Tag Archives: characters

Book Review — Remarkable Creatures

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.  To that I’d add “or its blurb.”  I just finished listening to a book on tape, Remarkable Creatures, © 2010 by Tracy Chevalier, put out by Recorded Books Productions, narrated by Charlotte Parry and Susan Lyons.   More about that blurb below.

The novel is the story of a lower class woman in England in the early 1800s, and her dealings with an upper class spinster.  The story starts with the first woman, Mary Anning, as a child when the spinster, Elizabeth Philpot, is in her twenties.  They end up sharing an interest in gathering and understanding fossils.  Fossils had caused a stir in the scientific community since many seem to be from animals that no longer exist, which called Biblical teachings into question.  The two women develop a knowledge of these fossils that equals or surpasses some of the learned men of Europe, but it is a time when women were sadly powerless in many areas, including science.

The author really puts you in the timeframe, and you come to care about the characters.  If you don’t think you’re interested in fossils before you read the book, you might well be fascinated with them when you’re done.  You’ll be drawn in as the two women become frustrated with their inability to be recognized by the male scientific community, and with their lack of success in finding husbands.  All they really have is each other, and the author  skillfully leads you along the ups and downs of their relationship.

What I didn’t know when I began reading is, these women were real.  There really was a Mary Anning and an Elizabeth Philpot.  In fact, most of the characters and events in the book were real.  I had thought it was just a historical setting with made-up characters, but that is not so.

The narrators, Charlotte Parry and Susan Lyons, did a fine job in this audiobook.  The book alternates in point-of-view between Anning and Philpot, and the narrators take turns.  I wondered, at times, if it would have been more effective to have the ‘Mary’ narrator speak Mary’s actual lines and the ‘Elizabeth’ narrator speak Elizabeth’s lines, but Recorded Books chose the point-of-view method instead.

On the negative side, there is not a lot of action in the book.  Moreover the conflicts and problems of the characters are not well defined.  Fiction is about conflict and the attempted resolution of problems.  I understand it can be difficult to force such a fictional constraint on real historical people, but there is a reason real life tends to be more boring than fiction.  Fictional characters have well-understood goals and passions, and really important problems to solve.  It’s my understanding that someone has bought movie rights to this book, but if a movie is made, they’ll have to put more action scenes in it and make the conflicts more apparent and dramatic.  Either that or opt for a straight historical documentary.

I was enticed into reading the book by the blurb on the Recorded Books cover, including this intriguing sentence.  “Mary discovers she has the ability to ‘see’ and locate fossils buried deep in the cliffs near her village.”  That certainly makes it sound like she has some supernatural x-ray ability to see through rock, right?  Nothing of the sort.  Mary’s good at locating fossils, but due to the shifting of land in the area and the action of waves on the beach, new fossils become exposed on the surface quite often and it is these Mary can spot.  Although it was a good book, I feel a little cheated by the misleading blurb.  I can’t really fault the author for that, though, since she probably didn’t write it.

A surprisingly good book, I’ll give it a rating of four seahorses.  Whether you concur with my opinions or differ, I’d like to hear from you.  Just click on ‘leave a comment’ and you’ll get a reply from–

                                                                          Poseidon’s Scribe

February 25, 2012Permalink

Book Review – A Curse on the Cygnus

At DarkoverCon last November, I met author Kevin M. Houghton, and bought a copy of his book, A Curse on the Cygnus.  It’s the subject of today’s book review.

This steampunk novel follows Royal Defence Service agents Colonel Ian Grey and Lady Victoria Dallas on a trip aboard a British Imperial Airways airship called the Cygnus.  A murder occurs onboard, and the protagonists become involved in the investigation. The question is whether this is a straightforward, naturally explainable crime, or whether it has something to do with the airship’s cargo of ancient Egyptian treasures and an associated, rumored curse.

I found the story engaging and exciting; it’s high adventure in a wonderful steampunk setting.  The novel gives the reader a good feel of being in an airship, conveying a sense of being confined.  Lady Victoria Dallas is a strong character, well able to defend herself.  The author does a fine job of making clear the motivations of all the major characters so their actions are believable.  Tension builds nicely through the story to a dramatic conclusion.  Moreover, the book is short and written in an easy-to-read style.

