End of Month Wrap-Up: May

12:58 PM Gemma Fitz 2 Comments


WHAT??? May is over already??? I feel faint.

And it's already behaving like summer over here-- step outside for five seconds and you're steamed. I don't like summer. WHERE DID SPRING GO??? Oh, that's right-- spring doesn't exist here.

Anyway, the month is basically over, whether I like it or not, which means it's time for a quick wrap-up. Here it is. You're welcome.

On the Blog

At My Writing Desk

  • I was assaulted by an army of evil plot bunnies with plans to take over the world and my brain by degrees.
  • I continued rewriting Splitting Atoms.
...
Yeah right, who am I kidding? I did hardly any rewriting-- the plot bunnies hauled me off captive, bound hand and foot, and there were only a few instances where I wriggled free of my bonds and got some writing done on my WIP.
Enjoy a gif of evil plot bunnies hauling me off to evil-plot-bunny-land.
BUT THIS MONTH I PROMISE!!! I WILL FINISH IT!!!

In the Books

I read 6 books this month, which wasn't as many as I was hoping, but more than usual. Maybe with summer upon us the pace will pick up a bit. I continued my YA adventure, and while I didn't find exactly what I was looking for, I did end up liking more of the books than I did last month. Here's my Goodreads, where you can see what I read and what I thought, if you feel like it.

Also,

On the Web

With Me and My Life

  • I FINALLY GOT TO THE ELEVENTH DOCTOR (in Doctor Who) AND ADJFLDKJF!!!! I miss Ten, though. And Nine, actually.
  • Summer is here, which means I'm miserable and hot and achy from working too hard yesterday.
  • Some family members played instruments at a Benefit Concert this month, and I missed all their pieces and most of the other performers, because I was stuck outside with a screaming nephew. I was not happy.
    Me for two hours.

Coming Soon to the Blog

  • I've got a good friend, Lily Lindsey-Aubrey, scheduled to do a blog post about no-win scenarios in fiction.
  • I'm considering either posting about my WIP or putting up a page to house my current writing projects. What do you think?
  • I'm going to find out how to schedule posts with blogger. I WILL DO IT!!!!
So that's the month!

How did your month go? Quick poll: do you or do you not like summer? And what do you want to see on the blog this June? I'm kinda stuck for ideas at the moment, but I'll get over it.

2 comments:

I adore comments! Just keep it clean and respectful...please no profanity and while I respect people's opinions and love a good argument, simply bashing my post is obviously not appreciated. :)

3 Secret Ingredients to Creating Characters You Love

12:33 PM Gemma Fitz 2 Comments

Lately, I've been rewriting the novel I drafted for NaNo back in November. Diving into the edits back in April, I was painfully aware of the many problems that needed fixing. One of these was my main character. I simply didn't like her.
As part of the writing community, we hear a lot about "strong leads" and "proactive characters". But all the strength and pro-activity in the world won't make our characters worthwhile if we, as the authors, don't love them. What makes a character great is the passion and care that the author puts into him. If we don't love our characters, the readers can tell-- trust me. And it usually results in either a "why do I care?" feeling, or an anger at the author for playing favourites with his characters.

So it's important to love our characters. But what if we just don't? (This may sound stupid to some of you-- why would I be writing this story in the first place if I don't love my characters?-- but some of us really do struggle with. If you don't, kudos to you. You probably don't need to bother reading this post.) What can we do to make ourselves fall in love with our characters, when in reality they're not all that lovable? We fix the character, of course!

Haha. Easier said than done. So I'm here to help with 3 secret ingredients you can add to spice up your character. These have been tested-- they worked for me, turning a lump of boring, annoying personality traits into one of my best friends. That being said, if you try them all and still hate your character, I will humbly accept your blame. (But if that's the case, maybe you just need to drop-kick that charrie out of your story.)

1. A piece of yourself.

You've probably heard this one before, and your character may already have it. But if he doesn't, you need to pour some in right now.

Think about your friends. Why was it you developed relationships with these people? Chances are it was because you had something in common: a hobby, a fandom, or, if nothing else, possibly age. If you didn't have anything in common, you wouldn't have anything to talk about-- unless you were both the sort of people who love to argue, in which case, you had that in common!
It's important that you have something in common with your characters, something you can understand and identify with.

2. A piece of someone you love.

Think about your favourite character, your best friend, or your closest family member. What do you admire about each of them?

