Playing God

   Being God is a tough job. There are many misconceptions about it, many who want nothing to do with those in that profession, many who say they appreciate what God does but live their lives as if they don't. Human relations have to be the toughest part of it. I wonder if God's laughing right now. "You don't know the half of it," he's saying. He's right. I don't even know how much I try his patience. I am one of seven billion people on this planet, not to mention those who have passed on before me. I have no idea how hard his job is. It's incon-
   I'm getting way off the point.
   There are many reasons we writers take up the pen. If you were to ask a hundred writers why they write, ninety-nine would probably give you one or more of responses similar to these:

• "I write for the money."
• "I write for the possibility of being famous."
• "I write for the fun of it."
• "I write for the glory of God."

There is one response, however, that I never expect to hear anyone say, though I believe it's one of a writer's most common motivations.

• "I write for the thrill of playing God."

   Does that shock you? It shouldn't. Think about it. As writers of fiction, we create and control everything about our character's lives, inside, and out. We are, in a sense, the "gods" of our story world.
   Though we are gods, there are still things we cannot do. Our characters will never have free choice. We control their choices, and we are the author of their thoughts. They are simply our robots, dead without the life we give them. They live in our books, but each time our books are read, they will go through the same performance, changing nothing, immune to boredom. Because of this obedience (indeed, they have no choice but to obey) they will never give us the same grief that we give God. Though writing a story can be frustrating, we will never have to fix it after our characters mess it up, ever. They are unable to mess up, for their messing up is always according to our plan.
   All writers are capable of using this reason of part of our motivation, whether they know it or not. I, for one, have a skyscraper-like need for control, and I'm sure I have used it in the not-so-distant past.
    Does this desire for playing God mean that Christian should not write stories? No, absolutely not. Harriet Beecher Stowe told a story that raised the awareness of a nation to the injustice of slavery. And who is to say that God did not work through the stories of C.S. Lewis?
   The answer is not to stop writing, but to allow God to be the God of our stories, and not us.
   Unlike us, God has the power to give us free choice. We are not robots. We have the choice to either take control of our own lives, or to allow him to take control. The answer for Christians is to allow God to control our writing, even as we allow him to control our lives. That, I believe, is the only way to destroy this subconscious desire to play God.

   I think this is my favorite post to date. I'm a little surprised. I don't usually like writing non-fiction.
   Your turn. Let's keep it simple: What are you thinking?

Rainbow II

   Last week I said I'd pour a rainbow of colors onto the page and see what happened. Let's try it. Since this is a journal, I will talk about what has recently made me...
Angry: A few weeks ago I accidentally (don't ask) ordered a book on crime from the inter-library loan program. I ended up reading it anyway. The book focused mainly on high-profile crimes, and included pictures. While I must admit there was some fear and sadness involved, the main emotion was anger, and I don't think that's a bad thing. While it was a difficult book to read, it also gave me an insight into how much Jesus has done for me. The Bible says there are no big sins or little sins, only sins. My own sins may not physically be as ugly as murder, they are still sins, and just as ugly, spiritually.
Excited: How God had me in mind from the very beginning of the world. He chose my base characteristics from among the genes of my parents, and then he left it up to me what I would do with them.
Nervous: Preparing for college, wondering what the future holds for me.
Happy: My wonderful family. Music. Also, coming up with a good blog post idea :)
Think: The book,Anthem, by Ayn Rand. It was very interesting and I have only once read a book like it.
Dream: An idea for an extended field trip that will probably never happen but is fun to think about.

Rainbow

   Okay, so I've made up my mind. I received good feedback on my last post, (thank you, Amanda) but there was one problem: I didn't enjoy writing it. Since I get to write what I choose on here, I might as well make it something I like doing. So here's my decision: this blog is a journal, not an advice column. My subtitle reads "the scribblings of a crazy author." That's what these are going to be. Scribblings. This is a place where I don't have to worry about grammar, proper form, or organizing my thoughts. A place where I can forget about every piece of writing advice I ever heard (which is what I do anyway, during my first draft) and just enjoy doing what I enjoy doing: expressing myself. This is where I just pour a rainbow of colors onto the page and see how it turns out. I'm going back to once a week. It's easier now that I don't have to think about.

Making Memorable Characters

   What is it that makes you remember a person years after you met them? Why do you still remember the name of the kid who bullied you in middle school, when you can't even remember the hair color of the last person you passed on the street? The answer is: The person you passed on the street wasn't memorable. You remember people because something they were, something they did, or something that happened to them, was memorable. It didn't have to be big. Maybe another shopper spoke to you when most wouldn't even make eye contact for more than a split second. Maybe a customer went out of her way to make you smile. Maybe they themselves weren't extraordinary, just a situation you saw them in or were in with them. Do you still remember the guy you spilled gravy on in high-school? What about the kid in first grade who broke his arm while you were watching?
   Basically three things make a person memorable: either there is something extraordinary about them, or they did something extraordinary, or something extraordinary happened to them. Very often it is a combination of the three. This brings me to a rather obvious point:
   Extraordinary books need extraordinary characters.
   Think about it. Out of all the books you can remember reading, which ones did you enjoy the most, and why? There's a variety of possible answers, but chances are, your favorite books had colorful, unusual characters, even if they weren't specifically what made you enjoy it.
   So how do you make Your characters both memorable and realistic?
   Here's some suggestions I've come across in my own search for reality:

