characters

I’m Happy Tonight

| rachelhamm

Since my last post, I re-read one of the fragmented beginnings of an idea and fell in like with it.  I wondered why I ever stopped working on it.  And then the characters began speaking to me!  Hurray!

I haven’t had a ton of time to work on it, just here and there scratching out what I could in my notebook.  But it feels great.  Really great.  I don’t think this is going to be a fantastic story by any means, but the fact that I can actually put my pen to paper and the words flow out without effort- well, I can’t even describe how it feels.  Fantabulous isn’t good enough.

I’ve gone from 4,133 words to 5962 in five days.  That’s the most I’ve written in that small span of time in months.  I realize it’s not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things (I hate the grand scheme of things, anyways) but it’s huge for me right now.

I’m super stoked!

A little thing that makes me happy: buying myself something I really shouldn’t spend money on 🙂

I’ve Been a Bad Blogger Lately

| rachelhamm

And I’m sorry.  I haven’t had much to say, honestly.  Life is busy and I haven’t been writing very much.  It makes me sad, but it’s also okay.  I’d love to work on The Death Effect, but the characters are being very quiet.  They don’t seem to want to speak to me.  And that’s okay, too.  Sometimes the mind just needs a bit of a break.

So I’ve been giving my brain a lot of rest.  I’ve been watching a lot of movies and just relaxing as much as possible.  It’s been very nice.  I wrote a poem a few days ago which I really liked.  I think right now my creativity is on the short-winded side, so I’m going to work my pen out with short stories and poetry.  If I write anything interesting, I’ll post it for you.

Some good news for you: my novel, Twenty-Five, is a finalist in The Next Big Writer‘s Strongest Start 2010 Competition in the Romance category!  There are six finalists in each category and there will be one winner and two runner-ups.  I’m sure I won’t win anything, but I almost didn’t enter, so being a finalist is pretty cool!

And a little thing that makes me happy: getting a random text message from one of my siblings with a quote from Mean Girls or Friends.

The Query I Wish I Could Send Out

| rachelhamm

Dear SuperAgent,

I wrote my first novel, Twenty-Five, a year ago, on the verge of my own twenty-fifth birthday to deal with the trauma of that milestone.  It is the first time I’ve attempted to write fiction other than a contest in the fourth grade (which I won) where I wrote a short story entitled The Summer Aliens Invaded My Brother’s Brain.  I know my strengths and I know my weaknesses.  Twenty-Five is a love story, pure and simple.  The characters are not so utterly unique that reading about them makes one wonder if I was on acid when imagining their personalities.  The plot is not so action packed and full of twists and turns that readers will sit looking at the wall, scratching their heads, for ten minutes after reading because they have no idea what the hell just happened.  Instead, I’ve created characters who are a lot like you and me, your best friend, your next door neighbor, and the boy who grew up down the street from you who you always had a secret crush on.  What happens to them is what happens to us all- the firsts of a new relationship.  The first meeting, the first date, the first kiss, the first fight, the big breakup, etc.

I realize this doesn’t sound glamorous or jump-out-of-your-seat fantastic, but it’s one of those books that will make you feel good.  Reading it, you’ll be reminded how hard it was to summon up the courage to ask that girl out or say I love you.  You’ll remember those nights you spent heart-broken and crying because nothing in the world seemed more disastrous than the person you love leaving you.

I wrote Twenty-Five with the hope of penning a story that would inspire in others the same feelings of romance and hope that Jane Austen’s work inspired in me.

Twenty-Five isn’t a rewrite of an Austen classic and it doesn’t feature any characters named Mr. Darcy, but it does show a strong woman who doesn’t believe in her own strength and a beautiful man who would do anything to make her see how amazing she is.

When Abigail Bronsen turns twenty-five, she wonders why her life has gone nowhere.  She’s trapped in a job she hates and spends her evenings alone in her apartment, with nothing but her literary heroes and writing aspirations to keep her company.  Then Ben Harris crashes into her.

