Time once again for our round up of online writing classes and workshops happening in November. If you’re not participating in NaNoWriMo, sign up for one of these low-cost classes and learn something about writing this month.

Surviving Trauma – Learn the characteristics of resiliency and the secrets of survival from numerous case studies of individuals who have survived violent trauma including concentration camps in Germany, genocide in Rwanda, violent crime, spinal injury, childhood abuse, etc.

Ignite Your Fiction – Learn how to examine and write succinct, vivid examples of Exposition, Description, Narration/Summary, and Action-Dialogue. The concept of pacing in character and plot will be stressed as well as development of the writer’s own “voice.”

Mastering Point of View – How truly understanding and mastering point of view can fix an ailing manuscript, and turn a decent but lackluster novel into a page-turner.

Scottish Castles of the 12th and 13th Centuries – Learn about the castles, king and court, the nobility, and calendar feasts and pastimes.

The “W” Plot…or The Other White Meat for Plotters – Learn how to use the “W” plotting technique tol uncover the skeleton of your own novel. Whatever your genre, not only will you have the tools you need to finish plotting your story using the “W”, you’ll know how to use it to write the synopsis we all love to hate…all without writing one word of the novel.

Breaking Procedural Rules – Learn the facts about legal procedures and how they can go awry, including how to stir in entrapment, illegal searches, tainted evidence, tampered juries, and badgered witnesses.

Inner Drives: Create Characters Using the Centers of Motivation (Chakras) – Each physical-psychological-philosophical Chakra has unique hopes, fears, strengths, weakness, actions, speech styles, and more that you can use to define and explore your characters.

Fiction to Freelance Writing – Discover how writing articles can boost their writing career regardless of their publishing status. Get insider tips on how to research a publication’s slant, learn the secrets of twisting a topic to generate great article ideas, where to find the perfect markets for those ideas and the easy (and painless, honest!) way to create the perfect query letter.

Day in the Life: Archaeologists – Learn about the difference between contract work, academia, and wwashbuckling; the basic steps in what to do if you want to dig something; the importance of permission and ethics (no Indiana Jones-style looting); how to interpret archaeological sites from the ground up.

Heightening Conflict Through the Fatal Flaw & Shadow – Learn how the “triangle” technique can unveil your character’s suppressed or shadow traits, which will emerge as the character struggles to overcome a deeply hidden flaw.

Online Critique Group – Receive feedback on six crucial components (concept, character development, plot, narrative, dialogue and research) of whatever you’re currently writing with the goal of helping you continue the development/rewrite process independently.

NaNo’s approaching rapidly and I’ve got some fun links for you.

The Writertopia Progress Meter. There are two available; get the second one with the writer. You can use it to set your “mood” to illustrate how your writing is going.

If you like to do timed writings, try the Online-Stopwatch. You can do a count down or a count up. For extreme fun, try the Bomb Countdown.

Need some plot ideas for your novel? Try the 36 (plus one) Dramatic Situations for some twisty ideas.

Draw a Basic Mind Map of Your Character with guidance form Deborah Woehr.

How about a Timeline Generator for your fantasy or science fiction novel?

If you need details on a religion, try the God Checker featuring over 2,850 deities.

If you need a break from writing, there’s nothing better than fun with Sticky Notes?

By Holly Lisle

If I ask you to tell me about your character, and you tell me his name is John and he’s 27, tall, blond, and muscular…I’m outta your book. Gone. You have told me NOTHING that MATTERS. Who is this person you want me to pay my money to meet? He’s not going to be a tall, blond balloon if I’m going to buy him.

And you’re not going to sell that big young nothing to a publisher, either. You’re selling characters. If we’re going to call them characters, they have to have some.

Character, that is.

You’ll pitch your book with what I call The Sentence. You have less than thirty words to convey the highlights of your story idea so anyone can follow and understand it. In that one sentence, you will describe the main situation of the book, your protagonist, your antagonist, and why I should care about what you’re writing—the thing that makes your story matter. Call it your twist.

Your protagonist—your main character—is critical to The Sentence. You have about three words in The Sentence to nail him. No name, no physical description—just…character. You get to character through questions like:

• Who are the people who shaped his life? (His friends, his enemies, his lovers, his family.)
• What drives him? (Examine his desires, needs, fears, and struggles.)
• What is his occupation? (Examine his job, his hobbies, his goals and plans.)

Here’s what you’re trying to get. Start with Blond John the Empty Skin Suit. Is he a husband, father, or brother? A CEO, a carpenter, a sailor? What one noun describing him is MOST important to your story? Use that. And then… what’s he like? Driven, obsessive, pursued by villains, haunted by his past? Blond nothing becomes pursued father, haunted carpenter, obsessed brother…and suddenly we care. We want to know how he’s haunted, what’s pursuing him, why he’s obsessed. When you can get us to care, you have us where you want us.

