Nerves

So today I'm taking my driver's test and I can't say that I'm very excited. You see, have this bad habit of blowing tests, or at least you know math tests. I'm nervous that I'm going to fail and the state will not see it fit to ever turn me loose on the roads.
By the fact that I'm being really dramatic, you can probably tell that I'm not looking forward to this in the least, but oh well. Pain is often the price for the best things in life.
So explain why getting up for school is so painful? ;)
Anyway, remember my whiny session yesterday, I wrote the essay and I'm going to post it here for two reasons
1. So when I actually quote it, you guys will know what I'm talking about and can laugh.
2. I have a habit of losing old essays, so here, it will be preserved forever.
So here it is, my essay with the essay instructions at the top. And have you realized I've just started three paragraphs with so? Sooo annoying! :)

Prompt 2: Imagine you are a published author. You have received a lucrative contract to write a novel in the next year. You will be interviewed about your upcoming novel. In preparation for the interview, they have sent you a series of questions. To prepare for the interview, write the answers to the following questions.

What will you choose to write about? 
What obstacles might you face?
How do you develop your characters?
How will you choose the setting?
What literary techniques do you commonly use?  Foreshadowing?  Flashback?
Have you ever had writer’s block? What would you do to overcome this? 
Do you make a schedule of writing?
How will you stay on schedule?
What most excites you as you begin the process of writing?

Prompt 2

Hi, I’m Tayla Durham and the book that I’m writing is called Twisted. I’m pretty passionate about what I do. So passionate in fact, people probably call me crazy behind my back. I spend hours upon end staring at a computer screen as I type one…slow…letter…at…a…time, but this is me. I can’t go without writing; it’d be like trying to go without air.

The obstacles I face are pretty intense. First off, time is a major pain. I used to get by with just writing in the afternoon after school, I’ve been writing through junior high and the first two years in high school like this, but then things changed. During the summer after tenth grade, I started waking up really early to write. I’d exercise and then it was straight to my computer. I didn’t know it at the time but doing this would save me a lot of pain when eleventh grade started and I started running out of time in the afternoon. I generally try to write a chapter and a half every day, that gets difficult when I only have two hours to write and it takes four hours to write a single chapter!

Another roadblock that I face all the time is writer’s block. It’s a killer. It can take me hours to get past it, and during that time, I’m struggling and pounding my face into a wall (not really, but I get tempted) and then I get extremely grouchy. My sister once complained to me that she can tell when I’m going through writer’s block because I’m so grouchy! Usually, I just keep writing, or I take a break and walk around to get my creative juices flowing, other times I just turn my back on my computer and wish I’d taken up knitting instead of writing. I get through it, but it still feels like I’m getting dragged behind a truck and trying to pull myself into the trunk while it’s doing sixty on the freeway. Ouch.

I could probably go on forever about challenges, but to save you the time of listening to me complain, I’ll just move on. I develop my characters by writing. Yeah, just by writing. I let them develop themselves. I do take a lot of time to think about what I want them to become, and most of the time, the change just happens, there’s no big epiphany and I leave it up to the readers to spot it. I love doing this, I used to struggle to do it, and practically held my characters at sword point while screaming, “Change!” but characters are like people, they hate being told what to do. Especially one of my characters called the Secret Keeper, he’s naturally stubborn to begin with, and then I try forcing him to do something, he throws down his foot and I find myself stumbling along without him.

Another way that I develop them is by switching to different point of views. This gives me a different way to look at the story, because each character is inherently different from the other and this gives me room to make them each suffer…I mean develop differently and the reader can see it firsthand. I also like doing this, because seriously, I enjoy the bad guys. In Lord of the Rings I was voting for the Nazgul, in Harry Potter I wanted the dementors to get a bigger part, and so naturally when I got a character like this, I wanted to explore him. I began developing the Secret Keeper from day one, he has the biggest development to go through and so I began writing from his point of view. I was (and still am) amazed at how difficult it was to write from his POV. As a wraith, he definitely does not think the same way we do, and I’ve struggled to show this. He’s so different from my other characters, bipolar to a fault. He’s really where I had to learn to just write. I can’t force it out of him. His changes definitely have to be subtle.

No matter how painful that may be.

So now off of character development and onto literary devices. I personally believe that a good book is one that is all connected. I’ve mentioned this on my blog; I enjoy a good book that is tied from start to finish. I want to be able to pull on one string and yank something in a different book. No random starts, I hate it when an author tosses something into a book because it looks good. Biggest example that I can think of is when an author threw in the idea that one of his characters was afraid of tight spaces and he had never mentioned this before in the eight other books in the series! That’s one of the reasons I purposefully throw in foreshadowing everywhere I can.

