Co-writing

While I am not yet an expert at it, I have been co-writing a fan fiction that shall be turned into an original story for about 9 months (for more information about this, check the current projects tab). It started out as something fun to do, but slowly became more serious. It is still very fun to do but the decision to transform it into an original story and try to publish it, adds responsibilities to it.

I have this rule to never engage into business with a friend and I broke it. I am writing with a friend and even though I do not care much about the money we may get when we publish, it turns it into a business. That’s why I will not write anything of the original version of our story before we made up a contract. A contract is the basis of good partnership because it gives insurances. Things like deadlines, who writes what, who earns how much, what about expenses and what happens if someone does not want to continue anymore should be covered in such a contract. It will put your mind at ease!

Co-writing has both advantages and disadvantages. The best advantage is that you have more brainpower to come up with interesting plot twists and solutions to problems. The downside is that it can also make it a lot more difficult to agree on things. It is unavoidable that each writer has their own view on the story and the characters. That is why communication is very important. I have been talking almost daily to my co-writer. Our conversations are not always about the story, but it is an important part of our discourse. If you are too stubborn to give up on your ideas, you should not co-write! 

A big disadvantage for me is that I am not a very patient person. Since we are still writing round-robin at this moment, I sometimes have nothing to write until my friend finishes a part. And this can be very frustrating! This is the only project I am currently working on and beside school I have not much else to do and this gives me quite some time to write. My friend, however, has a lot more other things to do than I. I perfectly understand that, but, as I said before, I am impatient. This difference in time we have to spend on writing might cause some problems setting up deadlines. They have to be viable but at the same time I do not want to spend years and years working on this.

We divided the portion of work more or less equally. We all have our ‘own’ character to develop, have about the same amount of point of views to write and we split up the world building. This was fairly easy to do in our case, but when you both want to write the same character or both to the same part of the world building progress, it might be harder. 

While co-writing is a lot of fun with the right persons, it is a lot harder than writing solo. Everything has to be discussed and you must count on each other. It can ruin friendships. So far is had been a great experience for me, but if you want to try it, pick someone who has the same views as you and expects the same of a story. Be very careful and do not start a project with the first person who is willing to work together without!

When I have more to say about this topic, I shall write another blog. If you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments or ask them on twitter!

Get to Know Your Characters!

Characters are very important in stories and you should spend time on moulding them. There are a lot of different ways to this and no way is right or wrong. Some people work well with a character sheet on which every single detail of the character is written down and some work best with writing down nothing at all. It is, however, important to you get to know your characters. 

You want to know how your character react on certain situation and why. The why is for me more important that the reaction, though the latter can have a major impact on the plot as well. If you want to know why a character reacts a certain way, you need to know what drives him or her. To know what drives him or her, you'll have to take a dive in your character's history. If your character refuses to ride a horse because he or she is afraid of them, you have to find out why the character is afraid. Perhaps he or she fell of a horse once and broke something or maybe a horse kicked the character or even worse, the character lost a loved one because of an unfortunate fall of a horse. These are fairly clear reasons that influence reactions, but it isn't always as easy. I have a character that experienced a traumatic event a couple of years before the story starts and since he never managed to really cope with it, it's something he keeps dragging with him. This event has changed him and influences every move his makes and it has an enormous effect on the story.  I must say he is sometimes very hard to write because I have never been in a similar situation and that makes it hard to place myself in his shoes, but not impossible.

There are, as I said, many ways to get to know your characters and maybe some character require a different method than others. I have done some research about such methods because when I started developing characters, I found that I had a hard time connecting with them and getting them know good enough to understand their actions. I found that letting the characters talk about their life is very helpful for me. They tell about the events that they think were important in their life. I write this down in a monologue. Perhaps an example will be useful to illustrate this:

"Girls… not my strongest point. I could never tell if they liked me because of me of because I was in a well known band. It wasn’t rare that girls would almost fall down before my feet and declare their love for me. I hate it when they do that. They don’t even know me. So I'm always very careful around girls. While I don’t open up easily to anyone, I especially watch out what I say to a date."

 I also tried to write whole scenes from first person, but that didn't work out for me. I had the feeling I was distancing myself from my characters instead of getting closer to them. I will probably write down important scene in third person limited from my characters history just to understand the events better and exactly know how what happened and how the character felt at that very moment. Character sheets can be another useful tool but I find that it limits my characters' potential of growth. I do not want to cling on to some triads I have given them early on. Another way to get to know your character is to hang out with them. When you go somewhere, ask yourself how your character would get there. Wonder what your character would do on a bus: would he or she chat with someone he or she doesn't know or stare outside and listen music? Would your character notice the girl who walks across the street or the birds in the sky?

Some writers let their characters take personality tests and build them further on the outcome of such tests. I do not think I will ever do that since I do not believe you can put labels on people based by some questions they answer. Especially since people evolve and change the whole time. And we do want our characters to be just like real people, don't we? They could perhaps serve as a guideline but than it's important you don't cling too much to the outcome of the test. Dare to colour outside the lines!

Whatever method you choose (I'm sure there are many more than the ones I briefly summoned up here) it's important to remember that if you want a great character, you must remember to give them flaws. Perfection is boring and no one is perfect. Flaw create tension and tension creates a story. Don't worry too much about if the readers will like your characters or not. Even unlike able main characters will still be able to give the reader a good time reading your story. You just have to make sure you develop your character well. Evolution is an important aspect of this. Characters, especially main characters, should learn something while they journey through your story. If your character at the start of the story is a heartless bully and is still the same heartless bully on the last page of the story, then why have you written the story? It's much more interesting to read how the events in the story make the bully realise that he is feeling lonely and that he bullies because his insecure. Maybe he will even learn to love someone and perhaps he will understand at the end how bullying can destroy a person.

To be able to create such an evolution, you need to understand your character. To say it simple, your character has to become one of your best friends. Writers have a great excuse to have imaginary friends, so take advantage of that! Just remember to give your characters the opportunity to grow.

Why do I write?

 It's simple, actually. I love writing because I enjoy doing it. I enjoy stories and I want to tell stories and I cannot think of a better way than writing them down. Humans have always told stories. It's a big part of our lives and we need stories to process what happened during the day. Cavemen told stories by painting images on walls, the bards sang stories and eventually stories were written down. First as (long, epic) poems like Beowulf and later as novels.

Now I want to tell my story. I want to entertain and perhaps inspire people. I want to bring a world alive and create great heroes and fantastic villains. While I have been writing for almost as long as I have been reading for pleasure, I have never been this serious about it. The reason for this is that I hadn't found the right story yet. But about six months ago, I did. I started to write a round-robin story with a friend for fun. It started out as a fanfiction but the plot had such potential that we decided that, after the fanfiction version is completed, we will rewrite the whole thing as an original story with potential. I am very passionate about this story. I really comprehend now what Christopher Paolini meant when he said:  "Write because a story burns within you, and you find yourself thinking and dreaming of it every free moment."


Writing has been my creative outlet, but now it has become more than that. It became one of my favourite ways to spend time.  I want to get my stories out there, in the world where people can read them. Writing has become a job. A hard, but enjoyable job. The chances that I will earn enough money to live from it are very slim; so it won't be my only job. And I actually don't care a lot about the money even though I put so much time into it. Money is just a bonus. If you write for money, you are doing something very wrong.

I'm going to end this blogpost here. I will try to write a blog at least once a week and I might update the lay-out of this blog in the coming weeks.