Pam Uphoff
Yeah, wow. I’ve kissed farewell all hope of sticking to a diet . . . and D****it! The writing is coming easily, and the words are flowing on a sugar high.
Not sure the stories makes a bit of sense.
Going to have to find a happy medium in there, somehow.
Only two more Christmas party/feasts to go. (My husband is a social butterfly! Plus family!) Then back on the diet before I really mess up my body. My brain needs the body in reasonably good working order, and will just have to deal with only getting a little sugar at much wider intervals.
However . . . on the writing front, I got this Amazon review. Not a *bad* one, four stars, but the reader pointed out that I had given my Main Character insufficient cause to abandon his loyalty to the old government, and join an attack on it, with the rebels.
And he was absolutely right.
Damn, I hate that.
And it wouldn’t really be hard to fix. The trigger for the rebellion was the murder of the Crown Prince of the now rebellious region. All it would take would be a few sentences. The young man remembers his time with his grandfather fondly. Dead easy to add the Prince, and the boy’s admiration. And then, when the news of the Prince’s murder by a faction of the Government at the highest level reaches them, add the shock of the young man hearing about his hero’s death.
Bam! Of course he’s going to aid the split-off of his region. It’s not just regional loyalty, it’s personal!
Grrr. Now I have to decide if I’m going to edit in those little changes. Heh. It’s an ebook. Easy to do. Just because I’ve probably already sold half the copies I’ll sell in the next ten years . . .
That’s both the good and bad part of mostly publishing electronically. I just need to not do it regularly. And check my character’s motivation level, before I hit the PUBLISH button the first time.
How about it? Are your characters getting enough motivation in their diets? Do they need more reasons for anger or angst?
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “Merry Christmas Sugar High!”
I know what you mean about the excess sugar. It’s terrifying.
As for character motivation, I’ve been having a weird time of it with my current WIP. For the last several years I’ve been writing a series where I know the characters really well, understand what’s motivating them, and have a world in place that’s pure invention: Not What We Were Looking For is a colony world far, far away in the distant future.
Now, I’ve got young Jack Darien who is a new main character, new relationships, a new setting–about 15 years from now on Earth–and I’ve had a real struggle getting to know Jack. This was weird because he showed up in my head two years ago and has been waiting for his story to be told. Nonetheless, I was about 2/3ds through the first draft before I realized one of his salient characteristics. I kept writing, and just got to the end this week.
Now, to check myself for when I re-read it, I’ve written up a sales blurb using Saves the Cat’s rubric. I now know Jack’s a protector. There were hints of it early in the book (thank you, subconscious), but I need to see on re-read if the hints are clear enough. In the meantime, I have this nice pithy statement of a blurb to serve as my guide.
I feel you! My husband is still quietly chuckling with amusement over sporadic, heartfelt rants from my direction about having characters who are quiet professionals means they don’t talk! Not even to me! Not even to get their story told!
Lol. Jack’s finally talking to me. He’s a bit of a mess, but he’s 18, so I mustn’t be surprised.
I myself use an internal structural story layout (3-act, 4-act) to satisfy my sense of “story-form” for each entry of a series, and I’m not about to change. I worry about sufficient motivations, rising suspense, and so forth.
But… I am intrigued by some authors who produce Military or Historical Career long fiction series (Andrew Wareham, as a prime modern example) whose overarching structures are straightforwardly simple and episodic, in the way that old historical novels often were (but much longer), following a set of characters united by family or career as they progress through life. You would be hard-pressed to outline them in formal “rising tension, midpoint reversal, etc.” terms. Instead, they mostly use the natural career or family-fortune progressions of open-ended life for their shape, as well as the expectations of their time and place. And they work just fine.
Not all character decisions are well founded, not all motivations endure changing circumstances, not all well-thought-out plans succeed, luck can be capricious, and so on, and yet… the main cast continues on with plans and a shrug for the vagaries of fate.
One thing I do notice about the characters — they are formed by their experiences fairly early in their lives and their characters don’t change much thereafter. The stories are often reflective of the various character strengths of both the protags and their surrounding players as the circumstances play out.
The thing about being defined by your early experiences is that the same set of experiences can plausibly explain all kinds of characters.
Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series is an example of both. Each book is a stand-alone tale with the modern rising tension, mid-point, etc. But it’s a long life arc that the series follows. Sharpe is formed by his early experiences, but he gets to level up slowly through the series, both as a soldier and as a person. He remains the same person at heart, even as he gains experience and personal events.
Yes, similar idea. The characters, once formed, do grow in accomplishment and gravitas, and they reflect on what makes them them, and not someone else, as they observe the characters of others in their ambit.
The Wareham series are even more stripped down — there are incidents that move the plots along (they’re good reads), but not (I think) the modern structures. He is not above ending an entry in media res. But, then, that’s also part of a series structure, if not a story one.