When I was trying to make Avis, my MC, more likable, I sat down and thought of all my favourite female characters in books, movies, and tv shows, the people I admired most: people like Martha Jones from Doctor Who, Ella from Cinderella, and Idril Celebrindal from the Silmarillion. Before long, I realized that they all had three things in common: they were smart, strong, and selfless.

Pick a few of the qualities that the people you admire share, and make them defining traits in your characters' personalities. It could be a sarcastic sense of humour, an eternally positive attitude, or an ability to take charge in any given situation. Whatever it is, take it and run with it.

Note: You probably admire a lot of people, and they may be very, very different. It helps if you take a small number of people who are most like your character and look for their defining traits. For instance, I love Maria Hill, but she in no way resembled Avis, so I didn't bother trying to give Avis the traits I admired in Hill.

3. A piece of something you value.

I'm an extroverted feeler, and I highly value people and relationships. Stories where the protagonist has to learn to "believe in himself" in order to accomplish his goal don't ring true to me. I can believe in myself all I want and still fail. What do ring true to me are stories where one person isn't enough in himself-- where it takes other people to get him through to the end. That's why Avis is team oriented: she needs people, and she's knows it's important to help people as well.

What's something you value? It might be anything: peace, honesty, nature. Don't be afraid to make that a part of your character.

When your character is made up of things you care about-- yourself, your friends, your beliefs-- it's hard to feel disinterested or apathetic. You have to care. You have to relate. You have to love.

But before I fade out, I just need to say one more thing. Don't let what's "popular" and "safe" dictate your characters. Because if you just make your character into the type of person you think your reader will like, but don't particularly care for yourself, it shows. Write characters that you love, even if you think that they'll get lost among the Katniss Everdeens and Tony Starks. It's more important that you love them, even then that your readers do.

What are some things that get you fangirling over your characters? Have you ever tried taking characteristics from your favourite characters and giving them to your own? Do you think that's plagiarism (because if it is, I'd better get running from the law...)? What are some things you value which are woven into your characters? I want to know EVERYTHING (and yes, that was just the slightest bit creepy, sorry).

2 comments:

I adore comments! Just keep it clean and respectful...please no profanity and while I respect people's opinions and love a good argument, simply bashing my post is obviously not appreciated. :)

Doing Defines You: Using Relationships to Reveal Your Characters

7:38 AM Gemma Fitz 4 Comments

Recently, I watched Fellowship of the Rings for what was probably the 80 millionth time. Of all the Middle Earth movies, the Fellowship is my favourite, and very close to my heart. I'm the first to admit that objectively Return of the King was the best, and Two Towers had the most Smeagol, so, ya know, that means it's pretty awesome. But I still like Fellowship best, and watching it again, I realized why.

It's all about relationships.

With the Fellowship, we get nine characters stuck travelling with each other. Some of them are on friendly terms, others... not so friendly. We've got a huge variety of personality types and cultural backgrounds, which results in an even huger variety of relationships. And the whole movie long we get to watch these relationships in play, more so than in the other movies.

(It's also got Boromir, so I mean... how can it NOT be everyone's favourite?)

I think often as writers, we forget the power of relationships. Oh yeah, we give our character a girl/boyfriend, a friend or two, and sometimes a family, but we forget that ultimately, it's how we interact with other people which really defines who we are.

You can tell basically anything about a person from the way they act around other people, if you pay attention. We can guess Boromir is the eldest child in his family long before we meet Faramir by the way he supports and protects the other companions... much like an older brother would. We knew that Elves and Dwarves aren't on friendly terms before Hobbit came out and explained their rivalry, because we saw the way Legolas and Gimli treated each other.

It doesn't just stop with the externals, either. We can make some pretty good guesses as to their personalities and the way they see the world, too. We can tell that Aragorn believes men are weak by the way he treats Boromir and even himself. Are you familiar with the Meyers-Briggs Personality Types? We can deduce that Boromir is an F(eeler) and Aragorn is a T(hinker), simply by watching the way they interact with each other and the other members of the Fellowship.
Give them a moment, for pity's sake! 
(And yes, I'm talking way too much about Boromir in this post. But seriously!!! This guy!!!)

As writers, we tend to pay more attention to what characters are inside. We emphasise their mental or emotional turmoil by climbing inside their heads and hearts and digging it out to show the reader. We investigate every inch of our characters' thoughts and feelings from our nice little inside view. And that's totally cool. Readers love the emotional attachment that comes from being inside a character's head and seeing the world through their eyes.

