Creating major internal conflicts

From David Farland, a creative and easy way to create complex characters:

Give your character a major internal conflict. By that I mean, pick a word that describes your character. For example: He’s compassionate. Then find another word that can also describe your character, but make it a polar opposite—terrorist. Now, look for ways to reveal both sides of you character. For example, your protagonist might be at a French Restaurant. He sees a mother and a baby, and tries desperately to drag them away from the restaurant—just before it blows up. He saves them! But how did he know that the restaurant would explode? Because he set the bomb. Giving a character a dual nature creates an instability, a lack of balance, that probably can’t stay forever.

Read the rest here!

"The fact that you write is a passport everywhere"

From an essay by L. Ron Hubbard called "The Manuscript Factory":

It is so easy to get good raw materials that most writers consider it quite unnecessary.

Hence the errors which make your yarn unsalable. You wouldn’t try to write an article on steel without at least opening an encyclopedia, and yet I’ll wager that a fiction story which had steel in it would never occasion the writer a bit of worry or thought.

You must have raw material. It gives you the edge on the field. And no one tries to get it by honest research. For a few stories, you may have looked far, but for most of your yarns, you took your imagination for the textbook.

After all, you wouldn’t try to make soap when you had no oil.

The fact that you write is a passport everywhere. You’ll find very few gentlemen refusing to accommodate your curiosity. Men in every and any line are anxious to give a writer all the data he can use because, they reason, their line will therefore be truly represented. You’re apt to find more enmity in not examining the facts.

Raw materials are more essential than fancy writing. Know your subject.

The article starts here. The right margins seem to be on vacation; I had to highlight the text in order to read it. Let me know if there's more reader-friendly version of this somewhere!

No one finds me more surprised to be linking to L. Ron Hubbard than myself, believe me. But this essay was mentioned in a recent post by David Farland that I enjoyed, so I hunted it down, and thought it was still relevant and interesting.

Particularly this above. On the one hand, too much research can kill the writing before you've even written a word. But on the other... I could take a class on sword fighting, or interview a medievalist, or visit a musuem—there are any number of ways for me to get a better grasp on my epic swords and sorcery saga that one day you'll hear about but, for now, is still in the wishful thinking stage. And mostly I do not even consider them. 

What kind of research do you do before/during/after your writing?

Being and remaining a working author

Happy Friday!

From David Farland, a short post about finding and keeping the writerly work ethic:

Many writers [...] keep planning to write something, to become manuscript factories, but end up producing nothing at all. They dream of writing screenplays and novels, but never even write a chapter.

Obviously, I don’t want to be the kind of person who only dreams of producing manuscripts.

Between the extremes of the has-beens and the wannabes is where I hope to be. I want to be the kind of author who steadily produces something every day. I want to be a working author. I want to be bustling and busy, and keep producing.

Read the rest here!

...and speaking of, what a great time to remind you about Week Twenty One! Be the manuscript factory. And, really, a manuscript factory could put out 400 words before the workers even arrive. For this one, you only need to be a manuscript hobbiest, at best.

Instructions for the proper care and feeding of writers

From David Farland's Daily Kick in the Pants:

When I was young and newly married, I used to sit down to write, and my wife would immediately think that “since you’re not doing anything, let’s have a conversation.” That’s a frequent problem for those who work from home. It might not look like I’m busy, but sometimes I really am busy. 

In order to write, I have to get into what I call my “writer’s trance,” a state where I’m vividly dreaming about my world (with my right brain) while composing and analyzing my prose (with my left brain). So I have to work with full mental capacity, and it can take about ½ of an hour to get into that state deeply enough to get some good work done. So, if I’m in the groove, don’t bother me. I need time to focus completely on my work.

I've found that having a discreet but limited amount of time to write is perfect. If I have all day, I will definitely not spend all day writing, even if that's what I've been craving for weeks, months. Instead, I'll read some things, watch some things, play some things. Whereas if I have only, say, an hour before I have to be somewhere, so long as there's no distraction I can get into the writerly headspace pretty efficiently. However:

Your writer is insane. Remember that your writer spends a great deal of time in a dream world, talking to imaginary people, visiting places that don’t exist. Shakespeare often lamented about his poor mental health, wondering if he was a genius or a nut. He was obviously both. I once heard a psychologist say that “most writers are provably borderline schizophrenics.” I know that I am. I’m a science fiction writer, and being spacy is a job hazard. 

...Getting back out of the writerly headspace can be a challenge. I tend to miss train stops and spill things on my pants. How about you?

Link to the rest here.