Stories and the FML Moment

I’m taking a leaf out of the Teens Writing For Teens blog’s book for this post. I was thinking of a way to easily summarize my characters’ problems at certain points of my novel, especially for the first 30k words or so as I’m doing a very violent rewrite there. I remembered reading “The FML Moment” post on the Teens Writing For Teens blog, though I didn’t really think that much about it at the time. FML stands for F*** My Life, for the unenlightened. I’m thinking maybe I should start listing FML moments as my planning for stories rather than listing events as they happen. Sometimes I didn’t even bother pre-planning. I like to call it the Half-Baked Plan method. Well, no, not really. I just made that up.

Anyway, I thought this could be an interesting planning method, provided you have some idea of where the story’s going. These would be a few FMLs for my main character, Darian:

I was minding my own business waiting at the train station when a bunch of guys decided it’d be fun to beat me up. Yeah, thanks, guys. FML

I made it to Valora and promptly find out people are following us. They’re wearing metal masks and one’s now trying to shoot me. I love people. FML

Valora told me the President isn’t really the guy in charge. Apparently we’re being ruled by a pair of psychopaths. FML

And so on. I think I might actually try this. It could an interesting experiment. I’ll keep you guys posted on how well this works. I’ll call it the “FML Method”. Yeah, I’m great at giving things names (not).

How Well Do You Know Your MC?

Over on the Absolute Write website, in the forums, a lot of writers participate in a forum game called “How Well Do You Know Your MC?”, MC meaning Main Character (link: http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=133757). The questions range from the pertinent, to the pointless to the bizarre. This is in the Young Adult section, so most of the characters are adolescents.

 I thought it’d be interesting to try to answer some of these for your own main characters, even if you don’t answer them on the forums. Here are some of the questions:

- How would your character react to inappropriate advances by a dirty old man?

- How did your MC find out where babies come from?

- What’s your MC’s greatest fear?

- What is your MC look like?

- What would your MC do when confronted with the threat of death?

- What’s is the biggest black mark on your MC’s conscience?

- It’s your character’s last meal. What’s on the menu?

- If you have magical powers, what would you do if they suddenly stopped working? If you don’t, what magical powers would you NOT like to have?

- What is the funniest thing your MC has said?

- Out of these: toaster, computer, bathtub and oven, which does your character think could be the most terrifying if it became sentient?

- A gigantic tank is aiming straight for your MC. What does he/she do?

- What genre of books does your MC prefer? If he/she doesn’t read, which would he/she be least upset about having to read?

(The last three were mine)

I think this game thread is an excellent resource for character-building material. Sure, it might never be important to the story to know how your character would react to having a tank in the face, but these sorts of things will tell you something about the character. Sometimes there’s a question that’s difficult to answer, and that can help find holes in characterization. Anyway, I should get back to typing.

New Beginning

I’m in the midst of typing up my handwritten novel, which is incredibly time-consuming and bothering my temperamental wrists. I wrote a new beginning for this novel the page after I wrote ‘The End’ as the old one was bothering me. I had received a couple comments that indicated the start was too busy, with the fighting and conversing at the same time. As such, I decided to start my story earlier and may even forgo that particular fight altogether. Maybe make it more like a cat-and-mouse chase than an outright fight. I don’t think my protagonist would be prepared for a fight at that stage. Anyway, without further ado, here is my (rough) new beginning:

The platform smelled of exhaust and urine. A young, lanky man shiftily gave an older man with greying hair a wad of cash in exchange for a packet of pills. They walked off in opposite directions. The younger man joined a gang hanging around on one end of the platform, ignoring the yellow safety line.

Darian sat huddled on a bench and waited for the train to come. His breath misted in the air and the chill bit at his fingers. He hadn’t thought to ask his Instructor for gloves. Darian held out one hand and focused on it. Wispy threads of tree fibre wrapped around it, not enough to keep his hands warm. He sighed and gave up. Darian brushed some of his overlong, black hair out of his face. His fingers began to tingle, and it wasn’t pins and needles. He glanced at the gang. They were eying him. He refused to make eye contact.

***

That’s all I’ve got at the moment. I’m not sure if it’s any good yet. I’ll have to see how well it integrates with the story, which will have some major alterations anyway. Adieu!

Finished!

I just finished writing my first ever novel. Well, the first draft, that is. I feel this weird sense of release from writing the words THE END after the last words. I’ll give a wordcount update when I’ve typed it all up, which might take a while as I’m about 17 chapters behind in my typing. Thank goodness for school holidays…

Yeah, that’s all I have to post about. Until next time, I will sign off and prepare my fingers for a marathon of frantic (and hopefully accurate) typing.

Humour In Non-Humour Novels

I regularly post random snippets of my novel on Facebook as I write it, generally the funnier bits. One of my friends just asked how I come up with the funny. Honestly, I don’t know. I just happen to have a feel for tongue-in-cheek humour. As is probably the case with bazillions of people (not literally), I’m funnier in writing than I am in speech. 