However, most of the characters seemed rather stock steampunk characters to me.  I would have liked Ian and Victoria to each have an endearing character flaw to make them seem more human and compelling.  I found I didn’t care about them as much as I like to care about protagonists.  There were a lot of characters to keep track of, but the author did a pretty good job of giving the reader little reminding clues to keep them straight.

The story’s beginning was slow, it seemed to me.  I was confused by the Point of View throughout.  Third person POV is most common these days, but this novel seemed to either employ third person POV that flipped frequently within scenes (and once within a paragraph), or else employed omniscient POV.   I was never quite sure whose head I was in.  A large number of grammatical and editorial errors also detracted from my reading enjoyment.

Using my seahorse rating system, I give this novel three seahorses.  If you enjoy steampunk and like a good murder mystery with a touch of the supernatural, then I recommend you read A Curse on the Cygnus.  If you do so, and come away with a different impression, please leave a comment for–

                                                             Poseidon’s Scribe

February 18, 2012Permalink

What Happens Next?

Back in May, I promised to discuss suspense, and I’ve kept you in it long enough.  First, in defining the term, we learn that it means (1) the state of being suspended, (2) a mental uncertainty or anxiety, and (3) the state of being undecided or doubtful.

Definitions (2) and (3) may seem to have the most significance for us here, but I like the image of definition (1).  Imagine a character who is physically suspended over the ground at some great height.  There is a danger he may fall and get hurt or killed.  Neither the reader nor the character knows if the fall will happen or not.  However, at the moment there exists both the danger that he will fall and the hope that he will either not fall or that the fall will somehow not harm him.

The danger leads to the character feeling fear.  If the character has been previously introduced to the reader as a sympathetic one and the reader has come to care about him, then the reader will share both the uncertainty and the character’s fear of the fall.

The danger need not involve falling from a height, of course, but can be any real danger to the character, including emotional danger.  The feeling of suspense arises from not knowing whether the outcome will be good or bad and the feeling is more intense if the reader sympathizes with or pities the character.

In his book Poetics, Aristotle explained suspense the same way we have, with the concepts of a looming danger, a ray of hope, an uncertainty of outcome, and the audience’s (reader’s) caring about the character.  We’re not exactly plowing new ground here; suspense is a timeless idea.

We can bring in definition (3) of the word “suspense” by giving our character a choice of actions to take.  He does not know which choice will make the danger greater or which will cause a hoped-for positive outcome.  Since he does not know, he is uncertain and doubtful about which choice to make.

Most fiction involves suspense to some degree, but so-called suspense novels are chock full of that emotion.  What techniques does a writer of such novels use to ratchet up suspense?

  • Create in the reader’s mind an intense sympathy for the character.  Establish the character as real, human, and vulnerable.
  • Introduce a danger with high stakes.  It must be plausible and full of dire consequences for the character should the danger be realized.
  • Set up the situation so the negative outcome is far more likely than the positive one.  Make the odds nearly (but not) impossible.  Ensure Aristotle’s “ray of hope” is laser-thin.
  • Give the character a set of choices that all seem bad.
  • Provide the reader with knowledge of some fact the character doesn’t know, perhaps some fact about one or more of the choices being faced.  You might think this would lessen uncertainty and doubt, and thus reduce suspense.  But note that it doesn’t lessen the character’s uncertainty and it actually increases the reader’s sympathy for the character; it makes the reader want to shout, “No!  Don’t do that!”
  • Introduce a time limit, a race against the clock.  This forces the character to make one of the choices without enough time to fully analyze chances and consequences.
  • Conclude each chapter (or short story break) with some enticement to keep reading.
  • Bring in unexpected complications that worsen the danger, tighten the timeline, or narrow the ray of hope still further.
  • Keep the tension high for as long as possible.  In other words, delay the events that will resolve the suspenseful situation as long as you can, but stop short of the point where the reader gets bored and stops caring.

