Tell a Braver Story

You may have seen me post about something called The Blackberry Bushes. That's my WIP. Though that title has become less relevant to the actual stories as the stories and characters have evolved over the last twenty or so years, it's stuck around. So what are these stories actually about?

In a fictional world reminiscent of Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, we follow the lives and adventures of seven young protagonists:

Rachel Doncath, nervous wreck who's never had a solid sense of home or friends thanks to growing up in a military family

Rietta Valencourt, teenage queen of a major nation, kept in isolation by her adamantly protective mother until she reaches her majority

Delclis Phemister, socially awkward botany nerd who would prefer to ignore the fact that he technically has a claim to his country's throne through the father he never met

Elystan Liddick, Delclis's half-brother, annoying little jerk, and the current heir to the throne--if he can survive to grow up

Amarantha Melbray, daughter of Elystan's nurse, dedicated aspiring artist, too serious for her own good, and deeply resentful of the boy who has monopolized her mother her entire life

Josiah Callon, elder son and heir of an ambitious and image-conscious king, raised to embody perfection and is obnoxiously good at it--until he isn't

Tamett Låsrygg (Lockridge), paid companion to the crown prince (Josiah) of a nation that long ago conquered his, might not be able to keep up the facade of dutiful compliance much longer

As much as I love researching this mostly historically-based world, the characters are the centerpiece of the stories--their growth, their relationships. These are stories about isolation and longing for connection, about family dynamics--good, bad, and complicated, about the tension between responsibility/expectations and personal inclinations, about how people are often more than our assumptions make them out to be. I try to present characters' flaws honestly (and some of them are very flawed) while also making them understandable and human.

The tone I'm going for is something that hopefully feels a lot like classic children's stories you might have read growing up.

If this is something you're interested in, here's where you can find what I've posted. None of the intended novels are anywhere near complete, but there are sample chapters and a lot of short stories.

it's time for spring. we'll try again next fall.

Carb starts your engine, protein keeps it going.

Cookie

Fruit (canned or fresh)

Chips

Piece of bread

Popcorn

Crackers

Easy protein add on:

Nuts

Spoonful of nut butter

Cheese

Roasted chickpea snacks

Glass of milk (dairy or non dairy)

Tips for Writing Actors / Movie Stars!! 

˙⋆✮ Their whole job is being believable while pretending. That sounds obvious, but it changes everything. An actor character has spent years learning how to control their face, voice, posture, timing, and emotional access. They know what angle looks best. They know when a silence reads as mystery instead of discomfort. They know how to cry on command or at least how to look like they might. So when they lie in real life, it can be terrifyingly convincing, but when they are truly vulnerable, it might actually look clumsier than their performances.

˙⋆✮ Their public image is usually built from roles they played, not who they are. A popstar’s brand often comes through music and image. An actor’s brand comes through characters the audience thinks they understand. If they played the sweet romantic lead, strangers expect them to be charming. If they played a villain, people joke about being scared of them. If they played a genius, interviewers assume they’re intellectual. If they played someone tragic, fans project softness onto them.

˙⋆✮ Auditions are humiliating in a very specific way. They walk into a room where people barely look up. They perform grief, love, rage, seduction, terror, sometimes in bad lighting, sometimes after waiting for three hours, sometimes opposite someone reading lines like they’re ordering soup. Then they leave and hear nothing. Or they hear they were “great, but not quite right,” which can mean anything from their hair color to their height to the producer’s nephew wanting the part. Writing auditions well means understanding how much rejection actors have to metabolize while still staying emotionally available enough to try again tomorrow.

˙⋆✮ The set is mostly waiting. People imagine film sets as intense and cinematic, but a lot of acting is sitting in costume at 5 a.m. while someone adjusts a light. Waiting in trailers. Waiting for makeup. Waiting for weather. Waiting while crew reset the shot. Doing the same emotional scene twelve times from different angles. Crying beautifully, then stopping while someone fixes a microphone, then having to return to the exact same heartbreak on command. The glamour is what the public sees. The job is repetition, boredom, precision, and emotional whiplash.

˙⋆✮ Actors have strange relationships with their bodies. Their body is not only theirs. It is wardrobe, camera, marketability, continuity, choreography, beauty standards, stunt safety, intimacy coordination, gossip, fan edits, criticism. They may be told to lose weight, gain muscle, keep the same haircut for months, cover tattoos, change their accent, fix their skin, look younger, look older, look natural but not actually natural...

˙⋆✮ Chemistry on screen DOES NOT mean intimacy in real life. Two actors can look like soulmates on camera and barely know each other. Or they can hate each other and produce the best romantic tension of their careers because professionalism is weird. Or they can be actual friends and have the internet turn every glance into evidence. This is a great source of conflict: the public believes in a relationship that does not exist, while the real relationship is either colder, messier, deeper, or much more boring than everyone wants it to be.

˙⋆✮ now about PRESS TOUR!! The actor has to answer the same questions in different outfits for weeks. “What drew you to this role?” “Was it hard filming that scene?” “Are you dating your co-star?” “What was your favorite memory on set?” They have to be funny, sincere, grateful, humble, charming, interesting, but not too honest. A press tour is basically a second performance, except they are playing “acceptable version of myself.”

