountain. They prayed to Jove, god of the sky for guidance. There's was a meteor shower. It was enough to let them know Jove was still watching out for them.
The next day they saw an eagle. It led them west through the mountain pass that they hadn't been able to find in the previous days storm.

Same story:(paraphrasing John Denver) On the rocky mountain high, we prayed to the gods for guidance. The storm hadn't let up for days and the last of the food was long gone. Hunger had many in cramps and frostbite was threatening fingers. Directly overhead, we saw it raining fire in the sky. It was an omen. Jove, god of the sky had answered or pleas. We could rest now. In the morning an eagle's flight called us to dance on the west wind. It led us through the pass Jove had opened before us. We were free. The new settlement would honor Jove above above all other gods, as a token of respect.

Or which is better? (based on the movie Transformers):
Fly the fighters to latitude 41 degrees north by longitude 17 degrees east and saturate the area with bullets. -or-
Look for the orange smoke and Bring On The Rain!

The passion you have should be in your life, not sitting in front of a computer. Do you see having a passion for numbers as a requirement for an accountant? No, it's a skill to be learned. You need the interest to learn that skill, though. For fantasy writers the passion is to reach beyond the mundane and take others with you.

So you're 15 and can't take off for the Colorado mountains. Is there a place to hike? Can you check out the sporting goods store at the mall? Why does a tent claim to sleep four when it's six feet on each side? If you are asked where to vacation, can you pick a state park instead of a theme park? Can you rent a canoe for a day on the lake? I promise you, you'll show a better adventure if you have guideposts. Say yes to passion, but live it, not desparately seek it. Your stories will only be improved.

Food Not Bombs

This is a group that meets in our city park every Sunday to give food to local homeless people. One Sunday I cooked a cassarole and volunteered with them.

I met quite a number of homeless and struggling people. Many have jobs, this was essential to my story. They are disabled, or underemployed, or have no jobs skills. The number of panhandlers was low, but perhaps they weren't willing to admit to doing it. Some worked under the table, or were illegal. A few seemed to have a lazy streak, though few admitted to that, of course. For my story, I've had to learn to read people and I suck at it. I was dependant on other volunteers to give me the lowdown on the regulars. I generated some characters from this adventure.

I stayed after the food I brought was served and spoke with a few people eating. The homeless people tend to not trust each other either. They'll steal from each other and when they congregate, the police tend to watch them more closely. This became an aspect of my story, too. My main subplot actually--will the homeless people work together to change their situation, or keep going from one handout place to the next and hope for change?

I learned that some local residents are trying to shut them down even going so far as to claim there are break ins, prostitution, and muggings in the park. The city closed one parking lot while there was an investigation. They didn't find anything in two weeks so the parking lot was reopened. This is a large, well lit and landscaped park with a waterfall, that holds free concerts every weekend during the summer, not a lot with a swingset installed. It's called Findley Park if anyone is familiar with the area. (Columbia, SC). This became fill in for my story that puts more pressure on the characters in order to get them working together.

A few people shared with me how they spend their nights. Shelters when it's cold, under bridges when in town, camping in lots seems to be a favorite. --Every story needs descriptive passages. Details like snakes also like to be under bridges, and a cut on the leg tends to not heal due to poor nutrition but can be ignored until 'suddenly' when it's cold, it's infected and requires a hospital stay with with lots of food and clean sheets and showers. How much is deliberately infected by rubbing dirt in it and how much is real, who can say? Details like this make my story more realistic.

I was in the park about four hours and spent a couple more over the next week following the parking lot closing in the newspaper. There's information from this trip on every page in my story. If you have writer's block, turning on music might might help you phrase what you want to say, but getting out in the world will give you fresh information. Why work when you can have the story handed to you? GO FORTH WRITERS!

testing a premise

The premise of the novel I'm working on revolves around a group of homeless people who try to buy some land to camp on. To test if that was reasonable, one thing I did was visit some banks.

In one bank, even though I told them I was writing a story, and not actually asking for a loan, I was not made to feel welcome. In their defense perhaps they felt I was tying up their time with non banking matters.

Another sent me to their PR office (online) and they didn't get back to me. I didn't know banks have PR services, but if they did, wouldn't they want to leave a favorable impression?

I actually had good luck at a credit union where I was told to form a co-op so they could look at all the bits of verifiable income the people made could be concidered as one lump sum.

That's a lot of specific material for a couple hours work. Research needn't be hours and hours of reading in the library, if that not your thing. I wrote four different scenes- maybe 20-25 pages from a couple of hours visiting. Even the null results were information. Of course I could play it up since my character would have the added problem of needing a shower, and having self esteem problems, like not being able to look people in the eye.

This is meant by writing what you know. Don't be afraid to give yourself an experience if you haven't got any. You can't write about traveling around the world if you haven't done it, so go do something.

Don't assume people will 'get' what you want to say. Try to figure out details that will make it real to them. When I describe homeless people endlessly walking, I give them motive, and put description of what's in their heads so the reader's feet will hurt when they're done reading. Only enough description of the area to let the reader know whether the area is familiar to the character or not. That the way homeless people think. Where to go next.

A quest story would be different. The area is NOT familiar and would require extensive description to put the reader on heightened alert right along with the characters. If anyone wants to share stories of how they get ideas, this is the place.

Why I started this blog

I have been on Yahoo answers, and posted to what are probably highschool kids. This is great, really, that people want to write. I run across the same questions and problems time and again though, so I thought this might help. I also want to write and thought this might also help me, as I'm not published either.

Since there are plenty of places to edit stories, this blog will try to focus on stuff to do 'behind the scenes'. Stuff to do before you write the story. I've tried to point things out in a story that I see needs work, and people defend the reason it needs to stay the way it is. This is fine if you're happy with the story and nobody said you have to followed my suggestions, but then why did you put it out for peer review? If something's hard to follow because too many viewpoints in a scene, (there should be just one) then it's up to the writer to fix it, it's not up to the reader to understand a more complicated plot. If I can spot that, an editor will too.

I never get writer's block- ever. That's about all the expertise I can claim at the moment. Hoping to be able to share with other newbies to the writing scene so we can encourage and enlighten each other. If you're published we'll hope you can share some tips on that as well.