Do you think you can write in a suspenseful way?  What difficulties do you see in doing so?  I welcome comments on the topic. And for those of you wondering who wrote this blog entry, you may call me…I’m known as…(suspense building)…wait for it…

                                                                     Poseidon’s Scribe

January 15, 2012Permalink

Coming to Your Senses (in Your Writing)

If Poseidon’s Scribe suggests you incorporate an appeal to all five senses in your writing, that’s not exactly original advice.  But why are writers told to do this?  And how do you go about it?

The reason for using all the senses is to make your scenes more vivid, distinct, and real for the reader.  You’re trying to take your reader away from her world where she is sitting and reading a book, just sweep her away to your made-up world.  We speak of “painting a picture” in writing, but it should be more than that.  It should be a multi-sensory experience.  It’s like a Star Trek transporter machine that can move a person in an instant to a different location for a full immersion experience.

Artists, too, often bring the senses into their work.  This is “Still-life with Chessboard (the Five Senses)” by the 17th Century painter Lubin Baugin.

Each of the senses has certain properties.  Although they are obvious from lifelong experience, let’s think about each one from a writer’s point of view.

 

  • Our primary sense is sight, and that’s usually the first way a character perceives his surroundings.  Human sight is most especially tuned to moving objects, so characters notice them first of all. Depriving a character of sight using darkness or interfering objects can heighten tension.
  • Hearing is our secondary sense, and also has a long range.  Characters can hear things around corners and thus detect them before seeing them at times.
  • Smell has a strong link to mood and memory, and thus can provide a great opportunity for the reader to understand the point-of-view character’s temperament and background.
  • Taste is coupled to the sense of smell.  Letting a character experience food and drink in a scene can enhance the overall impression for the reader.  Remember that characters can learn things by tasting even non-food items, such as deciding whether a liquid is water or oil, for example, when gathering evidence.
  • The sense of touch is probably the most intimate.  It’s the only sense without a specific organ, and the only one we can’t block out except through numbness.

If you open up your writing to appeal to all the senses, you’ll find a wealth of new adjectives at your disposal.  There are many great descriptive words that apply to the non-sight senses.  These sensory descriptions should be used with purposeful ends in mind, though.  You’re trying to advance your plot, reveal character attitudes, or set a scene, not to demonstrate your knowledge of the senses.

Through practice you can improve the perceptiveness and sharpness of your senses as well as your ability to write better sensory descriptions.  It’s just like improving any other skill.  I’ll have more to say about that in a future blog entry.

I should caution you not to overdo it, though.  Modern readers dislike, and often skip, long paragraphs of description.  It’s best to sprinkle your sense-based descriptions in small chunks between and among character thoughts and dialogue throughout the scene.  This avoids overloading and boring the reader, and also gives the reader occasional reminders about where the characters are and the state of their surroundings.

As always, I welcome your comments on this topic.  From what I’ve seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt, this concludes another blog entry by–

                                                                          Poseidon’s Scribe

January 8, 2012Permalink

Just Thinking to Myself

The title of this blog entry is a little joke to remind me not to ever do that in my fiction–state that a character is “thinking to himself.”  How else would he be thinking?

But the broader question facing us today regards how a writer should convey a character’s thoughts.  To get your fiction published these days, it’s important to be able to let your readers know the thoughts of your point-of-view character.  Fiction, as I’ve said before, is about the human condition, and a large part of the human experience requires thinking.  In fiction, we expect to find a protagonist dealing with one or more conflicts, and a large part of understanding her struggle is to know her thoughts.

Thoughts reveal a lot about a character.  Often thoughts are more extreme and emotion-packed than spoken words.  In the cases where a character’s thoughts are just as restrained as his speech, that tells the reader this character has a great degree of self-control.  A character that “speaks his mind” likely does not have much tact in social situations.

It’s rather strange that English has quotation marks to indicate spoken dialogue, but no analogous, standard symbol for a character’s thoughts.  Without such a standard, practices vary:

  • “I sure could go for a hamburger,” Steve thought.
  • I sure could go for a hamburger.
  • Steve thought about how much he wanted a hamburger.

