If you’re a writer, you may at some point have set a word count goal for a story you were writing. If you’ve ever been a NaNoWriMo participant, you know the real struggle and pain and the hard-earned reward at the end of the month once you finally reach 50K. Sometimes writing for word count goals can be useful for people but personally, I’ve found that there are also some unhelpful and fruitless qualities about the exercise.
Psychology has always been a fascinating subject of study and scrutiny for me. Only last week I identified the source of frustration I constantly felt about people: I just want to understand them. What goes in each of their little minds that causes them to do, say, act, feel? What thoughts and emotions and beliefs make them stand for something, hold a particular perspective, feel a certain way? What is it like in your funny little brains?
Of course, the answers to these questions have to do with other things besides psychology. In fact, a person’s psychology is shaped and built on that human’s early life, their childhood, the parents that raised him/her. And history and life circumstances impact a person’s psychology even more than we think.
Bethany Jennings, a wonderful blogger, Christian writer, and homeschool mom (wow! talk about being an inspiration) has this hashtag called #WIpjoy, in which she comes up with a question for each day in whatever month it happens (usually three times a year). The last WIPjoy was in January, and I blog posted about my WIP Fiction’s Lie. This month, however, I’m switching over to Netherworld, because it’s been around way longer than any other story I’ve been working on, and it’s my favorite to think, write, and talk about.
So, without more ado, here are some answers to some favorite WIPjoy questions concerning Netherworld. I did tweet a few of these, but failed majorly to answer them all on Twitter.
When I first developed my story for Netherworld, I just created a villain simply so that my protagonist had some evil to fight against. But when I started questioning my villain’s motives, I realized that to have a full story, it is crucial to develop the villain because that’s the crux of the problems that create the story. Your villain is what drives your story; not just your protagonist’s motives, though those are important too.
There are no set rules for creating a villain; but there are guidelines, sure. Based on my experience, I have some advice on creating a well developed and complex villain. These are just my ideas and thoughts, and these may differ for many other writers (in which case, you can leave your own thoughts and opinions in the comment section below).
Things have shifted crazily with writing this past year. As most of you know, my NaNoWriMo 2016 novel Fiction’s Lie is on the way to indie publication through Amazon’s Createspace, but there’s a lot of other projects going on as we speak I type. I’ve developed new worlds and characters, rewrote some fanfiction, stressed out over Camp NaNoWriMo, and jumped back into my main project, Netherworld.
As indie publication looms brightly on the horizon, I’ve started getting a little frightened with the fact that pretty soon, I’m going to have to put together deadlines and release dates and post schedules for marketing. Which means lots of organization and planning, which is why I aspire to be a time lord or invent a way to create clones of myself. If only, right?
So, without further ado, here are some highlights of my writing world, as well as a very exciting announcement. The announcement? *accentuated advertiser’s voice* Read more to find out. (Or look at the blog post’s title.)
I’ve seen some of the older Spiderman movies, and liked them despite their cheesiness. But after watching Homecoming, I realized that out of all the superheros, Spiderman/Peter Parker is not only the most relatable, but also a character I will always admire and learn from.
(Batman’s cool, too. *namaste bow*)
I’m a fan of comfort zones. I’m not a huge adventurer and don’t take pleasure in running risks, even the small ones. I usually don’t venture away from my favorite genres, like fantasy and science fiction. I shy away from reading other genres, and I know that I should be dabbling in all different methods of writing and storytelling. Usually I wouldn’t pick a book off a shelf about modern day assassins and say “hey, this random book looks good!” because that’s simply not my thing.
But when Brianna Merritt, one of my favorite writers/bloggers/Twitter friends asked me to read and review her book Unsanctioned Eyes before its release date (which is JUNE 27: TODAY!!!!) I didn’t really know what the book was about, but the cover was beautiful and anything written by Ms. Merritt was bound to be good. I gave it a shot. And was held in suspense the whole time. When I finished it, all I could think about was “WOW. That was SOOO good” and “WHERE IS THE SEQUEL.”
