#nanowrite

More stuff for NaNoWriMo. Parts that I found particularly helpful about this:

"Now, when you focus only on the weaknesses in your writing, I suspect you might find yourself, from time to time, feeling one or more of the following things: You’re reluctant to write. You feel negative toward your writing. You treat even your best writing with disdain. You complain about why you ever took up writing and doubt your dedication. And you have fewer and fewer good writing experiences."

"We Americans believe that we can improve anything about ourselves. Gallup discovered 1) No you can’t and 2) don’t bother and 3) you have a greater capacity to grow in your strengths than you will ever have to improve a weakness and finally 4) you can’t turn a weakness into a strength. So 5) focus on your strengths. For one thing, you’ll work more productively. For another, you will be happier. Which will make you more productive, then happier, then more productive, and on."

"It’s clear that each writer has a greater potential for success in specific areas, and the key to your development as a writer and an artist is building on who you already are. ... So a revision to the YOU CAN BE ANYTHING YOU WANT TO BE maxim might be more accurate: You cannot be anything you want to be—but you can be a lot more of who you already are."

"As far as your talents go, you have a greater capacity to improve a strength than you will ever have to turn a weakness into a strength. The more you focus on your strengths, the more strengths you have to develop."

"You’ve got strengths and you’ve got weaknesses. What I want to say to you is, follow the strengths and manage the weaknesses. Better yet, get assistance with your weaknesses, but for your strengths…make that the study of your life."

"Hear me out: If you do this consistently, if you focus on your strengths and manage your weaknesses—not ignore them or neglect them, but manage them with precision, what do you achieve? Well, that’s what we call style. That’s what we call voice. That’s what we call insight. I read you and I think, wow, that writer is terrible at dialogue, but holy hell can she create a sensory world that is transformative, true, accurate, lush. No one writes with that kind of imagery skills. Dialogue, eh. Raymond Carver, could that guy distill a story to its essentials or what? Lush description. Not so much. And though it’s controversial, his editor, Gordon Lish, knew that. And so he brought more distillation into relief into Carver’s work. Lish was his Precision Guy.

I have a friend who is a prima ballerina, Gavin Larson. Just retired as a principal dancer for the Oregon Ballet when she was 35 years old. She says she’s very good at theatricality in her dancing. That’s true. Very good at long movements and stride. Her turns? For 25 years she’s struggled with her turns. She’s performed all over the world. But there are times when she looks across the dance floor, and dancer after dancer—whether they are merely promising, or less professionally successful than her, or they are her peers—she looks at them and sees how good their turns are, and then she begins to think she’s not a good dancer. She sees her weakness in other’s strengths. (In the realm of personality, it’s akin to judging your inner life by how you see other people’s external life.)

This is a formula for self-destruction. And I guarantee that there’s not a single person reading this who hasn’t committed that sin. You look at someone else’s writing—and while you may be inspired by it—you also may think, I’m screwed. That is not my strength. Therefore I must be bad. At everything. In my writing. And probably my personal life, too. And you begin to feel so crummy about your weaknesses that it obliterates your self-knowledge and confidence in your strengths."

"The constant capacity for growth in the strength area is infectious! It leads you to greater confidence and that confidence leads to greater risk taking in all of your talent areas (even ones you know to be weaknesses)—because as you know, when you’re faced with a weakness in your writing, your writing gets timid. So, be bold with your strengths—that’s how you begin to create a style and clarify your voice and develop better insights, not by babying your weaknesses but by dramatically focusing on and growing your strengths."

"I’m not good at description, at writing images. But I’m good at working with a couple kinds of images. Light. Wind. Sky. Horizon. Water. It shouldn’t surprise you if I tell you, I’m from the Great State of Texas. Let me say those again: Light, wind, sky, horizon, water…that is Texas in 5 words. In so much of Texas, especially the East Texas of my childhood, the landscape is more like skyscape, lightscape, horizonscape. Those particular images connect to my personality as an expatriate Texan. I like describing those things. No, those things mean something essential to my imagination…I have no choice. So here’s how it works: My obsession strength trumped my skill weakness—indulging my obsession in those particular images was a means to manage my weakness of not being so great at making images generally. And if you were ever to read my work and analyze my images, you might be inclined to think, that dude is obsessed with light, wind, sky, horizon, and water."

"It can be difficult to define your own talents and strengths as a writer, I know that. And you can learn yourself into your strengths, this is true. You may not know right now entirely what your strengths are—And you can experiment to discover what your strengths are. You don’t have to know right now what your strengths are, regarding your skills as a writer. Your personality strengths, your obsessions—these may be a little more fixed. If you’re fastidious in life, you’re probably fastidious in your writing. If you’re deliberative in life, you’re probably deliberative in your writing. If you’re competitive in your life, you’re probably competitive in your writing. And so on."

