As everyone knows, or may not know. A lot goes into writing. And well, every author probably has their own system of writing, no matter how much they may have learned from school or elsewhere. I'm not speaking solely on grammar, grammar is nothing more than aesthetics. Preety colorful words can be important, but should never be an issue when it comes to writing.

      Of course I decided, why not give my thoughts on the subject and use colorful GTS metaphors etc, to explain? I'm not a teacher, far from it really, college educated yes, but not a teacher. What makes my stuff valid, nothing, but the same can be said for any teacher or person's view on the subject.

      Well at best let me try and break down what I think of, when I think of writing a story. Namely a general analyses.

All stories fundamentally to me are broken into three things.

      First off, characters! They make up your story, and so of course they are important, but alone they are only a bunch of personalities.

Then of course you have the setting dictated by the author. It is through setting that characters interact.

      Thirdly you have misunderstandings. Without misunderstandings, you would have no story. Misunderstandings are in fact what create character, and story. And stories are just a makeup of its characters and settings. In a sense, misunderstandings, bring about both the flow of a story, as well as the hook to keep readers attention, and thus is critical.

      Let's look at characters briefly. They should have varying personalities, and traits which lead to misunderstandings with other characters. Characters should never bend to the author's will because it would be out of character to do so. The characters either need to be liked or disliked by the intended audience for them to have any interest generated towards them. Being interesting forms a hook, but still they are just characters, and without setting they could not interact.

      Setting, this is always changing and leads a story, or at least its characters interactions. The author can give characters any setting, and it will change how the characters act. Humans are social creature, so we have distinct tendencies to act certain ways in certain areas. Of course dwelling on one setting to long can lose your reading audience, or not staying long enough.

      Misunderstandings occur in stories so often, it's the bread and butter of a story. One occurs whenever something; is, happens, will be, in a way in which any character is not aware of that information. This can be as simple as not being aware of alien life, not being aware the girl sitting next to you is a witch planning to shrink you, or your best friend has been secretly living a shrunken life in your shoes. Basically a misunderstanding occurs whenever there is a lack of information to one or more parties that results in story progression. In key this also means the flow of your story is dependent on this, because they are one in the same really.

Examples:

      Jack Loves Lucy, but Lucy does not know. Jack will interact in a straightforward manner the audience expects, while Lucy is under the Misunderstanding that he is just another friend. If she knew he had such feelings then she would act entirely different, and the audience knows this, so interest is generated. They want to know if he will succeed, and want to know what her shocking revelation will be, when she discovers the truth.

      Philip is a giant, and thinks all humans do is murder his kind. When Catherine comes, he is deadly freighted of her. In truth she is a human of a tribe that protects Philip's kind. Philip is under the misunderstanding the she came here to kill him, while in truth it's the total opposite. This generates interests and a hook to get readers attention.  Of course this happened because the author placed Catherine in a setting where a misunderstanding would occur.

      Romeo the tiny human has fallen in love with the Titanic Juliet. The love is mutual and the two are secretly married. Their families however, have been fighting a deadly war for thousands of years. When Romeo is attacked by the giant's of Juliet's family, due to the misunderstanding that they are enemies, Tibalt of Juliet's family tries to kill the small Romeo. Knowing he must keep the secret, Romeo is forced to slay the mighty Giant Tibalt. Because of this decision, Juliet and Romeo fear their families will never let them be together. In fact the families head's would welcome an end to the fighting between their families, so Romeo and the Giant Juliet have a misunderstanding about their own parent's acceptance of their marriage. When they choose to run, their marriage is still not known, and because of this misunderstanding the families still continue to be violent with one another. Until finally the Giant Juliet decides to fake her own death with fake poison. When Romeo arrives to find his dead wife, who is actually alive, he misunderstands and kills himself. When Juliet awakens, her character pain is so great she is left with no choice but to act out her charters personality.  Sure all of the problems would be solved if all the misunderstandings had been properly explained, but instead the story characters would not allow an explanation, and they acted on them until a gruesome end. But without these misunderstandings, we would have no story. There would be no flow, and there would be no hook to keep the reading audience.

