The voices in my head

Characters are interesting creatures. They have the power to make me see the world from a different perspective. They allow me to experience things I'll never do, like understanding a dog's conversation or flying a ship through a lightning storm. I can be excited about the things my characters are excited about, or don't yet know about. But it's important to remember that characters don't exist outside of my imagination.

So why do they have such control over my writing?

I know the plot. I know the structure. I know who becomes the hero or the coward, I know who dies, I know who survives and I know what they're eating for dinner later.

What I don't know is how they'll react to things. Which sounds weird, I know, but let me explain.

I was recently writing a passage of my WIP that winds down from several fights and reveals more about who the characters are. That was when I discovered a few things about my characters that even I didn't know. Like one of them has a girlfriend and they've been together for nearly two years - that came as a surprise to me. It makes sense story-wise though, since it helps explain his stony relationship with another character. But I hadn't planned for this.

I'm back!

Hello, my sweet rainy London! It's been more than forty days since we've been apart but I have returned now, with even more writing tricks up my sleeve. Don't believe me? Check this out:

I waited by the front door for the postman to arrive so I could catch him before he rang the bell and woke Mum.

Fed up of watching her parents slip closer to death, Farren Biratba had left the Ley City hospital abruptly, and nobody had seen her in two days.

Yep, that's right: I totally just let you read the opening sentences of my two main stories. The first one is a collaboration story I'm writing with my good friend Daniel and I can't remember if I've mentioned it before now. We take turns writing the chapters, from different character's POV and if it's anything like our personalities, the story is insanely mad. In a good way naturellement (because a nice bit of Google-translated French is always cool). So far, we're up to chapter four but already have plans for the television spin-off series, million-pound budget film and how we won't let the fame from our success go to our heads. We're that grounded in reality.

The second one is the story I've been planning for about 150 years, which I summed up at the end of this blog post a while ago. If you've already read it, then you don't have to read it again. But if you haven't, then we are no longer friends and you're not invited to my birthday party. Somebody call the fire department because you just got BURNED.

Typing vs Writing

When I was younger (the pre-laptop days), I wrote all my stories by hand. But when I got 'Sheila Toshiba' - what I named my old laptop - I wrote it all on my Microsoft Word free trial. It was quick and easy and I could make a really cool cover for all my stories in next to no time.

Since I've been on holiday here in Trinidad, I haven't been writing on Microsoft Word at all, or any sort of typing program on the computer. I've just been scribbling away in my notebook diary and I've noticed several huge differences in the two methods of writing.

With typing a story, the words flow like an email. By that I mean: I know what I want to write and it just sort of happens on the screen. Also, in the corner there's all sorts of helpful numbers that tell me what page I'm on and how many words I've written. Which is handy. I can scroll to whatever page I need to in order to refresh my memory about what I've already written and I can do a few bullet points at the bottom so I know what to write if I'm stuck.

Writing in a notebook is a whole other bowl of porridge. I never have any idea how much I've written, or what page I'm on. I can't even make a cool cover (*wails*). There's always the danger of my pen running out or the spine of the notebook leaving lines on my bare leg in a very unattractive manner. It totally sucks out all the glamour of being a writer!

Obviously, that last line was a joke because everyone knows being a writer is anything but glamorous. We all live in garden sheds with spiders building webs on our glasses, etching our masterpieces in the wood grain with our fingernails.

In all honesty, I do like writing in my notebook because it is a serious time-killer. Last week I was so caught up in it that before I knew what had happened, I had been writing for five hours. I couldn't do that on my laptop for one main reason: eyes.

My eyes are dry as it is (just ask my optician) and can't really withstand long hours staring at a screen. I'll usually take a break a couple of hours in for a snack and then just... Forget to go back to my room. This is such a regular occurrence that my brother is no longer surprised that one of my catch phrases as we're playing PS3 is "Oh yeah, I left my laptop on".

Perhaps when I return to bonny ol' London things will be different. But I'll cross that bridge when I get there - and you'll cross it with me!