"But let me say this too: I do believe that your strengths exist already. They’re part of your personality as a writer, part of your personality as a person... I think that there is a primitive element at play, too: That which might have driven you to write in the first place is likely, possibly, at least, at the heart of one of your strengths even today. Go back and consider that impulse. See if that’s helpful."

"Better to have large ambitions than petty ones if you want to be a writer, is what I say. If you’re going to miss, miss big. No one likes a writer with petty ambitions."

"You work at becoming a writer and it’s natural to wonder what’s on the next horizon when you’re done—what will your writing be like, what can you accomplish, what can you improve, how can you get published, what is on the next horizon and the next and the next.

There are no horizons. And even if you arrive at one, believe me, there’s another mountain beyond that. It’s like Lewis and Clark in the Rockies…there’s just another ridge beyond that one. And then, you realize, there is no secret passageway either. You’ve got to paddle the whole Columbia River yourself and your canoes keep breaking. And like Lewis and Clark, no one has to die on the journey of discovery, and hopefully, nothing in you has to die either."

"There are no horizons—not externally. But there are many internally, intrinsically. You have horizon upon horizon upon horizon inside of you—and the route to discover those is through your talents as an artist, through improving not your weaknesses but your strengths: through using your strengths in your skills, in your personality, and your obsessions to grow in the right directions as a writer, in the natural directions, in your best directions.

Writing, as with other arts, is a great human adventure of hope and dream and connection and life. If you step back for a second, consider what you’re good at, and then…do that, again and again and again and again. You’re going to place yourself in a zone of creating where you make things—you make things that never existed before, ever, in the literary world. You’re going to make things that you didn’t think were possible for you to make. You’re going to exceed beyond what you ever dreamed was possible as a writer because you’re getting better and better at what you’re already good at. You’re going to create a style that only you can create, in a voice that is wholly your voice, with insight that is honestly authentic—because you’re working on expanding the best and most productive of your skills, and personality, and obsessions.

1. From the different types of pets, which would be your or your character's favorite? Why?

  The battle ram Rambo fits Kittar's personality very well. Even though they look cute and inoffensive at first, both will wreck you really bad if you don't pay critical attention.

  2. Tell us about your TERA adventures together. How would your character have met the pet? What would the pet's personality be like?

  This part is the interesting one. While Kittar is a fierce warrior and believes she can take every enemy by herself, she often finds herself surrounded or fleeing from some BAMs mob. You know, the usual. But that day was different.

  She was leaving the Mount Tyrannas area after a long day delivering things all over the place (for some reason, the people inside the Realm of Arborea have the intense need to ask you to deliver things to people 3 feet away from them) and was way tired of dumb villagers asking for help for easy stuff, like collecting branches or herbs along the road. Even though it wasn't night yet it was getting dark very fast and the cold winds of Westonia weren't making it easy for Kittar to find shelter. Acarum was still too far away and Bleakrock was unreachable until morning, the only thing she could do was find a small cave, light up a campfire and dream about home, or at least what she liked to call Pora Elinu, where she have lived for almost all her life, or at least until she was called for the Federation.

  After what seemed hours looking for a proper shelter, there was no way that she would find somewhere to rest, and at that rate, she could freeze to death!

  Not too far away from there, actually, on the other side of the hill, there was a rebel battle ram, which liked to call himself Rambo, no one knows why. He apparently came from Celestial Hills, but there should be no way for a ram to get a pegasus and fly over Acarum. Who knows?

But that isn't the focus here. Kittar was still in danger, and possibly fainted in the middle of the snow, getting colder and colder... that's when our hero, Rambo the battle ram enters the scene. While feeling cold himself, he sensed someone near him and ran to battle this possible enemy just to find poor Kittar, under a layer of snow. Rambo, when facing the helpless Elin, this curious feeling popped on him. Without thinking twice, the small but powerful ram, very carefully, put Kittar on his back and walked away into the night.

The next morning, even it being a cold day, theres no way to compare to the night storms which affect the area. Kittar then woke up with a ray of light on her face, making her shiver a little before opening her eyes. When she did open them, she found herself embracing a big ball of fur with horns, that was gently snoring, calmly sleeping. Kittar was surprised to see that, even under a snow storm and carrying her, he got to pry open a space into two rocks on a stone formation not far from where she had fallen asleep, and make that their shelter for the night.

While he was still sleeping, Kittar got a run to Acarum in order to buy food and campfires (which was the reason she couldnt keep herself warm the last night). Back at the rock formation, Rambo was still asleep, probably tired of carrying her all over the place. Kittar set the campfire and waited for her little savior to wake up.

That was just the start of a great companionship.

  //Kittar gave Rambo, the battle ram, the name of the healing archangel of an old civilization, Tsphakiel.