      As you can see, interaction is driven by the unknown. But that unknown is always played out by the characters personalities. How those actions they chose, from their personality play out, is dependent on that setting they are in. Also the way in which they might misunderstand is also relevant to the setting.

Example:

      A man in church who just found out his giant wife next to him cheated on him with another tiny human, is likely to wait until they get out of church. That's if he decides to act at all, because he is too small to really take action against her, that's also a character setting in and of itself.

      A man in the same circumstance who is aboard a giant mech suit in the jungles of giants, might choose a different route.

      Back to characters. Personality dictates a characters actions under certain conditions. Setting also dictates a characters actions, because your more liable to start a gang fight in the back streets then in front of a police station. A gang fight is most likely going to occur because there was a misunderstanding about what turf belonged to which gang.

      In the end all a author can try and do is place characters into a unique set of settings, and let the characters themselves write the story, they will have misunderstandings on their own, they will act on their own, and eventually choose settings of their own. All the author has to do is predict what their personalities will do. We the authors don't create the scenario's the misunderstanding, settings, and personalities of characters do.

      Of course, there are things which can destroy a character as well. Namely when a character is forced to unnaturally change by the will of an author for convince, or is stripped of a potential source of strength for no reason.

Example:

      Say you had a human who was very intelligent on their own, and became as smart as a super powerful giant alien race. Then you had a member of that alien race fall in love with that human because of their intelligence. But the author decides they need to make their character more acceptable, because his race is so stupid it just doesn't make sense. So he decides that all along this clever special human, "Whom all the readers slowly took their time to adore, was actually another alien species different from a human that had been sent to earth like superman. The author was trying to find a convenient way for his clever human to make sense. But by doing so he basically said, humans are worthless and this guy was only ever clever because he was actually an alien, not human. The readers get pissed and upset at this change, he was great because he was relatable. The author in this case actually dehumanized their character and made him less special.

So what can an author do besides come up with good misunderstanding, unique character personalities and interesting settings?

      Write something interesting to both you and the reader.

      Write about what you know, as writing about the unknown well leave your readers feeling just as confused as you.

      Characters develop themselves through their actions and words, not the authors vision of them. Play as little, God, as possible.

      Stories are interesting because of their elaborate misunderstandings, and plot devices, but don't forget your story must be easy to follow.

      As an author you must either give the reader either something to hate, love, or find fascinating. This can be in your characters, your settings, or the all important misunderstandings which create flow.

      Never dwell in one setting too long as it stagnates a story, unless the place itself is of interest. Sure you can be aboard the RMS Titanic, but make sure you got to more than just a single room, you could also call this scene creation, like in movies.

      Don't be afraid to surprise your readers, and always give your characters goals the reader can relate too.

      Use cliff hangers and events which lead the reader wanting to know what will happen next, this creates a great hook device.

      Allow the story to have a predictable flow but try and be unpredictable. Readers love to speculate and it helps to keep their interest.

      The stories or scene's,  which make up a long story, must have great triumphs and falls. Both most push the reader into the feeling of wanting or denying them. Nothing hooks a reader like a outcome they pray for, but see little or all to hope for.

If you want to create a story but are having trouble being creative try this exercise if you wish.

      Start by creating five unique characters. Try about 200-500 words which describe them, and their personality.

      Then write five unique settings, which any of your characters might react to, again 200-500 words.

      Finally, write out five or more uniquely different misunderstandings. They don't need to be intricate, they can be shorter then a paragraph. Now take two random characters, one random setting, and then one random misunderstanding. Write. You might just be surprised what you get.

      In today's addition to my, Thoughts on the Writing Process. I've decided to talk about how information plays a major role in misunderstandings, and how those misunderstanding bring about plot.

      I like to use the term misunderstanding, why? To me it generally best sums up an event, and events generally make up a stories plot, which is a sequence of events. Then again, I'm using misunderstandings to represent information which is known, or unknown. I think information, and how it interacts with characters, are how events are made.

      So why are misunderstandings a major potential for an event? Well an event is something that happens because of cause and effect. A misunderstanding is a failure to understand, due to known information, or a lack of information. But it's applicable use, while simple is actually, quite complex.