The first example with the quotation marks seems to have fallen out of favor.  It’s potentially confusing, since a reader could assume the character is speaking out loud, until the tag–Steve thought–appears.  Some say the second example with italics has run its course and is not recommended.  It may also lead to potential confusing ambiguity, since italics are also used for emphasis, or sometimes to indicate foreign words.

As for me, I prefer italics.  I like how italicized words leap out and distinguish themselves as different.  When used to indicate thought, they really help the reader separate “dialogue” from thought and narration.  I suppose the knock against italics is they can interrupt flow.

Although the last example reads just like narration, the tag “Steve thought” clues the reader in that the character is thinking.  The use of standard text makes for a smoother read.

In my view, there are three guidelines you should follow:  (1) stick with the publisher’s guidelines, if known; (2) avoid confusing the reader; and (3) be somewhat consistent through your story in the technique you use.

There are some other helpful blog post articles on this topic here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  As you’ll see from reading through them, there is general agreement, but some differences.  What are your thoughts on representing a character’s thoughts?  I welcome comments.

That’s another fine blog post I’ve written, thought–

                                                                               Poseidon’s Scribe

 

January 1, 2012Permalink

Give Your Characters Vivid Personalities

Figured out the plot for a story you’re going to write, have you?  Got some rough character ideas in mind?  You say the only problem is, you’re not great at fleshing out the personalities of your characters?  Well, you may have surfed to the right blog post.

I think the first rule of character personalities is–they must fit the story.  Sometimes the plot itself necessitates certain personality types for your major characters.  Of course, from the reader’s point of view, this fitting is the other way around.  Readers learn about the character’s personalities early as they are introduced and relate to each other, and then read about the plot events.  So from your reader’s perspective, it seems fortunate that your characters had just the right personalities, given what eventually happened.

You may have read plot-driven stories in which there’s a lot of action but the characters seem shallow or stereotypical.  These stories get published because the plot action is so riveting, and despite the character portrayals.  There are also character-driven stories where the characters are fully fleshed out, but very little action occurs other than people talking to each other.  These stand a better chance of publication because readers like compelling characters.  However, it’s best to have both a gripping plot and captivating characters.

Let me explain more clearly what I mean about character personalities fitting the plot.  The protagonist in your story will face a conflict consisting of increasing levels of challenges.  That’s what stories are about.  The conflict can be external or internal or both.  In the end, the conflict will be resolved somehow, and the protagonist may undergo an internal change.

So you could pick a personality type for the protagonist that suits her well for the conflict.  In that case the story line is about her dealing with the challenges as they arise, and the actions she takes in accordance with her personality help to resolve the conflict.  Or you could pick a personality type that’s at odds with the conflict.  (For example, the conflict requires bold action, and you’ve got a shy protagonist.)  Now the internal struggle within the protagonist is one more challenge she faces as she deals with the external conflicts.  The actions she takes may actually worsen the conflict initially and trigger the increasing challenges.

In addition to fitting the plot, a character’s personality should fit, and emerge from, his background.  As you figure out where the character was born, his birth order in relation to siblings, what his upbringing was like, and what occupation he chose, those background details might well suggest certain personality traits.  (Alternately, you can determine personality traits first and come up with a suitable background later.)  Keep in mind that people sometimes form personality types in reaction against their upbringing rather than being in harmony with it.

In addition to having a protagonist’s personality fitting both the conflict and the character’s background, you should ensure your major characters have different personality types.  That makes their interactions much more interesting.  As a beginning writer I have found this difficult.  It’s easy to have characters act as I, the writer, would act in their place.  That results in characters with personalities much like mine.  A good writer populates her stories with characters of several personality types that are both revealed by their actions, and determine their actions in a believable way.  Ideally your readers should be unable to determine your personality type from your writing.