So keep going. You bring your antagonist to life using the same set of questions. Every story has an antagonist, though not every story has a villain. The antagonist wants things that stand in the way of what the protagonist—the hero—wants or needs. Whether you have a true villain who wants to destroy the hero or a sympathetic antagonist caught on the opposite side of an impossible situation is up to you. But what stands between them has to matter. It has to be important. And it can’t be just one big misunderstanding—because if you pull that garbage on us, we’ll never pick up another book by you.

You’ll build your characters in layers, one question at a time. Eventually you’ll ask yourself “What’s this character’s name? What does he look like?” But before then, you’ll have learned who his is, and why he is that person—which is the part of any of us that actually matters. When you know the answers to those two questions, and when your answers matter, you’ll have a character worth writing.

You can do this.

——————

For more information on how to bring your characters to life by focusing on their specific extraordinary qualities, sign up for How to Think Sideways, a 6-month course on writing that will stimulate your Muse and guide you through getting your Muse to perform on demand.

This course, delivered in weekly lessons, includes:

• Monthly video that covers the month’s main topic
• Weekly lessons with assignments
• Weekly technique demonstrations
• Monthly checklist of all steps to take
• A monthly Q&A made up of questions taken from the course forums
• Private workgroups (optional)
• Class discussion forum to interact with other students

I’ve taken the How to Think Sideways course myself and loved it. It gave me insights into my plot and characters that I had never expected. It helped me take my writing to the next level. It can do the same for you.

But… (you knew there was a catch, right?) it’s only available for a very limited time. It’s closing to new students on Friday, October 9th. In the future, the course will only be made available twice a year, the next one being sometime in 2010. To enroll now, go to How to Think Sideways.

Invest in yourself and your writing this year.

If you write mysteries or any type of police procedural, here’s a useful article for you. It provides examples of how the FBI and other law enforcement officials analyze a suspect’s written statement to see what it reveals.

For example, in a case of a missing person, it is normal to describe the person using the present tense. “Jenny always comes right home after school.”

Making a statement about the missing person in past tense may indicate that the suspect already knows what happened to the missing person. “Jenny always came right home after school,” might indicate that the suspect knows Jenny is already dead.

The numerous examples given in the article will provide realistic words you can put in your characters’ mouths to prove their innocence or guilt.

February 13th is Get a Different Name Day. It was created by the folks at www.wellcat.com.

Most of us had no say in the name our parents gave us. We’re stuck with whatever they thought was cool, interesting, or appropriate at our birth. And that has resulted in some people who hate the names they were given.

Children of celebrity parents often seem to get saddled with the strangest names.

• Atticus, son of Casey Affleck & Summer Phoenix (actors)
• Bronx Mowgli Wentz, son of Ashlee Simpson (singer) & Pete Wentz (Musician, Fall Out Boy)
• Ignatius Martin Upton, son of Cate Blanchett (actor)
• Jagger Joseph Blue Goldberg, daughter of Soleil Moon-Frye (actor)
• Taa-Jah, daughter of Sarah McLachlan (singer)
• Ptolemy John , son of Gretchen Mol (actor) & Kip Williams (director)
• Jagger Song Scallions, child of Brett Scallions (Fuel) & Abby Gennet (MTV VJ)

As writers, we share the ultimate power of parents. We are responsible for the naming of our characters.

Some great resources for finding the perfect name for your character:

Name Nerds

20,000 Names

Fantasy Name Generator

Social Security Administration

I’ve had it! I’ve had enough of this crap and it ends here. I refuse to deal with this any longer and changes are going to happen. Big changes. Massive changes, because this is totally unacceptable!

I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!

Does your main character feel this strongly about anything in your story? If he or she doesn’t, you’ve got a problem. You main character should be passionately outraged about something. Fiercely irate. Livid and ready to do whatever it takes to make things right.

If your main character can ignore the situation and just walk away with no consequences… you’ve got work to do. Give your character something to fight for, something that she must set right… or die in the trying.

Celebrate “I’m Not Going to Take It Anymore Day” (yes, that’s today) and give your character something to be furious about.

Belinda aka Worderella offers up Five Tips on Character Building through Adversity .

1. Physical Adversity – nobody goes through life untouched by illness or accidents, whether it is to themselves or someone they know and love. Give your character a touch of realism by including a physical or mental illness or family history.

2. Unfulfilled Desire – nobody gets everything they want out of life, either. Give your character a lingering desire for something they can’t have.

3. Haunting Past – you can give your character regrets for something he did or for something he didn’t do. Give your character horrific memories of the death of a loved one.

My mother died slowly of cancer. The doctor told us there would be certain signs that indicated death would occur within hours. My sister called me at work when she saw those signs. I decided to stay at work because I had a vendor coming in for a presentation that afternoon. My mom died an hour later. I could have been there to say goodbye one last time, but I wasn’t. I still have a lot of guilt over that. Does your character carry any trauma or guilt from her past?

4. Counter-culture Tendencies – if you heroine has thoughts and action that run contrary to her culture (time period, belief system, family morals), use the frustration and anger she feels as part of your plot. Show her struggling to achieve her goals in the face of opposition.