They fall in love, of course, and Ben secretly helps Abigail cross off items on a list of goals she made as a teenager.  He finds out soon though, that helping build her confidence is sending her on a path away from him, one that leads to London and a dream job.

With an ocean between them, they’ll struggle to overcome pain and pride to see if their love is meant to be, or if it was all simply the result of a random accident.

Now doesn’t that sound amazing?  Please read my book!

Sincerely,

A Writer Who Will Be Eternally Grateful if You Give Me a Chance!

Does flirting release endorphins?

| rachelhamm

You may or may not know that I have many jobs.  I am a jack of all trades, if you will.  One of my jobs is to cat/house sit for a couple while they are away on business.  This consists of staying in their condo Monday night through Thursday morning and feeding their cats.  It’s a pretty sweet gig.

Anyways.  For the past couple of weeks that I’ve been house sitting, I’ve seen this guy taking his dog out.  Now, I don’t see many people coming and going in this complex, and I certainly haven’t seen anyone else my age, but I’ve seen him several times.  And I have to admit, the guy is cute.  We haven’t been really close to each other, so I’m not sure how tall he is, but it’s at least several inches taller than me (I have a thing for tall guys, I can’t help it!) and he’s got dark brown hair- not too long, not too short (which for me is just right 🙂 ).

Anyways (again).  Yesterday I came “home” to the condo, dropped off my stuff and went back outside to go to the grocery store.  He was standing in the parking lot with his dog (a Huskie, I think, but I’m not well-versed on dog breeds) talking to a little old man.  I smiled as I walked by to get in my car.

This morning my arms were loaded down with crap when I went outside to go to work because I had my lunch and a change of clothes with me, plus I was running a little late, so I wasn’t really paying attention to anything- I was in a hurry.  He must have been just a few feet behind me walking out of the building because when I got in my car and started the engine, he and his dog walked past.  He smiled and gave a little wave.

I don’t even know if I smiled back!

But!  The thought of his smile made me smile all the way to work- all 30 minutes! Traffic has never been such a welcome element to my morning drive.  And it put me in a super good mood all morning.  Throughout the whole day anytime I thought about his cute little wave, I smiled.

I don’t know if these little interactions we’ve had actually count as flirting, because I am in poor practice when it comes to flirting, but the wave and smile this morning definitely felt like a step towards flirting, if nothing else.  And all the happiness it caused me throughout the day made me think of the question used as the title of this post- does flirting release endorphins?  I did a google search, but didn’t find anything relevant on flirting and endorphins, so if anyone out there in the blogosphere knows of a connection, please enlighten me.

Of course, this little maybe-flirting scenario has given me scene ideas for a new book I’m in the developing stages on.  I’m trying really hard not to work on anything new until The Death Effect is finished, but this idea has been nagging me so I’ve been writing down character details and dialogue when it comes to me, and cute guy with dog has inspired a storyline for one of the MCs.  Who knows if I’ll ever actually write it, but it’s nice to know that my supremely boring life isn’t as boring as I thought, because if it was, would I actually be using it to draw inspiration for my writing?  I don’t think so!

Starting with Action…

| rachelhamm

When I was workshopping Twenty-Five on TNBW, several reviewers told me I needed to delete the opening scene and jump straight into the action.  So many reviewers in fact, that eventually I broke down and listened to them.  And I didn’t have second doubts about following that advice until I got my rejection from Scott Eagan.  He said that there was a lack of character development.  I wondered at the time if my character development suffered because I deleted the opening scene.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately.  I’ve read 13 books since the start of the year.  And not a single one of them starts off going straight into the action.  Granted, one is Jane Austen and no books from the early nineteenth century started with action (at least none that I’ve read), but the other 12 are all late twentieth or twenty-first century.  So….  My thoughts on that are that maybe I don’t need to start with action immediately.  Maybe that’s just a rule they throw out in writing workshops and on agent blogs because it sounds great in theory and because books that do it well, do it great.  But it doesn’t make sense for my romance novel which is based around the characters and not around what happens.