But ultimately it's not about what a certain character thinks or feels. It's about how he acts, how he treats those around him.
This gif sums it up well.
Think about it. In Age of Ultron, Ultron is trying to accomplish world peace in his time. That's a worthy goal, right? In fact, even though the movie was about the Avengers, the writers made Ultron a very believable and relatable character, whom the audience could sympathise with. His motivation was largely good, and he had a lot of believable emotional turmoil. Underneath, he might seem like a good person.

But his actions tell a different story. He tries to kill the Avengers, everywhere he goes, he leaves casualties, and then we find out that his plan for world peace is more like world destruction. Not such a good person after all.

It's important that you show what the character does and how he interacts with others, not just what he feels like inside. A person in a historical novel who believes all men are created equal and that the slave trade is wrong, but acts nasty and superior to all those he comes in contact with, still isn't a nice person. We learn most from the relationships. Show us how they treat other people, and we'll know what they're like.

Make the most of the relationships. They're not just there for feels and flails. They have a purpose. Use them to their full potential.

What do your characters' relationships tell about them? Am I just reading way to much into this relationship thing? Which is your favourite Middle Earth movie? Isn't Boromir just the greatest? What did you think of Age of Ultron?

4 comments:

I adore comments! Just keep it clean and respectful...please no profanity and while I respect people's opinions and love a good argument, simply bashing my post is obviously not appreciated. :)

10 Books I Want to Read in 2015

8:48 AM Gemma Fitz 2 Comments

Recently I posted about the problems with teen fiction and talked about how I've been having trouble finding good books. And then Aimee@To the Barricade! wrote a post about YA books that need to be a thing and I got started thinking about good books that I'd like to see out there. So this is kind of a follow up post for my post about teen fiction, where I tell you what I really want to see in the big world of teen literature. A lot of these books probably already exist. I haven't read them yet, but I'll be on the hunt for them this year.

Books which deal with health, mental, and personality problems.

I suffer from Lyme's disease, and I would dearly love to read a book about someone who struggles with what I struggle with. Also things like narcissism, borderline personality disorder, bi-polar depression, schizophrenia, OCD, and avoidant personality disorder. Firstly, these kinds of problems are fascinating to read about. Secondly, I can relate to characters that struggle with them. I may not technically be a narcissist, but I have narcissistic qualities which help me relate with narcissistic characters. I don't have avoidant personality disorder, but I have two sisters who have it or something very close to it and I can understand the struggle. And thirdly, people like this need a voice. We need to know what they feel like.

Books with extroverted leads/protagonists.

If you run down the list of extroverted protagonists in popular books and movies, it's a short list. The Doctor, Megamind, a few others (though I admit I'm not that familiar with popular books, so there might be more than I think). It makes sense. A majority of authors are introverts. Extroverts are becoming more and more stereotyped as obnoxious, abrasive people. But really guys, we're cool!! One episode of Doctor Who or ten minutes of Megamind and you know that. We can be really fun and fascinating. And we need more characters we can relate to.

Books where the protagonist isn't a selfish jerk.

In particular, in the area of YA dystopians, where the protagonist doesn't assume his/her life is more valuable than anybody else's. It really bugs me that survival is more important in so many books than mercy or integrity. We have Hunger Games, where teens are killing each other in order to survive, and Divergent, where *SPOILERS* Tris is willing to kill one of her closest friends because he's being mind controlled and is going to kill her if she doesn't *END SPOILERS*. That bugs me because it's morally wrong. You don't kill innocent people... kids, really... just so you'll survive. I want a hero who would rather die than kill an innocent human in cold blood. That's a real hero.

Books about dreaming.

As a huge Inception fan, I'm obsessed with the dream world and the possibilities for writing. I mean, if you're dreaming, anything can happen! The possibilities are beautiful and endless. I need more books about dreaming. I've got a plot bunny for a book about dreaming, but you could write billions of dream books and still not exhaust the possibilities. I really want to read some.

Books about big families.

Now hear me out, I'm not saying "books where the story is all about this huge family", or "books that deal with the problems and joys of being in a big family" or whatever else. I've read books like that, and I'm usually not a fan... just bored. I mean exciting adventure or fantasy or sci-fi or spy-fi or mystery books where the protagonist is actually trying to do something and, oh, by the way, he's from a really big family, and that's totally okay and cool and no big deal, but turns out there's no way he'd make it through the story and survive if it weren't that way. I want it. Now.

