I’ve learned senior health care and terminology because of my in-law’s medical problems. But, I’ve also seen some things that help me to create good characters in my writing.
The term “control freak” was created for my father-in-law. He needs to be in charge of every situation. Since my mother-in-law’s stroke, he can’t control anything.
He’s 93 and his short-term memory is bad. We’ve stepped in and are making decisions he feels he should make. We are keeping him informed and involved. However, we visit care facilities, talk to her doctor, talk to his doctor, and general manage everyday decisions as well as major medical decisions.
If I wanted to rip his heart out, I couldn’t pick a better way than to take decision making out of his hands. His memory problem makes the situation worse, since he can’t remember that we’ve discussed the issue with him before.
Good storytelling means that you need to make things as difficult as possible for your characters. Find your character’s wounds and weak spots. Then hit them where it hurts the most.
How can you use your observations to create good characters?
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is the time to try different things. This year try changing your writing style.
If you usually write detailed outlines, try plotting as you go. You may find the freedom that you have been lacking.
If you usually write by the seat of your pants, try doing an outline. At least, define your plot’s turning points or write some scene notes on index cards and pull them out when you get stuck.
NaNoWriMo is a perfect time to see how the other half lives. Try it. You might surprise yourself.
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Voltaire said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Actually Voltaire said, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.” As writers, we need to take these words to heart.
I know when I’m worrying over which font I used, and I’m spending time making sure that all the pages have exactly 25 lines, I know there’s something I’m avoiding.
Sometimes I run spell-check after spell-check and grammar check after grammar check (even though I argue with Microsoft’s grammar checker).
I have a friend who was obsessing over how the bold didn’t show in her blog when viewed with the Firefox browser. No one ever left a blog never to return because there wasn’t any bold.
I can spend a whole day checking out blog themes, down loading blog themes, uploading blog themes to my hosting account, and then editing them when they don’t look right. Does this get any posts written? Does this move my career forward? Can I tell myself I’m being productive?
When we send our words out in the world, we are putting ourselves on view for anyone who reads them. That takes a lot of courage.
We all know how the gremlins put in the typos the minute we hit send or drop our packet in the mailbox. This is the way writing is.