A misunderstanding can occur in quite a few ways. Here are the ones I can identify with the most:

      There is believed information, which is information that a character knows or has put faith in which leads him to a conflict with another character.

      In this first example of a misunderstanding, we have a character named Bob. Bob is a Giant, but has been taught to believe since childhood that all tiny humans are incapable of intelligence or speech. Armed with this information, an event occurs because he meets with a tiny humans who can speak. The cause of the event, is the misunderstanding, the effect is based solely on the characters information. In this case, Bob has decided to forgo the normal act of squishing the small pest,  and instead wishes to understand why it can talk.

      Biased information, is information that a character got from another source which may or may not be true.

      Jill learns that her grandmother had been a terrible witch. The source of the information is unreliable, but curious, the character acts on the information and tries a spell on her best friend, thus shrinking her. Had she known for sure the dangers or implications of the information she suspected as false, she may have hesitated more.

      A lack of information, is information that is unknown by a character, but is known by others, which leads him to an event.

      Tom was not sure where he was, a moment earlier he had been with his friend Jill, and now he was lost in a forest. Without any information to figure out what happened, Tom started to panic, he had no idea, he was shrunk unlike Jill. Meanwhile his girlfriend Jill searched all around for her best friend.

      Absence of information, is information that is unknown by the character which will lead him to a destination without his knowledge.

      Tom was unaware he was on top of a giant girl's head, the trees around him had actually been her hairs. Since he had no information about this, he went about his survival tasks of building a fire with his shirt and cartoon of cigarettes.

      Priority Information, is information that takes precedence over other information, usually forcing reaction from a character he might not normally choose.

      Jill was aware that putting the flames on her head out was important, but she was also armed with the information that her best friend had been shrunk. She didn't dare move to get a glass of water to put the water out on her head, fearing she might crush him.

      Assumption information, is information that a character derives through multiple other sources of information to come to a hypothetical answer.

      The fire in her hair! Of course, if jail put together the information she had in her head, and thought about it, she could come to an assumption that her best friend had started that fire. She knew what she would have to do.

Information

      Of course if you apply misunderstandings in this fashion, you can look at anything in the realm of Information. Character personalities in your story, the actions which they use, even the way the physical environment interacts with them. In a sense, it's the most logical straight forward way to over analyze and break down a story, so much to the point where it looks like pieces of segments of information.

      So the pieces which make up the events in your story, will always have a general trend, lead by their settings, characters will act by the information there given, express themselves in events through the misunderstandings they encounter. Then they will eventually reach some sort of ending. If all the pieces flow together nicely, you might even have some form of good narrative which some people might enjoy reading.

      So if information is so vital for events to occur, and the way these events fold out is dependent on the settings and characters. Then the author must piece together a set of information which leads those characters to a destination. The destination not necessarily being anything in particular. A place, a state of mind, a character's development, a tragic end, all of these things maybe, but maybe something else as well.

      Information is the deciding factor for what your characters will be doing for the entirety of your, or any story, how they interact with it, how it leads them. The settings you place them in, and how that effects them. Hopefully your characters will have big hurdles to face, and relatable information to the reader. Usually a story will have a build up as well, and great reveals, sometimes the reader might have been aware of information long before the character, driving up the excitement. And if you mange to do all of this, you might just have a good story and plot worth your readers time.

If you want to create a more intricate scenario in your story, try this exercise if you wish.

      Take your character, and expose him to multiple different types of Information misunderstandings. Doing so might reveal more about your characters personality and normal actions.

      With your new information on your character's personality, choose information misunderstandings which generate multiple misunderstandings in your side characters in response to your main characters information. This will result in more sub plots forming, making your side characters more interesting.

      Finally, with your main plot and new sub plots, try creating new information which will further skew, or clarify the misunderstandings to generate a flow which evolves your characters personalities.

      If you were successful, your characters and plot should feel a lot more intense now, and provide more hooks to your readers.

       So today I thought, hell, might as well have more Thoughts on the Writing Process.

       The agenda today is on character. I will do my best to answer these questions in my thoughts.

