Names

In The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, two characters who get married have names meaning Prince and Princess; here, obviously, their names indicate their relationship to each other. In The Fault In Our Stars by John Green, Augustus - the name of a Roman emperor - is referred to by his full name when he is strong and confident, and when he is weak and pitiful he is simply called Gus, which sounds more like the nickname of a child.

Character names needn't be as meaningful as this; any name has connotations. A name like Felicity implies that the character is quite feminine, whereas Taylor as a girls' name suggests the opposite. A plain name such as John might be given to an equally plain character.

A story I'm currently writing is about faeries (the ones with courts and queens - not the ones that like flowers and live at the bottom of your garden), so I've been using a lot of Irish names for characters. One character, a hobgoblin, is named Beagan, meaning small one, because hobgoblins are typically represented as small faeries; Eliana, whose name means sun, rules the Summer Court; a selkie - a type of water faerie - is named Muirin, meaning born of the sea. For most of my characters, I searched for a name that would suit them, but in some cases it was a name with an interesting meaning that inspired me to create a corresponding character.

So it's always a good idea to look up the meaning of a name before you use it for a character. Baby name websites are good for this, and for getting ideas for names in the first place. I spend more time on baby name websites than can be healthy.

Setting Out

Block one of my Open University course - Start Writing Fiction - gives a few tips on what to do before you start writing.

• Make sure you know enough about the characters, setting, and plot. I've mentioned this is my post about planning; the first time I tried to write a novel, I failed miserably because I hadn't planned enough. I advise having an idea of what happens in every single chapter before you even think about writing. Of course, some people work just as well beginning with no plan at all, but if you're new to this (I'm hardly an expert) then I'd recommend some serious planning.
• If the story stems from one image, unpack it slowly. Sometimes ideas come from nowhere almost fully formed, but I often imagine a single image or scene, which is my starting point. With Courage to Live, the image of a teenage girl and a girl of about five meeting in a hospital was what I based everything on when, in the end, I didn't use that scene. The main thing was to figure out who these characters were, why they were linked, and how they ended up in the hospital.
• Know how long the story will be. You don't have to decide that your story will be 80,000 words before you start, of course. It is, however, a good idea to know whether you want to write a short story, a novella, a novel, a trilogy, etc. I usually define a short story as less than 7,500 words, a novella as 7,500-50,000 words, and a novel as over 50,000. I've been told that a debut novel should not exceed 100,000 words, but it does depend on the genre. 

The course asks you to think about where you write best (a room in your house, the library, a cafe?)  and when (in the morning, during a free twenty minutes, or at night?). A small section of the first block focuses on the importance of names, which I'll write another blog post about.

I'm back!

When I left you in November, it was because I was busy completely NaNoWriMo. In the first three days of November, I easily wrote 2500 words a day, and so I decided to continue with this target throughout the month. I managed it, leaving me with 75,000 words of a novel, but it was exhausting and time consuming and I just didn't have the time or motivation to blog.

After that, I had my January exams to revise for.

And somewhere along the way I forgot about this blog. For that, I apologise; I spent about an hour finding it again, though, and now I'm back.

This year so far, I've done the vast majority of a twelve week creative writing course for the Open University. I'll write another post summarising each of the five blocks and I might post my first assessment piece. The second (and final) assessment is due in for the 27th, and at the moment it's a work in progress.

Yesterday, I finished the first draft of my NaNoWriMo novel, which is temporarily named Courage To Live. It ended up being just over 90,000 words so, seeing as I wrote 9000 words beforehand, it's taken me four and a half months to write about 6000 words. Hmm. The wonderful thing is that, once my next lot of exams are over, I can finally edit this novel into something worth reading. I'm proud of myself for completing just the draft, because it means I cared enough to finish it, albeit slowly, which I didn't do with my novel of 2010 (because it was a pile of horse crap).

Expect a few posts about my Open University course, updates on my editing of Courage To Live, some random facts about grammar and language, and then in August possible silence as I once again attempt to complete NaNoWriMo - but in the summer!