I took a couple days and re-read my MS.  Again.  And I really noticed the lack of character development at the beginning.  I was shocked, honestly.  I never thought that was a problem I had.  I assumed the biggest problem with Twenty-Five was that the plot wasn’t unique enough, which is still a problem when it comes to writing the query, but I actually think it kinda works for this book.  Anyways, my point was, it looks like you can’t listen to everything reviewers say.  Now, I’m not stupid or vapid or naive enough to believe that if I add that scene back in it’s going to magically fix my character development problem.  The opening scene is going to need a lot of editing and the action scene is going to need a lot of editing to make it work with the opening.  It’s going to be a lot of work.  But I believe in this book.  And I know I’ve said that a million times.  But I do.  So I’m going to do the work and I’m actually kind of excited about it.  It kind of makes me sick at the same time, but I’m going to focus on the excitement.

Incorporating the Exercise

| rachelhamm

Alright, so I took my writing exercise and used it to expand a character and chapter of TDE.  Yes, there is dialogue here, but I think I managed the description and character building fairly well.  Let me know what you think!

Chapter Ten: The Girl Who Died

I remember the day I really noticed Jax for the first time.  We’d been in classes together every other year or so since pre-school, but didn’t become friends until fifth grade.  We shared a table that year because Tasha Moore moved over the summer, putting Jax Nathanson right behind me in the alphabetical order.

During the second week of school, our teacher Mrs. Klein told the class about family trees.  “You connect married people with a bold dash and their children with another bold dash.”  She demonstrated on the chalkboard then asked us to fill in the names of our parents and siblings on the blank chart she’d passed out at the beginning of the lesson.

I carefully wrote in my parents’ names using all caps, G-E-R-I, D-O-N-N-Y, and my sister’s, T-A-Y-L-O-R and was just about to write my own when Jax’s arm shot up beside my head.

“Mrs. Klein?”

“Yes, Jax?”

“What about adopted kids?  Do they go on the tree?”

The teacher approached our table and knelt in front of Jax.  “Well, adopted kids are part of the family, too, aren’t they?”

Jax shrugged his shoulders.  “I guess.”

“Of course they are.  So you use a big dash to connect them, too.”  She patted his hand before walking away to answer another student’s question.  Jax still didn’t write anything on his chart.

His conversation with Mrs. Klein ran on a loop in my head, my pencil frozen on top of the paper where L-I-S-A was supposed to go.

ADOPTED.

That was the word for kids like me, but I’d never really known it until that moment.  I remembered very vividly the day my mother explained why Taylor looked like her and I didn’t, but somehow I’d never connected the dots.

Leaning across the desk, I whispered, “Are you adopted?”

Jax didn’t even turn his head to look at me, just nodded and continued staring at his blank chart.

“Me, too.”

That got his attention.  “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Why were you adopted?  My real mom died when I was five.  I was a foster kid for a while, but these people just adopted me.  I guess they’re my mom and dad now.”  He didn’t sound very happy about having new parents.  But it made sense.  I wondered if I’d been happy when I got my new parents.

“My parents have always been my parents,” I said slowly, realizing it was true.  My real parents gave me up, didn’t want me.  “They adopted me when I was a baby, I don’t know why.”

“Oh.”

I looked back to the chart in front of me.  I didn’t know why I was part of my family, but I knew I was.  Pressing down finally, my pencil formed the letters of my name.  I drew the line between myself and my parents as bold as possible.  Jax’s chart remained empty.

“Alright, class, settle down.  Your homework for tonight is to fill in the spots for your grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  There are questions on the back of the sheet for you to ask your parents.  Tomorrow everyone will tell the class a little about their family.”

Jax immediately balled his paper up and stuffed it into his backpack.  He didn’t give a presentation the next day.