Books without romance.

I don't like romance. I especially don't like romance when they're twelve. It's always like a breath of fresh air to read a book where guys and girls are just friends and no more, or, depending on age, the guys and the girls totally ignore each other and don't really mingle. Not that every story can be that way, but I want to read more of them.

Books where the protagonist doesn't get the girl.

This is so cool and sad and satisfying. There need to be more books like this and I need to read them.

Books about Asian people.

I don't mean just Asian people, either, I mean Asian people who think and act like Asian people and who are really weird and funny and sometimes annoying. 'Cause Asians are really, super weird, which can easily translate to cool if you write it right. Plus, I'm a quarter Asian (Japanese, to be specific), so I always feel nostalgic when reading about Asians.

Books where the characters disagree and are friends.

You can't be friends with someone who disagrees with you!! Or if you are, you're constantly fighting about it and eventually one of you 'sees the light'. I want books where everyone has differing opinions... on politics, sports, religion, moral standards, etc and it's no big deal. Maybe the characters argue about certain things sometimes, but it doesn't turn into a huge fight, and those opinions don't necessarily change.

Books about superheroes.

I love superhero movies, but I haven't actually read a superhero book. I want to, though. I want to very bad. I'm even plotting one to write, but I'd like to read one first.

What books do you want to read this year? Do you have any book recommendations for me?

2 comments:

I adore comments! Just keep it clean and respectful...please no profanity and while I respect people's opinions and love a good argument, simply bashing my post is obviously not appreciated. :)

What's the Deal With Teen Fiction? 7 Common Mistakes in the YA Genre

5:47 AM Gemma Fitz 4 Comments

Recently, I've been on the hunt for YA novels, since I'm writing one myself and always find reading in the same genre I'm writing in inspiring. This is really the first time I've looked into the genre. I hadn't read Hunger Games or Twilight or The Fault In Our Stars or any of the other famous (or infamous) books out there for kids my age today, so it's really a whole new world for me. And I can't say I'm impressed.
I was going to make this post into a book review, but I'm awful at book reviews, and it was just turning into a rant about how bad the book was. Instead, I'll be discussing some of the glaring problems I found in the YA genre in general, and I'll use some of the books I read as examples.

So what are the most common problems I found?

Annoying Main Character

I think Celaena (Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas) wins the prize for the most Mary-Sue-ish character I have ever come across (and believe me, I've read a lot of Mary-Sues). Of course she's unbelievably gorgeous and unbelievably macho at the same time and has a weird name, but worse still is her point of view, which is what made me put down the book just a few chapters in.

For one thing, she never stops thinking about guys, or how pretty she is. In some of the first chapters she's talking to a guy whom she supposedly hates (at least the narrator keeps saying she does), and yet her thoughts the entire conversation are bent on how handsome (and evil) he is and whether he thinks she's pretty. I was just sitting there and thinking, "Why do you care? You ought to care more about getting out of your enslavement than whether or not he's disgusted by how dirty you are."

And let's not forget her bratty attitude and the fact that she acts like a victim when it's her criminal acts (assassination, people) that got her stuck as a slave in the first place.I quickly decided that I did not want to spend an entire book stuck in this girl's head and moved on to a different book.

Make your characters likeable--and by likeable, I don't mean pretty and macho. That's cliche, not likeable. Make them people we can relate to and care about. Don't make them murderers, for a start, unless you're really certain you can pull it off. Don't say they're "strong" and then make them do nothing but whine.

Unpleasant Content

They were...rather horrible, lingering lovingly over sights and smells which everyone is aware of, but most people contrive to forget. -Huntingtower, by John Buchan
I quit a few paragraphs into the first chapter of Red Rising by Pierce Brown, simply because the narrator seemed to have an unexplained obsession with rather nasty things. He started out with sweat, which, while I don't object to, I derive no pleasure from reading about (I don't enjoy sweating--it's inconvenient and nasty feeling--so when a book reminds me what sweat feels like, I don't enjoy that either), and then he moved on to even more unpleasant things, which I had no desire to hear about. I've heard a lot of great things about that book, but I didn't feel like hanging around until the good parts, because the first couple paragraphs completely killed it.

We all know about how our bodies work. You have to be really immature to think that it's funny. You have to be really desperate to think it'll interest us. My advice: just leave it out.