Lex :)

1667 words

Today is the day that I start NaNoWriMo! I've actually exceeded the target of 1667 words and written 2548 instead, so I'm pretty impressed with today's effort.

Things I've learnt today

About NaNoWriMo: Word sprints - where you write for say twenty minutes and then have a  break - are really useful and motivating.

About writing: Even in stories that are predominantly sad, you need some lighter scenes to vary the mood. Humour is a great way to balance out all the depressing stuff and keep your reader interested.


I'll try to keep on writing something for this blog every day, but I've got to keep my word count on target! Fellow wrimos, good luck!

NaNoWriMo!

I will acknowledge my complete failure to write anything on this blog for several days, but in all fairness I've taken on a lot of new things lately (clubs, prefecting, volunteering, running newsletters, etc.) and I just can't keep up! To make my life even more complicated, I'm going to be doing NaNoWriMo for the the next time, starting Tuesday.

If you don't already know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it takes place every November. The clue's in the name, really: the aim is to write a novel in a month, will the word count goal of 50,000 in 30 days, so the daily word count is about 1,667 words. And that's every - single - day.

I did NaNoWriMo last year and, while I did manage to reach 50,000 words, few of those words did anything to move the plot along, enhance characterisation or...umm...well, basically, I wrote a load of crap. This year, I have a plan that's been in the making since July, so I'm a lot more prepared. At least two-thirds of my novel is planned out scene-by-scene, so there's no room for me to go astray and repeat the exact same scene three times in different locations (ahem, not that I did that last year).

To summarise, my novel is about death - this isn't surprising, as everything I write has a death at some point. In fact, last year I got to about 30,000 words and had so few ideas that I killed of a couple of characters just for something to do. If I'd been writing an zombie apocalypse novel, that would've been acceptable, but in your everyday school there just aren't that many deaths in the space of half a year.

But anyway, my main character - Erin - is in the car with her boyfriend, Oscar, when their car crashes into another. Oscar dies, as does the driver of the other car, who was the mother of a little girl named Faye. Faye and Erin meet and basically help each other to deal with their losses. I'm terrible at summarising, but there you go.

I'll warn you now that this blog is likely to turn into a place for me to update on NaNoWriMo and complain about how awful it is (but don't worry, I DO love it really). However, I'll try to be constructive and give you a few tips on writing while I'm doing so much of it. This could end up being in the form of me giving an example of what I've just written, and telling you why it's so awful, but I'll at least try to be positive.

I'm so, so, so excited about NaNoWriMo right now, and I can't wait to get started!

Begin

Blog: A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts.

My blog will be based around the topics of writing, editing, books and other general stuff that I want to share with you.


Word: A single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.

I want to convey the power of words and the ways in which they can be used.


Life: The condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.

I don't like the description of life as a "condition", nor do I think this covers what life truly is. Life is emotion, experience, and our own perseption of the world around us.


Story: An account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.

A story can be fact or fiction, but, just as with life, we experience it in a different way to any other person.


I'll introduce myself, shall I? My name is Alexandra, but only exam boards and distant relatives call me that; assuming you don't fall into either of those categories, you can call me Alex, Lex or Lexical (I dare you to find a more nerdy nickname). I'm sixteen, currently studying maths, English lit & lang, physics and psychology at A level.

Some people are probably thinking "She's just a teenager, she doesn't know a thing about writing". Well, in an area where there are very fews rules and an abundance of opinions, nobody can really say whether you know more than I do. I'll probably say a fair few things you disagree with, and I don't mind you disagreeing with me (though I tend to argue my point pretty passionately). It's more than likely that at some point I'll say something that is undeniably wrong but, to borrow a lyric from Hank Green, "making a mistake is just a chance you've got to take", so if I delve into a topic without doing the proper research, just gently break the news to me that I got something wrong.

I'll post something more related to writing soon, and possibly an actual piece of original fiction (but only if you're lucky).
For now I'll say goodbye, au revoir, auf wiedersehen, dasvidaniya, allons-y Alonso* and thanks for all the fish!

(I realise this means "let's go" rather than "goodbye", but I couldn't resist.)