He completely fascinated me: I watched him after school, studying his face.  His dark brown hair had been shaggy when we first started school, but by the time we became friends, it had been shaved closed to his head.  The shade of his eyes matched his hair almost perfectly and he had beautiful tan skin.  His face was actually rather plain, a straight nose and square jaw, but he was still nice to look at.

The thing that fascinated me the most about Jax was seeing him with his new parents.  I was sitting on a bench outside of the school the same day as our family tree presentations, waiting for my mom to pick me up, when Jax and his parents exited the building.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  He actually looked like them!  His new father had dark hair shaved close to his scalp and his new mother had a square jaw.  He looked like he belonged to them, but he hated belonging to them.  I loved belonging to my parents, yet I didn’t look like them.

I found out a few weeks later that his new dad was in the army and that’s why he shaved his head.  He shaved Jax’s a month after the adoption was final.  Jax hated him.

It was a weird thing to have in common, being adopted, but it was nice to have someone who knew what it was like when my parents just didn’t get me.  Not that it happened often for me, even though it happened all the time for Jax, but it was still nice.

He was my best friend.

Day 3 of the Writing Exercise

| rachelhamm

My third attempt at creating character description without dialogue.  My intended focus here was Emmy, but things kinda got away from me.  Now I’m worried that these exercises are encouraging “telling” as opposed to “showing.”  Although, part of me doesn’t really care if that’s the case because I hate the show vs. tell rule.  Well, I did until I started reading The Wings of the Dove by Henry James.  Now I totally get why showing is better than telling.  If you’ve read even the first page of that book, you’ll know what I mean.  I’m only finishing it because I spent money buying it and feel like I have to or I might as well have trashed the $10 bucks I spent.

Anyways, all thoughts on this exercise welcome.  I think tomorrow I’m going to focus on a character from a book I actually intend to finish writing, The Death Effect.  I know the excitement is killing you…

Emmy was the most beautiful child Aribelle had ever seen.  She wasn’t just cute- she was absolutely gorgeous.  She had thick, curly blonde hair with just a hint of red undertone.  Aribelle could tell it would darken as she got older and eventually match her father’s.  But instead of grey eyes, Emmy’s were bright blue, wide, and sparkling with long blonde eyelashes.  She had the prettiest plump little lips and to-die-for dimples on her chubby cheeks.  Aribelle adored her instantly.

And she adored watching Tom interact with his daughter.  They laughed and teased and tickled one another.  She had never pictured him as the father type, but seeing him with Emmy, she wondered what else she’d been wrong about.

Of course, if she asked him about it, she’d find out she wasn’t entirely wrong.  At any point before Emmy was born, Tom would have said he didn’t like kids and never wanted any.  He and Julia agreed that they didn’t want a family.

Emmy was a blissful accident.

But, even during the pregnancy, Tom had doubts.  He never believed he could be a good father or love any child, even one of his own.

It only took a second, though, for him to fall madly in love with Emmy.  The nurse handed her to him, all pink and new, and he’d never felt an emotion so powerful.  He couldn’t even name the feeling- it was too overwhelming, too all-consuming, to be described by the simple word “love.”

Loving Emmy made him love Julia even more and Julia claimed the same was true for her, but things still fell apart.  Not because of Emmy.  No problem in this world could stem from such an angel, all smiles and laughter as she was.  But Emmy couldn’t help the situation, no matter how much they tried to grow their relationship around her.  Love wasn’t enough.  Tom didn’t think it ever could be.

Am I Getting Any Better?

| rachelhamm

Okay, my next attempt in the writing exercise to work on character description.  How am I doing?

Tom Witherspoon was no one special back in high school, unless Aribelle’s love made him special.  He wasn’t short and he wasn’t tall, he wasn’t ugly and he wasn’t handsome, but Aribelle loved him.  He was the kind of guy you had to get to know to love, and once Aribelle got to know him, she couldn’t get enough of him.  He was funny in a subtle way, one really had to think about what he was saying and realize the irony.