1. Pattern them after someone. My favorite character is patterned partly after myself, partly after the person I would like to be. Sherlock Holmes was patterned after a professor of Arthur Conan Doyle. If you use this, don't pattern them after someone close to you, and disguise it carefully. You don't want to be sued or have a friendship ruined because someone recognized themselves and/or didn't care for the way they were portrayed.
2. Talk to your characters. That sounds a little weird, but once you've got a basic idea of what you want them to be like, figure out what they would say and how they would act in response to certain questions and situations. You don't have to do it out loud, just talk back and forth in your head if you have to.
3. Give them their own personal quirks. Every person you meet has something weird about them, some ridiculous little mannerism or ritual or way of saying a particular word. Giving a character a dash of weirdness makes them seem more human. Be careful not to overdo it. To much weirdness makes a person, well, weird, and unless that's your intention (E.G. the mad scientist type) don't add too much.
4. Don't make your people Black and White. A trap many authors, even the bestsellers, fall into. The perfect hero, thwarted by the perfectly bad villain. The Superhero vs. Archenemy stereotype. The truth is, we are all fallen. We all make mistakes, including those who only exist in the minds of the author and readers. It's the same way with villains. Every person, no matter how bad they are, had a time when they were not. Every person has vulnerabilities. Giving them a past, an incident in their life that made them choose to go the way they did, will help, even if it's known only to you.

So what do you do to make your characters realistic?

Let me introduce myself

   My name is Elisabeth, I'm from the land of ice (Michigan) I'm home schooled and I'm eighteen. I like to sing and write and read and worship God. I like to be direct and blunt.
   I feel kind of guilty about having only one post, but hey, everyone has to start sometime!
   I didn't start really writing until June of 2011, and I've been exclusively using pencil and paper until about a month ago when I discovered that nobody gets up until ten O'clock around here. I am not a morning person, but this is the only time I can get privacy while using the downstairs-only computer. So I make it work.
   A little bit about my history: I've been a bookworm since before I  could read. I became aware of my desire for adventure after I read Gertrude Warner's The Blue Bay mystery. Thus followed a period of intense longing for the kind of adventures the Alden children had. In my drawing book over a picture of a person in a ship, I wrote this poem, with the original spelling. It's not dated, so I can only guess that I was nine or ten.
   I wish, I wish, with all my might, to have an advenchure, in God's sight.
   I hope to go on a flight or a cruse, but please don't make me get a bruse.
   It's pretty silly, but it was the beginning of the writing bug, and let me tell you why.
   After a while I pretty much figured out that the Alden's type of adventures are pretty rare, and they either happen by accident or when you have tons of money like they did... or they can happen in your brain. So I read every adventure book I could get my hands on, and started going on adventures in my imagination. For the past five years I don't think there's been more than a handful of nights that I haven't done this, though I've moved on from the Robinson Crusoe dramas of my tween and pre-tween years. My adventures are now more grown-up, and incorporate different characters from myself, but, truth be told, they are still adventures and I am still very much a part of them.
   I wrote my first story when I was either six or seven, a short story entitled the Adventures of Cat and Dog. I tried to write a few different Robinson Crusoe-type books, but never finished them, maybe because they were just that- Robinson Crusoe's, and not mine. In 2009 or so, I came up with a more grown up story, a biblical time romance. Long story short, it died. My current project is a story from the American Civil War, and it's going much better, though I can't tell you specifically how much is done because much of it is still in the giant notebook that I was writing in up until a month ago.
   Now, for the story of how my writing style was developed. From the fourth grade to the tenth, my English curricula was very rigorous. I hated it. I hated all the rules and the hard work. I felt like I wasn't good at it, though I generally got a B average. So my writing was kind of in limbo for that period, though, as I said, I wrote a few Robinson Crusoe-type stuff that I never finished. In my junior year, I moved on to an SAT preparation course because my English only went up to the tenth grade. I had already written a few scenes of my current book in the year before. They were really bad, and I had quit, I think, but I'm not sure. Anyway this SAT prep book stated that the single best preparation for the SAT was reading good books, and it gave us the freedom to choose the books we wanted from a list of classics. Being the bookworm that I was, I loved that!
   Thus I began what I believe was the single best thing I ever did for my writing style. I loved most of the books (once I got used to the hard words) and my tastes began to change. The books I had enjoyed before I began my journey now seemed shallow. They didn't sound good anymore. I looked over my old manuscripts, and saw them for what they were: they were terrible. A friend of mine says, "When you read crap, you'll write crap." I've found this to be very true in my own experience. When I began writing again, my style was much better, and I found myself enjoying it. Finally I had the freedom to break the rules! I now find it irritating when people feel like they  always have to follow the rules. No matter if there's a dangling participle or two, if it sounds good, it's right!
   So there you have it. Me, and my writing, in a nutshell. I plan to write on here once every two weeks.