There are many sources of information about personality types that can aid you in developing your characters.  Internet searches on any of the following terms will provide plenty of information:

  • One (my favorite) is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which lays out sixteen different personality types.
  • There are four-color personality representation schemes which seem a little less useful to me.
  • Enneagrams provide nine personality types.  I have not used or studied this much, but it looks intriguing.
  • Astrology, either Western or Chinese, provides twelve unique personality types.

I listed these aids last because they are only useful to you in fleshing out a character’s personality type after you’ve already ensured the personality (1) fits the plot, (2) fits the background, and (3) differs from other characters and from the writer’s.

As always, feel free to leave a comment whether your personality clashes or matches with–

                                                                          Poseidon’s Scribe

December 11, 2011Permalink

Why’d She Do That?

Did you ever read about a character making a decision or taking an action and wondered “Why did she do that?”  For example, why does the girl in the skimpy dress unlock and crack open her door after she’s seen the TV news and knows there are zombies loose?  If you have to ask why, the author hasn’t made the character’s motivations clear enough.  Today I thought I’d give you one technique for avoiding that problem.

Engineers have a method called Root Cause Analysis (RCA) they use when something goes wrong with machines or systems they designed–ships sink, spacecraft blow up, cars crash, etc.  They review the accident to understand if they could design the machine or system better to lessen the risk.  It occurred to me one day that RCA could be applied to fiction writing.

Imagine an event–one person taking a specific action.  Let’s represent that event with a rectangle.  For the moment, we’ll call our event the “effect.”  For that event to take place, a set of conditions must be present, and a few other events must have taken place first.   These can be represented by other box-like rectangles off to the left, connected by lines to the effect box.  The prior events can be termed “causes.”

Each of the prior causal events are also themselves effects of even earlier causes and conditions.  This means there is an endless stream of causes and effects, creating a rather messy diagram of infinite boxes and lines. But for our purposes we can keep it from getting too complicated.

Let’s take our seemingly idiotic girl (whom we’ll call Mary) who unlocks her door in a zombie-infested neighborhood.  We put the words “Mary cracks open door” in our effect box.  We know some conditions have to be present for that to happen, but some of them are too obvious to write down–Mary has to exist, she has to be inside a house or apartment, the dwelling has to have a door.  As you do RCA you’ll become more skilled at figuring out which conditions to write down.

Let’s suppose there are other, less obvious, conditions that lead to Mary’s action.  Suppose there’s a storm or fog and the view out her nearby window is obscured.  These could be shown as condition boxes with lines connecting to our effect box.  Suppose Mary’s personality includes the fact that she’s a naturally curious person.  We’ll come back to that one later.

Aside from conditions, we can think of a few preceding events that might prompt Mary to crack open her door.  Suppose she knows her boyfriend is outside somewhere, because he called her earlier and said he’s on his way to her.

Suppose she just heard a noise from outside, a voice that sounds like it might be her boyfriend.  If the call from her boyfriend is one of the prior events, that one will take some explaining, too.  Why would he venture out on a stormy night when zombies are about?  That event cries out for its own prior events and conditions.

The point is for you the author to think about each major decision or fateful step taken by a character and come up with reasons, motivations (whether they are prior events or conditions) that help explain why the character takes that action.

Remember I mentioned that one of our story’s conditions would be that Mary is a curious, inquisitive person?  It’s not enough to just put that in a box on our cause-effect motivation chart.  You need to establish that point earlier in your story.  Provide some scene, or part of a scene, showing that Mary’s personality includes that trait.  Only then will readers understand why she cracks the door later.

When you finish your chart, it should look something like a big ‘greater than’ (>) symbol leading to the final event of your story.  Now make sure the manuscript mentions all the events and all the conditions, even if briefly, and even if only hinted.

RCA helps engineers figure out why bad things happen with complex engineered systems, but I think authors can use it to help explain why their characters do things, too.  What do you think?  Could that technique help you?  From personal experience, I can tell you it has helped–

                                                                   Poseidon’s Scribe

November 27, 2011Permalink

Show and Tell

Did you have Show-and-Tell in elementary school, where you brought in some object of interest, showed it to the class, and told them all about it?  The shown object gave something for the class to look at while listening to the speaker’s narration about it.  The whole process wouldn’t have worked as well if it were just Show or just Tell, would it?