Plotholes

Of all the YA novels I've read so far, the one I probably liked most was The Maze Runner by James Dashner. But even it wasn't without its issues. Like all the unexplained coincidences which just happened to make things easier/harder for the characters.

For instance, why did the Grievers play dead near the beginning? If the Grievers could climb the walls, why couldn't they get into the farm? How did Gally know that the Grievers would only take one boy a night?

Admittedly, I've only read the first book so far, and some of these questions may be answered later in the series (but a friend of mine who's read the next two books says that the first two questions, at least, weren't answered).

Have you thought your plot points through? Make sure everything works together and makes sense or you'll have some very frustrated readers.

Bad Romance

Reading Divergent by Veronica Roth was probably the worst decision of my life. If I could erase one book from my memory, that would be the one. It was trash on a multitude of levels, but the one that stuck out the most was the romance.

Several times throughout the story I found myself thinking "Wait...why does she like him?". Tris mentioned that Four was handsome several times. He touched her once and she was all like "Oooooh, he touched me, I'm in luuuuuuv!!". But there was no actual foundation for a relationship. She didn't even find out what his personality was like until after she "fell in love". If their relationship was portrayed as a crush, this would make sense, but instead it was treated like a real, lasting relationship (at least before I quit, eight chapters to the end of the first book). You can't base a lifelong relationship on physical attraction alone. Especially when you're sixteen and have never had a handsome guy look in your direction before (cause guess what, you're gonna meet a lot more handsome guys in your lifetime, and--le gaspe--some of them might even touch you!!).
Plus, the whole thing was just gross. I'm an anti-hopeless-romantic, so I'm biased, but I felt like it was sappy and overdone. If you've read it, maybe you know what I mean. If you haven't, I honestly don't even know how to describe it.

Pare down the sap, and please make sure you've got a good basis for the attraction.

Mature Material

I desperately wanted to like Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. The premise captivated me, it was about a guy, and, reading the first chapter, I even fell in love with one of the characters. I wanted to like that book so much that I pushed through all the way to the second chapter, but after that, I couldn't keep going. What killed it? Um, guys, can we please not swear so much??

Some authors (and readers...and people in general) seem to think that swearing and other mature material is "cool" or maybe "realistic", and since it's for teens, supposedly they can get away with it. But when I read a book, I want to be edified, not have my mind pumped full of garbage.

There are plenty of people who won't mind if you put mature material in your book. Just keep in mind that you will be losing some portion of your potential audience if you put too much of that sort of thing in. (You may be losing part of your audience if you don't put it in, too--I wouldn't know. Personally, I don't care if that type of person doesn't read my books anyway.)

Overly Original

By "overly original", what I really mean is "obviously someone was trying to be original, but either he failed or it just ended up being cheesy", like, for example, in Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment by James Patterson.

First, we have a main character named Maximum Ride. Oh yeah, you don't get much more obviously-trying-to-be-original than that. But what really got to me were the *scary music* Erasers. Erasers.

Okay, so first off, that just gives me a weird mental image of someone being chased by giant jumping rubber erasers. But when you add to that the fact that the reported "Erasers" are pretty much exactly the same thing as werewolves (part man, part wolf, evil, um...where's the difference?), you've got me floored. They're werewolves, dude. Call it what it is. (Or at very least make them part man, part skunk, so that you've made up something new which deserves a new name.)

Originality is great. Please be original. But please don't insult my intelligence or make yourself a laughing stock. You can over do this, people.

Cliffhangers

My most recent adventure was Variant by Robison Wells. While it was far from perfect, I actually enjoyed this one, just so that's out there. But the ending was a disappointment. Lots of threads left hanging, and a rather dramatic cliffhanger.

Hear me out on this: I'm not saying all cliffhangers are bad. Some cliffhangers can be really cool. But if your cliffhanger's main purpose is to drag the reader into the next book in the series, that's just cheap. It feels like you're manipulating me into buying your next book, and I don't like being manipulated.

There are many better ways to get people to read your next book. Great characters, setting, and writing will do it. Some hinting at future possibilities is fine. But don't drag me kicking and screaming from one book to another.
This is often a problem, too.
The thing with cliffhangers is that they don't make you work hard enough. Anyone can write a cliffhanger, but you have to work hard to create lovable characters, an intriguing setting, a beautiful writing style, and mind blowing foreshadowing. Your readers deserve your hard work. Don't be cheap.