Of course, if I had to write an all-humour novel, I’m betting it would suck. I’m not all funny all the time. In fact, at least half of my jokes completely flop. I take the Hollywood gunshot approach to humour: keep shooting and hope one hits. It is neither delicate nor particularly accurate, but it generally works out in the end. I have a (very funny) friend who uses a similar approach when talking to people. He also thinks I’m insane, and wants to read my novel once it’s finished so he can understand my completely random and bizarre thought processes. Or maybe he just wants to laugh at me.

In any case, I think a healthy dose of humour is needed in our lives. If you suck at telling jokes, learn to laugh at them. That sounds stupid, but I think a good sense of humour is a sign of a healthy mind. I’m not as much of a joke-teller as a random-comment-maker. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re completely stupid and sometimes people just ignore them. Works for me.

So be funny, or be able to recognize funny. That includes all the stupid jokes you’ve heard over and over again. There’s nothing quite like a good stupid joke. There’s no pretense of trying to be intelligent. It’s just a cheap laugh, and cheap laughs are awesome. Just ask the kids (and adults) that laughed at my intentional slip-up of the line “Pianist here, Ms Darbus” when I played Kelsi in my school’s version of “High School Musical” a few years back. I’m sure you can imagine for yourselves what I said instead. Go ahead. Laugh. Unleash the eight-year-old within thee!

After The Battle

I just finished writing the big ‘final battle’ sort of scene for my novel. It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but I don’t even know what I had in mind in the first place. Well, the end result is the same. My main character is alive but injured and his love interest is almost dead. My main character had more of a breakdown than I had anticipated. That might have to change in the edit, since he’s not supposed to be a weak characters. Weak characters annoy me.

So the bad guys have fled and the good guys have won. How do I wrap things up without going on for too long? I need my protagonist to discover his friend is hurt. The protagonist must help the friend make peace with his love interest’s guardian. I need to have a certain artefact destroyed and my protagonist and his love interest to come to an impasse.

I’m not sure what is more annoying: stories that end too soon or stories that overstay their welcome. I think my novel may be leaning towards the latter. I guess time will tell how much I want to bang my head into a wall upon rereading the draft.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

After reading some positive reviews from Young Adult authors much older and wiser than yours truly, I decided to steal Percy Jackson and the Lighting Thief from my brother’s room and give it a go. Since the protagonist, Percy, is a twelve-year-old boy, I’m assuming that the book is largely aimed at the middle-grade audience. Regardless of this, I actually liked the book.

Percy Jackson is a twelve-year-old boy diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. He’s been expelled from every single school he’s ever gone to because strange things keep happening that the teachers somehow blame on him. Percy never knew his father growing up, and his mother has remarried…to a vile man who Percy cannot stand. Percy’s latest expulsion comes as a result of bizarre happening on a school field trip to a museum. His mother and friend, Grover, take him to camp half-blood, a camp for the half-human children of the Greek gods. It is during a capture-the-flag battle that his father sends a sign indicating that Percy is the son of Poseidon.

Percy is immediately thrust into a dangerous situation, where Zeus believes he has stolen his lightning bolt. Percy, with Grover and his new friend, Annabeth, a daughter of Athena, have to retrieve it before the summer solstice…otherwise war between the gods will break out.

As a narrator, Percy keeps things interesting with a random quip every so often that stops the story from getting too serious and, at times, depressing. Modernised versions of the Greek gods are revealed all the time, and their interactions with Percy and his friends don’t feel forced like when many other writers do the same thing. I found this interesting, as Greek gods actually play into the series of novels I’m planning. I could use this as an example of how it can be done.

I would recommend this book to anyone who likes middle-grade or Young Adult fiction. The language is not too advanced to make a middle-grader cry out in terror, and not too dumbed-down that a teenager would scoff and throw the book aside. Now I have to go see the movie. I probably should have seen that first, since movies rarely, if ever, do the book justice.

Clever Graffiti

I’m rather fond of random pictures. Here is a rather clever piece of graffiti I found while doing a  random google image search sometime last year:

 I wouldn’t do it myself, so I applaud whoever was responsible.

Won’t The Editing Be Fun?!

I just looked at my updated (Microsoft Word-generated and therefore inaccurate) wordcount. I appear to have typed over 120,000 words. I have approximately seven more chapters to type, and plenty more to write. This is going to be huge, and I will have to be ruthless in cutting out all the useless banter I can’t help myself but sprinkle ubiquitously throughout my creation. My original plan to ask English teachers and friends for feedback has officially fallen through. I would not read 120,000 words of crap and therefore cannot expect anyone else to, either. The first edit will be a solo act, methinks.

And, yes, I admit that it’s crap. I reread some of the earlier novel and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or throw something. Being the inherently impatient and rude person I am, I have not developed the ability to laugh it off yet. I’m getting there. I will get there.

This has been another completely random and pointless blog post from yours truly.