Tag Archives: characters

Oct23

dialogue

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dialogue

I suppose it’s time to openly admit it. Some of my characters are based loosely on real people. I can’t say they are completely based on these people because I’ve never actually been through the end of the world with any of them so I don’t really know how they’d react to all the things I’ve put them through. A lot of my dialogue in my stories is based on what I believe these people would do and say. To me it helps me make sure my characters are as realistic as I can make them. I’ve always hated books, movies, or TV shows that had horribly unbelievable dialogue. From the very beginning one of my main goals was to have good if not great characters.

I’ve spoken to some of my friends who know this little secret and all have said that the dialogue sounds perfect and can tell who the characters are just by what they say. I take this as a great compliment. Amusingly enough, I was hanging out one day with a group of my friends and somehow a conversation about a tank or driving a tank came up. I let them play out the conversation, only nudging it in a certain direction and then waited. After they were done I started laughing when they asked what was funny I told them that I had basically written that conversation in my first book. It was almost verbatim. Read the rest of this entry →

Oct22

Action scenes

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Action scenes

Not sure if I’ve mentioned this lately, but I LOVE writing action scenes. It brings me a certain type of joy and excitement that doesn’t show up in the everyday writing process, at least not in mine. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy writing dialogue and descriptive scenes as well, but there’s something very cool about writing an action scene that actually gets your blood pumping.

You get to get into your characters head in a different way. You see there best and worst traits come shining through when they’re under that kind of pressure. I’ve seen my characters make great decisions and horrible ones. Right now I’m in the middle of an action scene for my third book in which there are war weary vets who have been in countless battles along with rookies who have never been stuck, alone trapped by hordes of people who want them dead. They’re finally getting their first respite and I have a feeling that when they have a bit of time to settle down and realize how big and bad the pile of shit they’ve stepped in is that some of them may not handle it very well. Read the rest of this entry →

Aug29

New characters

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New characters

The other day I brought back a character that I introduced in book 1 but didn’t use at all in book 2. I’m not sure how I’m planning on using this person yet but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I also created three new characters yesterday while I was writing. They were needed addition since I’ve killed off a number of other characters over the course of two books. I have a better sense of what these characters are going to be doing but still not sure how it will all turn out.

I keep getting angry at myself for not having a more complete outline of this new book. I do have one I swear. It’s kind of vague and has such great headings as Middle, I’m not sure but there may not be anything written under middle… I’m bad at outlines. It seems that I’m also bad at pre planning my books. I’d like to be better at it, much better at it, but at this moment I just don’t seem to be. It doesn’t seem to slow me down much though. I mean it may not seem great compared to big name writers but a book a year for the last two years and another on the way maybe by years end, seems pretty kick ass to me. Maybe on those days when I get stuck I’ll pull out the outline and work on that instead… hmm that could be a good idea!

Then again do I really want to mess with what’s been working so far? I sat down the other day with absolutely no clue on what to write and came up with the three new characters and how they came to be. Maybe I’ll work on trying to combine a little more planning with a tad less spontaneity.

 

have a great night all, back to work for me!

Don