I gave a single example for each of these points, but don't think that there's only one book with these mistakes. Divergent could have been placed under 'Annoying Main Character', Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment could have gone with 'Cliffhangers', The Maze Runner could have gone with 'Overly Original', and so on. Lots of teen books have lots of these problems.

But I'm convinced they don't have to. I'm convinced you can write a good teen book. In fact, I'm convinced that there are some great teen books out there, which I just haven't read yet (because Maze Runner and Variant, while enjoyable, weren't exactly what I'd call great). These are my seven pet peeves of the genre, but I'm convinced someone could write a book without a single one of them (okay, maybe except for the plot holes).

Could you?

So, do you agree with my observations? Did I bash all your favourite books? Do you like cliffhangers? Sappy romance? Celaena? What are some of your pet peeves when it comes to YA books? Are you going to accept my challenge and write some great teen fiction? Based on my rants, do you have any suggestions on great books to read (I really need some book recommendations)? What really is the deal with teen fiction? Tell me in the comments!

4 comments:

I adore comments! Just keep it clean and respectful...please no profanity and while I respect people's opinions and love a good argument, simply bashing my post is obviously not appreciated. :)

When Research Steals Your Writing Time: How to Research Efficiently

1:45 PM Gemma Fitz 2 Comments

Lately, when I sit down to write, it seems all I end up doing is research.

"She pulled on her bluetooth--" Oh, wait a minute, do you pull on a bluetooth? How do bluetooths work anyway? And what's the plural form of bluetooth, 'cause 'bluetooths' doesn't sound quite right...

At the end of my hour long writing session, all I've got is 100 words and 10 tabs of wikipedia.
If you're like me, when you signed up for the writing gig you didn't envision yourself staying up til three in the morning looking up different types of medieval weapons. I'm a writer! I'm supposed to be writing, not spending hours altering my google searches by a single word!

And yet here you are, and it's all very exhausting and disappointing. Not to mention you're just not making your word count goals and it's taking you forever to finish a single chapter. And if you're like me and hate research in the first place, it can even make you want to stop writing the story all together, because it's just "too much work".

So here's some tips on researching efficiently, so you can get back to the actual writing.

Don't do it if you don't have to.

It's such a huge let down when I've spent hours or even days looking up how it feels to be in a car accident, and I then end up cutting the car accident out of my story or brushing over it, since the character who goes through it is only a tertiary character and it's not really important how they feel about it. (And yes, I have done this type of thing many times.) If you're spending a lot of time looking something up, just pause for a moment and ask yourself "do I really need to know this?" If you don't absolutely have to research something, your time could be much better spent on something else.

Save it for later if you have to.

If you're writing for NaNo or some other hefty word count goal, slowing down just so you can make sure that a semi automatic is the most practical type of gun for your character to be using just isn't worth it. Usually, when I'm drafting, I either write whatever comes into my head, accurate or not, or I simply press the enter bar a couple times and pick up the story after the problematic scene is over. When I come back to edit, I can then make sure my information is correct and my plot problems are believable.

Make sure you have all the facts you need.

I cannot tell you how many times I've done some research for a story, closed the tab, and then suddenly realized that I didn't collect all the information I need for the story. I do it multiple times for practically everything I look up. It's a real time waster. If you're researching, make sure you get everything you need before you close the tab. It's so much more efficient.

When you can't find it online-- be creative!

Contrary to popular belief, you cannot find the answer to every question on google, or even the internet at large. The novel I'm working on right now has a very small protagonist who is supposed to be able to fit places where the other characters can't. Googling "would a nine year old fit through a basement hatch window" hasn't been very helpful. What has been invaluable has been a ruler, cardboard boxes, and my little sister. If you can't find it online, experiment with the stuff around your house (or your friend's houses). You can find the answer to every question in real life, if you use your imagination.
Research is important. Really important. No one appreciates a book crammed full of inaccuracies and anachronisms. You need to research. But more importantly, you need to write. You are a writer, not a researcher. So don't let research steal your writing time.

Do you enjoy research? What are some ways you research efficiently? Does your first draft have to be perfect and have all the details already included, or do you skip the research and wait til later?

2 comments:

I adore comments! Just keep it clean and respectful...please no profanity and while I respect people's opinions and love a good argument, simply bashing my post is obviously not appreciated. :)

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