Today I’m tackling the age-old caution given to writers to “Show, don’t Tell,” which I briefly mentioned here.  As with many of my blog topics, I’ll write about it as if I’m an expert, though I still struggle with the concept in my own fiction.  First let’s define terms.  In writing, “Show” means to convey to the reader a sense of being inside a character, experiencing what the character is going through, portraying the character’s senses, thoughts, and feelings.  “Tell” means to describe or inform in narrator fashion, mainly using facts much like a journalist would use his “who-what-when-where-why-how” model.

In Showing, you really engage the reader.  Remember that the purpose of storytelling is not just to convey information, but to create a reaction in the reader, to entertain (and I mean that in the broad sense, not the comedic sense).  Showing does that in a way Telling never can.  Think of the best stories you ever read.  Chances are you felt a part of the story as you read along, and that made you care about the characters and about the outcome.  Unfortunately, Showing typically takes more words.  It’s very hard to be blunt while Showing.

On the other hand, Telling can be very compact.  You can convey a lot of information with very few words.  However, Telling is often boring.  It doesn’t engage your reader for long or help her care about your characters.

My advice is to use both techniques, but learn when to use each.  Showing is necessary for the more dramatic moments of story scenes.  It’s vital to show the key moments of your protagonist’s struggle to resolve the conflict of your story.  However, events have to happen between these key dramatic moments.  Use Telling to catch the reader up on these in-between events.

The suggestion to combine some Telling with Showing isn’t just my idea, but any writer will pretty much tell you the same thing.  Why, then, do you still hear the “show, don’t tell” advice?  It’s because Showing is harder to write than Telling, and it’s easy to lapse back into that narrative, journalistic way of writing. It’s difficult getting into a character’s head and conveying the character’s feelings and impressions.  You have to force yourself to Show.  Although writers must Tell on occasion, they need not be reminded to do that.

One key to writing well in both the Show and the Tell mode is to choose details wisely.  That is well worth a future blog entry all by itself.

So just like in elementary school, it’s important to both show and tell.  For now, class dismissed.  Your homework assignment is to leave a comment with your opinion about the “show, don’t tell” admonition, to–

                                                                Poseidon’s Scribe

 

November 20, 2011Permalink

That’s a Great Story!

What makes a story great, or even good?  For this discussion I’ll concentrate on short stories, my main medium, but the principles apply to all fiction.  Fair warning:  I’ll explore the topic to the best of my ability, but if I was an expert on writing great short stories, I would be better known.

Philosophers since at least the ancient Greeks have puzzled about what makes one thing better or of greater value than another.  Is it really all subjective, in the mind of each individual reader, or are there some objective aspects on which we can all agree?  Further, what is meant by ‘great?’  Do we measure great stories by sales, by the number of favorable reviews, or by how the story stands the test of time?

For an interesting romp through the fields of quality, goodness, and value (in general, not specifically as related to stories) read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

Of course, people differ in the stories they like, and a given reader may change her own tastes over time.  So there must be a subjective component to any definition of a good story.  I touched on this in a previous blog entry.

Still, perhaps we can agree on a few elements that should be present in a good story.  Not every element need be present, and excellence in some of them can make up for mediocrity in others.  Further, as you’ll see, these aren’t exactly objective elements, so people could disagree about whether they are present or absent in any given story.  Here are my ten elements, expressed in one long sentence:

  • A good story deals with one or more aspects of the human condition and starts with
  • an attention-grabbing hook that introduces
  • a compelling protagonist, with whom the reader can identify, who is
  • dealing with a difficult problem, a problem
  • with some relevance to the reader’s own life
  • in a vivid setting that puts the reader right there while the protagonist
  • encounters more difficult obstacles along the way
  • with enough tension and suspense to keep readers reading
  • and with the protagonist resolving the problem in the end in a satisfying, logical way, with bonus points if the protagonist learns something, and more bonus points if the reader can’t guess the ending early
  • with the whole story told in strong, clear language that produces an emotional reaction in the reader.

