Reviewer: FleetingMoment Signed
Date: December 06 2013
Title: Chapter 1: Chapter 1
Since your latest discussion was about characters then I would like to try asking about something a little more specific. In the process of creating characters obviously there needs to be interaction and conflicts. One of the hard things I have had trouble with is trying to make caracters feel believable, while keeping a senario understandable (not nessecarily realistic) and avoiding circumlocution. Hardest trick for me is maintaining a proper flow especially when I need the plot itself to move into a certain area. I hope there will be a future discussion about linking characters and senarios. Preferably I would like to see a topic about how to control an imagination that just wants to fly out the window.
Author's Response: Yeah they should be almost any stories staple, though there is something to be said about pure action. Making a character believable is partly making their personality believable, which I touched up on my last discussion, of course there is more to it than that. Motivation, there local settings, etc.
Creating a understandable scenario, not necessarily a realistic one has a lot to do with your settings and how your character interact and describe it, often the reader better understand once the characters in your story do.
Circumlocution, what a choice for words you have. For those not wanting to look it up, which I embarrassingly did, is the use of many words to say something that could be said more clearly and directly by using fewer words. That is a bit tricky, and sometimes you want to use less words, but in your instance, you say you don't use enough. I find going back, re-reading and editing your work helps avoid this. If used properly circumlocution is a good thing, I suspect in your instance, the reason it doesn't work is because your few words are not very clear or concise. In which case exposition might be your new best friend.
I find flow comes naturally once you've narrowed down your characters and interactions, because flow is determined by the events which are caused directly or indirectly by your characters and settings. Authors have to deal with finicky characters with personalities, and we create those personalities. All we can really do is provide them with the right conflicts of character or settings to direct them to hopefully the place where we want to go. Often time are own characters are traitors to us.
You would like to see a chapter basically, not so much on scenario's, but on the link between events which make a story's plot and theme. In this case you also want to see how to control your own imagination giving you too many ideas? Well in this case, having too many idea's is good, but picking out the good ones might merit a discussion more.
Thanks for the discussion, I'll think about what I want to write next.