CATching Up, April 6, 2010
It’s been a busy year so far. Lots going on with writing and painting. New challenges to face and some old routines to maintain.
The last two months have certainly been no exception to that rule.
While I don’t have a lot to show for it, I have been very busy writing. Between lessons and workshops (from ACFW), story developing, snowflake design work and even some research, there has been at least three things to do every day. Some days, it’s difficult to choose the project that gets work first!
Since joining American Christian Fiction Writers in February, I’ve participated in two of the monthly ecourses. Time hasn’t allowed me to do every lesson with every course, but the course for March was on Characterization and it was fabulous. The April course is just getting started and is concentrating on writing opening lines, paragraphs and pages that take a reader in right from the start. Since I like to mosey on into the story, I’m looking forward to this course.
Archived workshops cover such topics as defining characters, writing proposals, word choice, and developing stories from premise to proposal. I’m only about a third of the way through the selection of archived workshops, but I’m looking forward to getting back to work on them.
I have take a moment here to say that if you are serious writer (that is, you write every day, you want to hone your craft and you want to be published), you will want to take a look at American Christian Fiction Writers. The courses and workshops I’ve taken in the first two months have been worth more than the price of membership. Much more!
Currently, I’m working through Brandilyn Collins’ excellent book on character development, Getting into Character. I’m developing some character of my own in this exercise. Every day I’ve worked on the process, I’ve approached it with the sense that I don’t understand it and will never understand it. Every day I’ve persisted through the lessons, I’ve discovered something new about my characters (and my own character, as well). I don’t remember having such difficulty wrapping my understanding around something since Algebra II in high school. The effort is well worth it.
I’ve been using the story, Saving Grace, as the subject for many of these lessons. While no fiction writing is taking place, I am coming to a better understanding of my two main characters, why they do the things they do, what they hope to accomplish, dreams and desires and all sorts of other things. Problems and potential problems are being exposed, too. My goal is to find my way through those problems, questions, confusion and doubt and find the story that’s wanting to be told, then know how to tell it in a captivating and enlightening manner.
Other ideas continue to bubble to the top, some of them so energetically I have to stop and take a look at them. Sometimes a one-sentence summary, sometimes a longer premise, sometimes a scene. Everything gets recorded and some of them get quite a bit of attention before I go back to the ‘real work’.
In the meantime, I continue wading the rapids of learning about writing. Even when I feel I’m about to go under, it’s fun. There’s nothing like that moment when the understanding arrives and I can say, “I get it!”