5. Worderella’s last piece of advice is to surprise yourself and your character. While this doesn’t seem to initially fit with torturing your character, think of it this way–people are mean, rude, and self-centered much of the time. Take an easy situation where your character could logically expect a good outcome (ordering a coffee from Starbucks) and turn it on its head (the server intentionally spills it all over your character and insists it was your character’s fault, refusing to get her another one).

Okay, it’s kind of far-fetched… but what can you do with the “normal” moments in your story, to make them more challenging for your character?

How do you torture your characters?

The key to winning NaNo is speed. You need to be able to sit down and bang out scene after scene. For me, that means good planning in October. I start with my characters.

I have an idea for my novel this year. It’s a story that I’ve already written about half way through, but I’m going to rework it completely. I have about ten characters already defined but I’m taking a close look at them again to be sure they serve the story I want to tell.

To start the planning process I want to define high-level personalities for my characters. I’m going to use the personality profiles in Character Creation Made Easy as a short-cut to get started. I want a base personality type for each character, major and minor. It gives me a handle on how they’ll react in their scenes. Even the walk-on characters need something to distinguish them from every other character.

For the minor characters, I’ll stop with just a base personality and a small amount of background to explain why they’re in the story and what they want (everybody wants something). For major characters I need more background and most important, motivations and goals for each one. For those, I’ll go back to Character Creation Made Easy as my starting point. Once I have an idea of the base motivation and story goals for each, I’ll switch to the Create a Character Clinic. It does a great job of leading you through a series of questions that explore different aspects of the character’s life – Work & Play, Past, Present & Future, Friends, Enemies & Lovers, Life & Death, Culture, Religion & Education, and Moral Stance. Working through some of the questions in each section gives me great detail on my major characters. I can then use the material for plot ideas also, but we’ll cover that in the next post.

So, to prepare for NaNo, start with your characters. Get a good handle on them so you know what they want and how they’ll react when you throw alligators and obstacles at them.

Have writer friends who might enjoy this post? Send it to them with my compliments! And add me as a writing buddy at nanowrimo.org so I can follow your progress in November!

About a month ago, we had some severe thunderstorms roll through the area, taking down tree limbs right and left. Many limbs that managed to stay connected to their trees are bent down and touching the ground, making mowing my yard a challenging exercise. (Ants in the hair, anyone?)

I have options, of course. I could call a tree service to trim up all the limbs. I could trim them up myself (if the chainsaw worked better). Or I could leave them and keep mowing into and around them.

What I really want though, is for the storms to have not come through and the tree limbs to be in their normal positions, high off the ground. Then I wouldn’t be dealing with any of this–not the decision, or the phone call or the work to trim them up and haul away the debris.

In Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One & Never Lets Them Go Les Edgerton mentions this desire.

Of course, what people really want–both in fiction and in real life–when a significant problem arises, is for the problem never to have happened in the first place. This is our true goal. To figure out a way to turn back time, to make it so the disaster never occurred. Think about your own life. Perhaps you were cheated on by someone you loved desperately. Wasn’t your first thought that you wished it was still last Thursday, the day before you learned of his infidelity? Wasn’t your second thought that you wished you’d never found out?

We can’t turn back time (unless you’re writing science fiction and are using time travel as a story device), but the desire to return to the world before the problem, or at least a world that doesn’t have the problem any more, is one that each of us experiences in the face of a devastating problem.

Your characters feel the same way. If you’re looking for a quick way to motivate your character (or plot your novel), have something devastating happen and then let the character work toward a world that doesn’t have the problem any more.

What quick methods of character motivation or plotting do you use?

The last piece in the Character puzzle is Attitude. You may wonder why attitude is included in the Appearance section. You can see what the character looks like. You can see where the character lives and how her living space is laid out and decorated. You can’t see an attitude. Or can you?

Attitude is the character’s consistent disposition or dominant impression. Say you’ve got a friend, Robbie. And he is Mr. Bad News. No matter what happens, he can put a negative spin on it. It could be your birthday and he’d mutter, “Another year gone that you’re never getting back.” He usually has a somber expression, more frown than anything. He walks slowly, his shoulders hunched as if waiting for someone to hit him. He squints a bit with a permanent crease between his eyes.

Do you see Robbie’s attitude? Yep, it’s Negativity. He exudes it in how he stands, walks, everything he says, even how he says it.

Figuring out your character’s attitude will give you a handle on how that character moves through each scene in your story. It gives you a starting place for what a character might say or do in response to the story events.

To select an attitude for your character, take a look at the character’s personality. Is there an element there that provides a dominant impression for your character? Perhaps her analytical tendencies have become a compulsion and she analyzes everything and everyone around her.

Look at your character’s history. What life events have shaped him and how does he feel about them? Did a bad childhood leave her with a timid disposition or a chip on her shoulder? Is the world her rose garden or is today just another ho hum day?

Find the attitude that your character wears day in and day out and use it to make your character memorable.

And this brings us to the end of the Character Creation Made Easy series. I hope you enjoyed it and found some tools that will help you create your next character.

Have a suggestion for a writing series you’d like to see? Leave me a note in the comments. I love a challenge!