I try to keep my foreshadowing simple. A phrase, a sentence here and there. I try to foreshadow things at the end of the series as well as at the end of the book. Like for instance, to foreshadow one of the characters coming down with malaria, I’m going to put into my books that he simply gets eaten by mosquitoes, and then Allie’s father, a sailor by trade, talks about how five of his crewmen came down with malaria. It’s foreshadowed twice, no doubting about what’s going to happen, but the readers won’t guess it until it actually happens. This is the best kind of foreshadowing, sadly, I kind of suck at it. J.K. Rowling and Rick Riordan are two authors that are so much better at this than me. I respect them both for their amazing books.

Along with foreshadowing, I use a lot of flashbacks. Usually, they happen without the usual indication that there’s going to be a flashback. I just start writing letting it flow out of the characters. We as humans naturally flashback on things that have happened to us in the past, I try to show this through my characters.

I read once that it’s one thing to tell what’s going on, but it’s quite another to show. I find that both work, you need to tell and you need to show, but in the case of characterization, I prefer to show. I can do this through flashbacks because it shows the characters as they were so you can understand how they are. It’s better than telling because the reader can really understand what the character went through to get to where he is for good or for bad. It’s more personal to use flashbacks.

As for setting, I just let it happen. Most of the time the setting is in my head, greatly resembling places I’ve actually been. Like for the scene where Chikego (a wraith) chases Aster, Allie and Maffio through the darkness of Robin Woods. This scene was really created when I went camping and when the sun went down, I looked at the trees and was pretty awestruck at just how dark it was. I could barely see the trees, forget a being of darkness. Other times I pick a setting that will reflect the mood of the scene, dark places for characters of darkness, lighter settings for characters that aren’t as evil. I try to develop my setting so that it seems like the characters are walking in a real place, and not a partially developed map. I love having images of where the characters are in my mind, but I don’t want to dictate, the reader’s imagination is the best place to develop the setting, I just point it in a certain direction on occasion.

Now, onto my writing schedule. Yikes. This can be kind of hectic. I generally wake up at five in the morning (four fifty-eight if you want to be precise, my clock is slightly ahead) so that I can exercise early in the morning and then write. Usually I write from six to seven thirty in the morning before getting ready for school, then after school I write for all I can during the afternoon before exercising again (I believe close to an hour is necessary and usually I’m so dippy in the morning I can only manage twenty minutes before getting grouchy) and practicing my violin. I fit in all I can, often times writing pretty late into the night to get my full chapter and a half. Needless to say, a chapter and a half doesn’t seem like a lot, but on bad days, it’s immense, but I just have to do it. I won’t quit.

What gets me excited about writing? Hmm. I love creating my own worlds with my own rules. I love developing those worlds and sharing them with people. I also love my characters; each one has a little bit of me so it’s like a big party with me, although sometimes I can drive myself crazy! Writing is so personal for me and sometimes I don’t like to share it because there’s so much of me in there. If you took all the characters and looked at them, you’d see all my insecurities, my joys, my pains, my blah moments. For instance, if you looked at Allie, Aster and the Secret Keeper and how all three of them are more than a little anti-social and unwilling to interact, you can see how I feel sometimes. Insecure, lonely, ignored because I’m different, yeah, like that, and on the flip side, if you take a good look at Amaarzar, you can see how hard it is for me to let go of a grudge sometimes. But unlike Amaarzar, I don’t let it eat me until I’m something like him.

See what I mean? I’m passionate, I love talking about my characters. They’re all so unique and at the same time like me! I love developing them and sending them on the crazy adventures I’d never be brave enough to survive. I’d never get brave enough to backtalk a wraith like the Secret Keeper, I might get annoyed enough, but I couldn’t hold my ground for long, not like how Aster did. That’s what gets me excited, having my characters do the things I’m scared to the dickens to do!

Though, I think the best thing is the idea that my world, my characters and my story will be in the hands of readers someday. I can’t wait to see where my story will take them. Will it inspire them to write? Will it inspire them to reach higher? Will it inspire them to start reading more? This is why I enjoy getting comments on my story, it’s nice to be told that my story made someone’s day, that it made them laugh and helped them forget their own trials. As an author, this is the best thing I can hope for, that my words will inspire at least one person.

So that's the end.
Anyway, wish me luck for my driver's tests. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that I'll do something right. :)