Tag: characterisation

Writing

Which Story To Write?

carolyncordon

I have a friend, a member of my weekly writing group, who is working on, I think she said, ten novels at the same time. She is a dedicated writer, and I am so impressed by her output, in both quality and quantity. She writes historical fiction, and more contemporary fiction, as well as a smaller amount of non-fiction. I am in awe of her, I’m not sure is she realises that …

I can’t imagine having that many ‘works in progress’, going at the same time. I work at a crazy mixed up, slap-dash kind of pace, and feel unable to commit myself, and my concentrated time, in the same way as my friend. That being said though, I have managed to write and either publish, or have published, seven books since my first one, about fourteen years ago.

My most recently published book “Dog Buddha’s Thoughts”, which I self-published last year, is the last in a series of three books, written in the point of view of a made up dog, Buster the Dog, and I don’t think I am going to write another book in that series. I feel like that book from last year said all I had to say. But the thing about books and writing, is that inspiration can come from a wide variety of places, so really, who knows?

At the moment though, I don’t feel at all committed to writing another “Buster the Dog” book, but Buster is always there somewhere in my head, so who knows. I keep my mind open to new ideas, always! I have other, more sensible ideas for stories that may become books though, and I am much more interested in those. One is a book for the 10-14 year old reader, and it involves, amongst other things, unicorns.

Unicorns have been in my life since I was around the same age as my imagined readers for this book, and I’m certainly excited about getting that book out. It’s a positive book, about a young girl growing up and learning about herself, what she is capable of, and how her life may be as she gets older. It is set in a district based in part on the region where I live, which is also the region of a made up place, I have set another book I’m currently working on.

This particular book is a novel, with intrigue, murder, politics, and is a bit of a love story. It is slowly creeping into existence, with me adding another paragraph or two every week. As I said, ‘slowly creeping’! I don’t know if I’m going to ever finish this one. I know it will need to be at least 65,000 pages, but at the moment, after a couple of years since I began it, there are perhaps 12,000 words.

With this book, I have paragraphs in notebooks, and devices all over the place, and I don’t know whether I’ll actually be able to even find everything I’ve already written of this book-in-progress. I think if I was really committed to this particular novel, I would have got far more organised with it by now, but haven’t really done much about it at all. I think that tells me the truth about it. I still have my main characters in my head, but not so much on the page. I suspect Meredith may never come out into the world …

I’ve enjoyed writing the snippets I’ve written in response to prompts from someone in my writing group, and I definitely feel that all writing is good practice. So, if that’s true, I’m not wasting my time with this novel-in-progress, I’m in fact learning more about how to write a novel, so that when a novel I feel I must write comes along, I will be ready to do it justice.

I hope anyone reading this has found it interesting, and I would love to read about your own writing process! Feel free to leave a comment here!

Writing

The Dog in My Head

carolyncordon

Three of my published books are written by Buster the Dog, with my assistance. Buster the Dog is the dog who lives inside my head. That is, Buster the Dog is in fact a figment of my imagination. He was created many years ago, as a part of the process of writing a book about gardening, as a dog would view the past time.

Dogs don’t do gardening in the same way people do. So to write this book, I had to think about the many dogs who’d been in my life, and look at how they would think about things such as compost bins, or fertilising the garden. I thought up a dog, made up of the two dogs breeds who were in my life at the time, and I called his Buster.

I enjoyed writing in Buster the Dog’s point of view so much that I wrote two more books in Buster the Dog’s point of view. Buster is a sassy critter, he does things his own way, and as I’ve discovered in the writing of the third of these books, he is a spiritual creature, up to a point, at least. Buster the Dog showed me, in that third book, the ways that a dog can have a life attitude very much in tune with Buddhism.

cropped-img_1499907044954_1.jpg

I had so much fun with that book, thinking about ways in which a Dog Buddha, and a Buddha for humans, might be the same in some ways, and different in others. The process was a great follow on from the second book in the Buster the Dog series, which was about how dogs may consider Mindfulness, which was something I’d been learning about just before I had the idea of writing that second book in the series.

At this stage, I have finished with writing these books with Buster the Dog. I have no ideas about any new book or books in the series, and I am content with what I have done with it. Dogs and thoughts about how they may think will go on being of interest to me, but I don’t feel I need to do any more about writing books for them. Having written that, I just remembered Buster the Dog does actually have another book to be written.

This next book, to be written next year, will be another kind of collaboration. A friend of mine, another writer, is interested in writing a book with Buster the Dog and me, and a ‘cat’ – McTavish the Cat. McTavish is real in the same way that Buster the Dog is real – the cat lives inside my friend’s head, just like Buster lives in my head.

Putting myself in the mind of a dog in this way, is one of the things fiction writers must learn to do, inhabiting the mind of their various characters, so the character acts in accordance with the needs of the narrative. This is how fiction writers come up with characters and story lines their readers will believe.

So when I’m writing about a dog, I think on all of the dogs I have known, and make my story dog the most ‘doggy’ dog there ever was. Or at least as much as is needed to make the dog believable, for my reader. And surely that is an important role for a writer, to make aspects of your book believable, so that the reader believes the story the writer is telling them, so they will be willing to spend some time in the writer’s new world.

I know a lot a bout dogs, I try to think about things how a dog might, when I’m writing in the point of view of a dog. If I can get other people enjoying my dog books, with Buster the Dog and I, what a fun time all involved will have, Buster the Dog sure knows how to enjoy life. I love it when my written words have the ability to hook in a reader and keep them there in my story! I lice writing about Buster the Dog, people have enjoyed reading my stories about Buster the Dog, and Buster has lots of fun in my books.

Just don’t tell him he’s only an imaginary dog, please?!