       What makes a character?

       Who is a character?

       And why the hell should we give a damn about the characters?

What makes a character:

       Before, when I spoke of characters in my writing exercises. I said they had personality and performed actions based on the information they were presented with. Of course there is far more too it then that.

       Personality is a set of traits which show particular combination of emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral response patterns of an individual.

Action is the result of those response patterns, and those response patterns are generated whenever a misunderstanding occurs.

       Appearance was unmentioned before, but also important. Unlike information bodies inside a story which result in responses, character appearance is reliant on observation.

       So with these basic idea's planted, lets dive deeper.

Personality:

       How does an author decide which traits to give? How does he make them believable? How does he avoid over describing?

       A story usually has an end concept, or at the very least a checkpoint for the author to achieve. To get to this point he will need character willing to naturally proceed to his end goal.

       He may want his story to end in a romance, but if he makes his shrunk male lead, Hitler, and his giantess a Jewish girl, he may encounter serious problems. So if he had proceeded, he would most likely have been faced with disastrous reviews of his story.

       So if the male lead needs a personality that is easy going and likeable, the information generated by the character interaction with the giantess should be peaceful instead.

The way your character is, by his very nature, is the way he acts. Every misunderstanding bring about infinite possible reactions. But a character with a proper personality will only ever chose the same action given the same circumstance, that is personality. The core at which all humans are held to.

Action:

       Since our character is a bundled mess of possible actions, depending on his personality, and the misunderstanding he is presented with. We can assume, when asked what he likes to do, it will always be answered the same way if the person asking, is asking it for the first time.

       Assume for a moment, that our character has a diverse set of traits which make up his personality. But when he was twenty five years old, he was captured by a giantess. The shock was so hard to bear, that when the alien giant returned him to earth, his personality had become locked. He forget everything he was told, the previous minute.

       Asking the man a question always result in the same automated Action response. There is no change in his action.

       In reality and fiction, a personality is fluid, so if you were asked the same question, you might respond differently. Your opinions make up a part of your personality which also dictate your actions.

       If Kelly accidently shrunk a bunch of her friends, and became frustrated caring for them in secret. She might eventually become frustrated as her mind begins to get sick of the same routine of caring for her friends which have no beneficial use to her. As her opinions of her friends change, so to do their importance to her, and the actions she takes with them.

       So in this case, her personality has twisted by the perception of Kelly's shrunken friends. They realize she no longer has any attachments to them. Because of this, those friends now sit in the bottom of a dumpster, in a shoe box.

Appearance:

       So while appearance may seem straight forward. The act of having an image, means that your character is observable by others. Stereotyping, or opinion based interaction is common in the real and fictional world. How your character looks, effects how the other characters have interacted with them, and conversely helped shaped their personality.

       Cheryl had grown up to be a smoking hot babe, but in truth she had been obese all though her school years. As a result of the bullying and constant abuse, Cheryl had developed a personality quirk, in which she hated skinny people who made of fat people.

       When her date made such a comment, she had such a deranged personality, she never hesitated shrinking him and placing his micro sized body in the fat ladies food, in the both next to them. Paul cried, for help, but alas no help came.

Who is a character:

       There are many characters already out there. They are often copied, remembered, and fondly adored by reader and writer alike. Basically, a character is a mess of information one could call a biography. So I like to think there are three common types of characters. Of course there are actually more, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

       A garbled mess of traits which don't make any sense, generally is not a character. It is an it, and the reader is forced to learn about it. This is the common character who makes appearances in quick porn, or that side character who was never mentioned again, let's call him Buck. Buck is the lazily written, uninteresting character, authors should try to avoid.

       Tim, he is a well established character. He doesn't have a bio, he has character interaction, and his own actions speak louder than words. He is a very hard person to make exists, because he is like a fragile glass floor.

       Francine, she is a sub character. She plays no other purpose for the moment, other than to interact with characters like Tim and Buck. Honestly she prefers Tim, but often ends up sleeping with Buck. Oh the Irony.

