bringing life

Meet Anna. She's almost 18 years old, preparing to leave school. She's ready for graduation, and gets along great with her classmates. Oh, and she's a princess of a make-believe country.

Did you ever have an imaginary friend? I still have one...actually, I have many. Lots of people roam around the inside of my head, interacting in new and strange ways. Welcome to the process of story creation.

Yep, my promised and long-awaited philosophical musings are going to be on story and character creation. I'm going to use Anna and her story for the purposes of this post, simply because it is her story I am currently working on. I've taken a sabbatical from The Zephanaian Chronicles right now, mainly because I've run into a Zephanaian road block. It's really annoying, but it means I can turn my focus onto other projects.

Something you have to understand if you ever want to write anything (beyond news - I'm talking creatively here) is that it cannot be forced. If you don't already have a poem or story or what-have-you rattling around in your head, don't try to write one! You'll only give yourself a headache. If you do manage to write something, it will be stilted and unnatural; it won't feel right to you OR your readers. You need to write something that matters to YOU. If it doesn't matter to you, it won't take on a life of its own.

Generally, a plot is highly suggested. I say this as a dramatic understatement. Before you EVER start writing, you need to have at least a very vague idea of where you want the story to go. I know a lot of writers outline heavily as they write. Great for them. I tried that a few times. It didn't work. As you create the characters, and if they come to life on the page, they will be beyond your control (like a literal child - only this is a brain child). This is good; it means they live on their own. It's not so good for outlining every little thing. You do need to have an idea of where the character will be at the beginning of the story and the end of the story.

Take Anna, for example. (By the way, that's my drawing there. I'm not the greatest artist in the world, particularly when it's from my imagination, so some of the perspectives and shading will be slightly off, but it's as close as I can get.) In the story The Frog's Challenge, she is initially a model student in an academy for princesses where they learn lots of princessy-type things. Personally, I'm glad I never had to do that, but my personality doesn't fit into that type of environment. In my initial creation of Anna's character, I made sure that, while she does have a very strong personality, she also can fit into any situation that she encounters. This is, I think, a true sign of nobility. If you can behave just as refined, poised, and confident in a swamp as you can in a palace, you could definitely do well in the medieval-type kingdom that this takes place in. (If you're curious, yes, she will have to deal with both environments.)

You have to take things like that into account when you initially are creating this character in your mind. If you don't, and if the character comes to life on the page, then he or she won't do what you want him/her to do. Not so good if you're trying to aim a story a certain direction. If you're doing a never-ending comic-type thing like Order of the Stick or Looking For Group (or even possibly MegaTokyo...not so sure on that one), then that's fine...you let the character evolve as it will.

Even in a somewhat-set storyline, though, your character needs to be allowed to evolve as becomes necessary. It's not something you necessarily plan for; it just happens. And you have to allow it to happen and possibly tweak a few things here or there to make it work. Allow the character to become a REAL person. (This is part of what I talk about in my post on manipulation - you want the character to become believable enough that the readers CARE about the character. If you say the word, it does sound like "care" is in the beginning of character.) I'm still in the beginning of Anna's story - I totally scrapped what I'd written initially and started over - so I still don't fully know the full evolution of her personality from beginning to end.

So you know a little bit about this project, The Frog's Challenge is going to be one of multiple short stories that will be published in a single volume. No title for it yet, but I'm working on it! The main premise behind this project is to take fairy tales (some popular, some lesser-known) and rewrite them a bit to make them a little more suspenseful and add character depth. Most of these will be based on the Grimm Brother's lesser known fairy tales, but I am going to be including a few of the more popular ones as well. I'm also going to rewrite The Dark Forest and put it in there, as well as The Journey. That will be removed from publication as its own novel on October 31, 2010. A few other fairy tales to receive a revamp will include Beauty and the Beast, The Twelve Dancing Princesses and The Frog Prince. Most of the others will be obscure Grimm titles. The concept came from Regina Doman's Fairy Tale Novels for teens. The difference is that I'm not going to try to turn each story into a novel; I'm simply letting it be a little short story. Depending on how long/short each one is, this project may become a multiple-volume project. We'll see. Right now, only two of the stories have even made it to the initial completion without editing.

That's it for now. :) I hope you all have a marvelous September (no, it's not over yet, and yes, I will post before then, but there's nothing wrong with me saying it anyway). :)

-enna

P.S. Please open the picture in a separate tab and view it at full size, then critique it! I want feedback on it. :) I know the scanned version isn't the best, but it's got the basic gist of what the drawing is.