As it turns out, it’s easier to write down that list than it is to write a story that hits most of those marks.  Thinking back over the best short stories you’ve read, are there common elements they share?  Have I left out any elements in my list?  As writers, we ought to be striving for greatness as we tell our tales, so it helps to know what separates good or great stories from the rest.  I welcome your thoughts, which you can provide by clicking “leave a comment” below, whether or not you agree with–

                                                                     Poseidon’s Scribe 

November 13, 2011Permalink

10 Reasons to Keep a Writer’s Journal

From my lengthy “do as I say, not as I do” file comes this item–keeping a journal.  I decided to blog about this topic to kick-start myself into restarting this important habit.  So read on if you like, but this entry is meant to persuade me.

Steve, I know you’ve kept journals in the past, but you’ve fallen out of the habit and out of practice.  You’re also now denying yourself a journal’s many benefits.  Yes, you kept secret “event”-type journals about each of your children’s activities as they grew, and gave the journals to them when they became adults.  Yes, you’ve kept “log”-type journals of writing progress, including daily word counts and submission status.  Yes, you still keep a computer file of story plot ideas that occur to you.  And yes, you write this blog.

But you’re not doing the type of journaling that could improve your writing.  You should keep a private writer’s journal, Steve, and in David Letterman style, here are the Top Ten reasons why:

10.  If you keep your journal in your computer it can be multimedia, including video clips and digital images.

9.  A journal can be a handy place to track your writing progress, by noting word-count per day, and by noting what stories you submitted to which markets, and what the response was.  This particular journal use is so important, I’ll devote a future blog post to it.

8.  You’ll remember things better.  The brain stores stuff in one place when you sense it, another place when you talk about it, and another place when you write it.  That “wet computer” between your ears is pretty good about cross-linking such storage places, so writing a journal will improve memory, whether or not you review previous entries.

7.  It’s a place to note things you may use in your writing — bits of dialogue, descriptions of people, gestures, facial expressions, descriptions of settings, and interesting words.  When you encounter anything of interest during the day, note it in your own words.  If you like the way some other writer phrased things, write that in quotes and note the source; you can paraphrase, but not plagiarize.

6.  Within the journal, you can find out which ideas don’t work.  Admit it, some ideas only seem wonderful when you first think of them in the shower.  Once you write them down, these great-sounding thoughts about plots, characters, settings, and scenes have now picked up some unsightly warts.  Good thing you found that out before going too far with a dumb idea.

5. You can use the journal to solve story problems with such aspects as plot, character, motivation, hook, and the “so-what? problem.”  In the private idea space of your journal, you can clarify the problem, brainstorm possible solutions, and examine each potential solution until best one emerges.  You can use mind maps in your journal to do this.  (I promise to write a blog entry about the use of mind maps to help your writing.)

4.  The act of keeping a journal instills a measure of self-discipline about writing.  Every time you walk into the room where the journal is (if you use the book-type handwritten journal) you’ll feel guilty if you haven’t written in it that day. Once the habit forms, it will nag your conscience until you make your daily entry.

3.  The journal is a safe place to write, a “word sanctuary” where there are no criticisms, no nasty reviews.  There you are free to roam with your muse discovering and charting regions of thought not suitable (yet) for public commentary.

2.  Journal-writing helps hone the process of capturing thoughts into words.  And that’s what a writer is all about.  You might learn to write with greater clarity and focus.  After all, it’s a private journal; there’s no need to write in a fancy, confusing, or euphemistic way.

And, Steve, the number 1 reason you should keep a writer’s journal is…

1.  By exploring your inner feelings in a private journal, you might increase your self-awareness.  It’s said that Gnôthi Seauton was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, meaning “Know Thyself.” If you probe deeper into yourself and combine that knowledge with a better ability to convert thoughts to words, it should make you a better writer.

Perhaps you readers of this blog can comment on other reasons for keeping a writer’s journal, or about your experiences with journaling.  Excuse me now while I go make a journal entry.  Signing off here, I’m–

                                                          Poseidon’s Scribe

November 6, 2011Permalink