˙⋆✮ An actor can be very good at emotion and very bad at honesty. They may understand how sadness looks, how desire sounds, how anger should land in a scene. But that does not mean they know how to handle their own sadness, desire, or anger when there is no script. Sometimes acting gives a person language for emotion. Sometimes it gives them endless ways to avoid it. They can perform vulnerability while never actually being vulnerable. They can confess beautifully in character and freeze when someone asks, “what do you really mean?”

˙⋆✮ Their relationship with fans is filtered through characters. Fans may say “you saved me” when what they mean is the role saved them. They may ask for quotes from a scene the actor barely remembers filming. They may blur the actor with the character and then punish them for not being that person. This can be sweet, overwhelming, or deeply uncomfortable. Imagine being hugged by a stranger who is crying because of someone you pretended to be three years ago.

˙⋆✮ Bad reviews can hit deeper than public scandals. A scandal attacks image. A bad review can attack craft. “They were wooden.” “Miscast.” “Out of their depth.” “Only famous because they’re beautiful.” “No range.” For an actor, that can touch the secret fear underneath everything: maybe I am not actually good. Maybe I have been packaged well. Maybe the camera loves me but the work does not. A great actor character should have at least one criticism they pretend not to care about and remember word for word.

Raffles is turned into a "proper" hero and leading man who only steals to return the jewels the next day and ask that the owner of the jewels donate the reward to a respectable charity (the Soldiers' Fund) instead. And, of course, in this version he has to get the girl instead of just helping set her up with Bunny, which is perhaps truer to the original stories but is done in a very mean spirited way.

Bunny really gets the short end of the stick. He's not only shamed for his gambling by Raffles (who is really one to talk), but also, when he finds out Raffles is the Cracksman, immediately betrays him to the officials, which is, of course, the very opposite of Bunny in canon.

My rigid approach is, the character does what I want it to do. I made the character. I wrote the scene. The character’s not real, it’s my puppet, I make it move, I change anything about it that I want for whatever reason I want.

And in one sense, that’s true. That will always be true. Without me, the Author, there is no character. No setting it exists in. No action it takes. No expression it makes. No nothing. No story at all. Without me, there isn’t anything on that page.

And I can write like that. But if you have any experience writing, maybe you’re learning like I’m beginning to—if the character never ‘becomes real’ to you in your imagination—if you never get a sense of what would and would not be in-character for them, to where you stop consciously having to mull over what they’d do and your imagination just feels like it’s watching what they’d do, subconsciously—

—if that never happens, and you’re just choosing what the character does based on what you want, and there’s no solid traits, nothing that can’t be bent to your whim-of-the-moment—

—If that’s how it is, you know how that character will turn out. You know what it’ll be to audiences, to yourself as you write it. You’ve seen the type in other people’s poor products.

The character won’t feel genuine.

It’s where you get the examples of Mary-Sues. When writers stop knowing ‘who the real character is,’ and it is just a face-claim puppet for whatever the writer is feeling the moment—what the character wanted yesterday when the author sat down to write a breakup scene is forgotten today when the author sits down to write a soccer match.

The character’s made from the Author. It can’t be apart from the Author. It’s not real—except in the sense that it can be genuine.

……annnd that, God help me, is how I’m starting to reconcile the idea of “free” will.

God could’ve made us automatons—and there is still no sense in which anything that happens is “outside” His sovereignty…and, He didn’t do that. We live. We make real choices. We want things. Sometimes things He wouldn’t exactly want us to have or do.

We can even not want Him.

Why would He make us? Why would He give us any kind of will, knowing it would stray from Him?

Because we wouldn’t be genuine, real, without it. We wouldn’t be able to choose Him, either. We wouldn’t be able to make choices, either.

He does orchestrate everything toward the culmination of His own will, and the end of the story He wants to tell, and it will all work out exactly as He plans it—and, we’re real.

I know I’m rambling and I know this isn’t theologically airtight. But honestly, I don’t expect to be able to defend it to anyone who hasn’t tried to figure out this… “the character doesn’t ‘want’ to do that thing in the scene I’m trying to write” paradox.

I mostly thought about this while I was thinking about people who dislike the idea of Yahweh because He supposedly forces people to live a life where evil and pain are a given—even if there’s ’glory’ on the other side—when He could have made it easier, if He’s so powerful, or kept us from choosing evil. The problem of evil.

And that’s the whole thing. He appears to have not done that because if He had, we wouldn’t have had the ability to choose. When we choose, and the evil is a consequence, He weaves it into good in the big picture.

am i learning, processing, or ruminating? it’s important to be able to distinguish between the three. learning is when you receive new information that updates your frame of understanding. processing is when you study a situation to help yourself understand it. ruminating is when you cycle over the same thought repeatedly, often causing distress. learning and processing are productive, while rumination is destructive.

which theme is this? understanding the root of the spiral has helped me to untangle why the rumination feels so intense and scary. (example: i’ve been ruminating on one specific interaction with someone where i think they might’ve misinterpreted what i meant. this is my theme of fear around being misunderstood.)

how do i respond? (example: okay, this is that theme of being misunderstood. but it is not my job to make myself perfectly understood. the people i have around me can ask clarifying questions if they’re confused, and they are willing to meet me in the middle because they want to understand.)

Alt version under break

Lying to the reader

Lying to themselves

Simply misinformed

Not paying attention

Has weird priorities

Assumed you knew

Hates you personally

Bad at communicating

Easily sidetracked

Will believe anything

Has weird prejudices