Aribelle’s friends didn’t get the appeal, but it didn’t matter, because once she made up her mind, there was no changing it.  And she adored his grey eyes and strawberry blonde hair.  He just wasn’t like the other guys- that’s what she liked the most about him.

He scheduled the appointment at the salon because his mother kept harassing him about his long hair.  She complained that he was never going to meet anyone else if he looked like a hobo.  Of course, after his five-year marriage ended, he wasn’t exactly looking for a new relationship.  He had his hands full enough with Emmy, his three-year old daughter, and learning how to cook, clean, and pay bills for himself all over again.

The marriage hadn’t been bad.  It just hadn’t worked.  After Emmy’s birth, things became strained.  Julia felt more and more tied down and began to resent Tom’s “free-spirited” existence.  He could never figure out where she got the idea that he lived a “free-spirited” existence, but stopped arguing the point after a while.  He finally supposed that the fact that he left every morning to go to work and she was “stuck” at home every day with the baby gave her the idea that he could go off gallivanting with his friends whenever he felt like it.

Now she was working again and Emmy spent the day with one of her grandmothers.  Tom had her for two weeks straight, then Julia had her for two weeks.  It was the easiest and best solution for the time being, but Tom worried when Emmy reached school age that the constant moving back and forth would cause problems.   Julia never wanted to talk about that, even though kindergarten was only a year and a half away.

Writing Exercise

| rachelhamm

I’m in need of practice, specifically with character description and prose.  I suck at these two aspects of storytelling.  I like to be all Dialogue, Dialogue, Dialogue.  So, I’m going to start a writing exercise where at least once a day I spend thirty minutes to an hour trying to write as much as I can in terms of character description/development WITHOUT ANY DIALOGUE.  I started last night, here’s what I came up with:

Aribelle Justice loved her job.  She counted herself lucky.  How many people could actually say they loved their job?  She loved that every day was the same, yet different.  She loved making people beautiful.

When she went into work on a Saturday, she didn’t consider life unfair.  She never once thought, “I never get a real weekend!  Why didn’t I choose a normal 9-to-5 type career?”

Aribelle Justice loved her boyfriend, once.  Not so much anymore.  But she hadn’t realized it yet.  Things were comfortable with him.  He was handsome and intelligent; he treated her with respect.  But the spark was gone.

When she left work on a Saturday evening, she wasn’t excited to go home.  She wanted to stay at the salon, see a few more guests, make someone else’s date night incredible.

Aribelle had been one of the pretty girls in high school, though no one would claim she was beautiful.  She had deep brown eyes and long dark hair, a round face and slightly chubby cheeks.  The boys loved her because she was fearless and never took herself too seriously.  Senior year, she climbed to the top of the school’s clock tower, in a bikini, to protest the strict dress code.  Now, ten years later, her face slightly rounder, her hair slightly lighter and much shorter, she used that same fearlessness and a pair of shears to transform her guests from shlumpy housewives into fierce sex kittens.

She walked into the salon every day with her head high, thanks to two-inch heels.  She hadn’t felt her toes in over six years, but she didn’t care.  “Beauty is worth a little pain every now and then,” was her motto and she took nothing more seriously than beauty.  It was her job, after all.

So it wasn’t fate that she happened to be wearing a stunning outfit on a Wednesday afternoon in March.  Dark jeans, a fitted royal blue top, and a killer black blazer.  She always dressed to impress.  But perhaps it was fate that caused Tom Witherspoon to schedule an appointment with her best friend and co-worker, Lacey, on that same Wednesday afternoon.  Or, it might have been fate, if she believed in fate.  But she didn’t.

Now I’d like your help.  In the comments, give me the name of a character and one or two thoughts on who this character is.  I’ll post my practices here and everyone is free to critique to help my improve my writing in this area.  Sound like fun?  Thanks in advance for your help!