Buck:

       The easy character to write for. He doesn't have very coherent traits. He could hate banana's but love banana split ice creams. If his character needed to be a murderous mad man, the author would only need say so. One doesn't need to bother with misunderstandings to describe him. The author may just get lazy and write him a bio. After all once you read the bio at the beginning, it's all fair game. The author doesn't need to have reasons to account for Buck's actions, he simply says, consult the bio.

       Buck was a kind man who loved giant girls. So he invented a shrinking machine to use on himself. Now he is at Francine's house. End Bio.

       Francine was hoping for an interesting character to spend some time with. Perhaps someone she could learn about through exchanges of misunderstandings. Maybe a shrunk fellow who was lost. Instead she got Buck, he was a man she didn't know. But somehow without a word, she felt he must be smart. It was apparent that she had a role to play today. According to the manuscript her director/Author gave her, she was to act like a bitch, randomly discover the little creep, and without any reason end his life under her foot. She couldn't argue, she had not had any dialogue or interaction with Buck. Yet she had a job to do. So lifting her large white cotton suck, she breathed a sigh as she snuffed out Buck's life beneath her. A small red stain glistened on the bottom of her foot. Oh, she wished there could have been more, well anything. She will never be remembered as any kind of character for this role.

Tim:

       Tim didn't have any Bio. He was told by the author to reveal his unique personality to the readers through his interaction with, the setting, the other characters through dialogue, and of course, his actions.

       Since he did so, it was not surprising when the author noticed a spike of new readers on his story. People generally cared about Tim's tough decisions he had to make. His heartfelt conversation's with the girl named Francine. A girl who had apparently had a crush on him years before. It had all come down to a near happy ending, when Francine discovered he had been lying to her. He was married, and unable to fulfill any promises he had made to her over the past few days. She ended it.

Francine:

       Francine is the glue which hold the story together, she can be a important character, or side character, she can even be a cheap thrill in Buck's story, serving no other purpose then to get you off. Francine is important as part of the main character's setting, and as a tool for his inter action.

       I feel both the example stories above showed how Francine can be done. Please don't neglect Francine, without her, your Tim, is nothing more than a boring auto biography!

Why we should give a damn about the character:

       As an author you should care, because those reading it, can usually tell when you don't, and as a result won't either.

       If your character is not relatable, or liked in any way by the reader, not even in the form of general interest. It's going to be rather hard keeping them as a reader.

       If your character is Buck, and the reader is only their because Francine kills him, then you might want to re-evaluate your stories. If your story is only there for a cheap thrill, chances are, that's all the readers will ever expect from your writing.

       If your characters are deep, and their personalities captivating, and interesting, chances are your story will be remembered and well liked.

A special note regarding Bio's. I mean no disrespect towards anyone who uses, Bio's I'm merely stating my thoughts and opinion's on the matter.

       Bio, is short for Biography. It is a way to describe your character's in a plain strand or chunk of data to anyone reading it. It may be convenient, but it's destroying any future build up about your characters in your story. It is lazy act done by authors often to bypass the inconvenience of writing out scenario's which bring your characters personality and traits to bear. Reading a chunk of raw facts is far less appealing them simply learning about the characters as the story progresses. Often times the data in some people's bio's is completely left out of the story, leaving the readers who skipped the bio's lost and confused when the reader expected them too.

       It is a silly practice, and no professional author does it unless they are writing a factual writing construct, like a biography, or facts book. Please let your characters act out their own traits, let your side characters observe and describe your main characters. Don't become the author who dictates every little thing to their reader, because they are too lazy to write out the proper scenario's which would do so, far better.

So with all these current thoughts in my head written, I will leave you again with another simple exercise which may improve your writing, try this exercise if you wish.

       Take a look at a picture, just use Google to pull something up with two people inside the shot. Now try writing a scenario for what you see in the picture. Do your best to have only your characters describe what they see, and use their actions they take, to describe what they are doing in the picture.

       Got your scenario written? Good, do it again, accept link this picture with the last.

       Finished that? Well, now try writing a scenario without a picture. Once done have a friend read it and the scenario you wrote from the pictures. Ask his opinion of which was better. This may help you identify problems in your writing.