Setting

The setting is one of the most vital elements of any story, and also one of the more difficult ones to get right. There are two problems, that I have seen, most often arise when new authours are trying to develop a setting; they are (and I'm generalizing a bit) writing in a purple-prose, over-informing, or they have, what I like to call, the empty-world problem.

We'll start with the "empty world" problem. What I mean by this is that, while the characters and plot may be described, the area around them is left completely up to the imagination.

Ex. "She whirled back at him, swinging her sword carelessly. He stepped back and tripped over something - she took advantage of this and flipped over the object and jabbed the sword into his chest."

While this is an example of bad writing, it also illustrates what I'm talking about. There are almost no sensory details that give me any context to the situation or tell me where this is even happening; the authour leaves it so vague that it could have occured in a barn or in a field and it have made absolutely no difference. The reader has very little idea of how to picture this scenerio, and unless they have a vibrant imagination, aren't going to be able to "see" more than two people fighting in a white/black/gray empty area.

If you don't have enough sensory details, the reader won't be able to picture the world, the story, that you're trying to create and won't be as drawn into it as they could have been.

Now to the opposite end of the specturm; purple-prose and over-information. I find this arises, usually, though not always, as a result of an authour trying to overcompensate (for lack of experience, not lack of skill) or having been taught in school/other classes to overload the reader with as much sensory information as possible, to "flesh out the story". When a writer gets too descriptive in a story, it distracts from the narrative, while annoying the reader.

I'll give an example (from one of my works, a few years back):

_{"The sun rose over the river, emitting rays of heat and light, a bright orange orb, shining over the river, reflecting on the scales of small, darting fish and gleaming lillypads. The river was thin, able to be crossed by a child if need be, not really a river at all, but a creek that people had just been calling a river for years now. No one was at it now, though. Weeds blew gently in the wind by the river, crickets chirping and leaping about within them, stretching from the water into the forest, which went on for miles, not touched, yet, but the rays of the golden-sun, which was just peaking over the moutain range. It was summer-time, the time when the bugs began to come out and children began to play. Almost time for the summer-festival."}

While this may have been...okay, if I were having something happen near the river, but the actual events of the chapter had absolutely nothing to do with the river at all and took place within an inn, with the story never coming back to that area ever again. In this, I'm just bogging the reader down with irrelevant details that do nothing to support the story.

You want to reach a happy medium between the two extremes; you want to have some detail, but not so much that it overwhelms the actual plot of the novel/short story.

Now, we can move right onto how to develop a good setting, and how much you should delve into settings.

A fantasy novel, especially one taking place in a different world, will definitely need more details about the world than, say, one taking place in a high school. However, both need to be developed; the best way, I've found and feel free to disagree, is to subtly introduce your world in sentences, rather than paragraphs, to avoid info-dumping.

Ex. She takes a deep, quavering breath and stands up, disentangling herself from blankets and a pair of arms. There is a bathroom in the corner of inn room and that is where she goes to, because there's a mirror. It's lined with mold, green grime, and is blurry with thousands of fingerprints, but it serves her purpose.

This is a decent example of that; from that last sentence you can infer that that the room she is in is filthy, a filthy inn, then, probably in a city. The phrasing also conjurers up a very specific type of imagery, which gives the reader the mood/setting that you were going for.

This goes into a bit more depth than I do, and covers characterization and voice as well.

This is also a quick exercise to help you flesh out your writing a bit more.

Have fun world-building and writing, everyone!

Finding A Topic

I found myself transported back to my history classes at school while contemplating things to write today.  “Now, what would you like to do your project on?  You can choose anything.  What do you want to do? … No, dear, I don’t think that’s appropriate.  No, you can’t do that.  It’s best if you just do the Spanish Armada like everybody else, I think.”  Of course, everybody grumbles when they’re forced to do a specific topic, but better that than be unable to come up with one.

The absolutely fundamental, most important, necessary, vital piece of advice is that you must choose something that you like or that genuinely interests you, otherwise you’re going to have a hell of a time (negative hell) and you’ll give up (unless you’re as obstinate as the worst of mules or, like me, refuse to tolerate self-failure.)  Incidentally, this is the advice I was given when I was starting my EPQ.  I watched people who didn’t listen to this advice giving up after months’ worth of research or, worse still, halfway through completing the report on the project.

More than this, if you aren’t interested in what you write, it’ll show.  Then your reader will get bored because the writer is lacking an interest in the subject.

So.  Step number one to choosing a topic: unless you are a masochist, make sure it’s something that interests you and that you like.

Step number two: be honest and reasonable with yourself.  There’s that saying “write what you know”.  That’s true to an extent, but you can’t really “know” exactly what it was like in the Victorian era because you weren’t actually there.  Write what you know and what you can research.

Whatever you choose to write about is going to require research, or at least planning of some kind, even amongst the worst of pantsers.  Even if you pants as much as me.  My plot plans range between two sentences and two paragraphs (the latter for series).  Occasionally I’ll plan by writing out a pitch.  Whether you’re like me or somebody who has to plan out everything in meticulous detail (recommended for series), you and you alone know how you react to the idea of researching.  For research, if you’re dong historical fiction, you need to be prepared to put in the work, otherwise the story’s just not going to bear credibility, and woe betide you if a graduate of that area of history ever picks up the book.  If you know you’re not going to be bothered with the research, it’s quite often worth transferring your idea to a fantasy or sci-fi realm (although even these are not free of research) where you’ll be able to fabricate more – BUT the research still needs to be there.  Swords, for example, were not that heavy.  Unless somebody is an elf, they are not going to be able to pick up a bow for the first time one day and be a deadly shot felling fully-armoured enemies from fifty paces the day after.  Even in the realms of fantasy, some semblances of realism are needed, or the audience becomes too alienated.  If something defies realism, it needs an explanation, such as magic or deities or non-humanism.

For people who are planners, they will often find that there are few plot holes to fill in the edits, since they have made themselves think things through beforehand.  I’m not saying that plotters are better than pantsers or vice versa, but I do not recommend being a pantser unless you love doing rewrites or are a master of the art of back-writing.  You know how you function.  If you’re a plotter, choose a topic that will give you plenty to plot about.  Intrigue.  Deceit.  Unexpected twists.  If you’re a pantser, choose a topic that leaves the plot fairly open-ended so you can tie the knot at the end of the story after plaiting the strings whichever way you want.  If you are a pantser, it is probably not the best of ideas to attempt a detective novel, for example.

Step three: choose something that suits your style.

This one probably doesn’t cause many problems, because your style is most likely going to match what you like best, which will hopefully be the topic you choose.  What I mean by this, though, is don’t set something like a general fic or a contemporary fantasy to archaic phrasings such as “desist thou”.  Make sure that the tone is fitting to the genre you’re trying to write in.  You probably won’t want a morbid first person MC if you’re trying to write a comedy book, for example.  Most people try to avoid being too colloquial when writing high fantasies, as well.  Stuff like that.

So, to sum up:

First step: Something you like or that interests you (preferably both).

Second step: Something that is realistically within your capabilities.

Third step: Something that suits your style.

-Kirky^^

Saturday

I made a banner for the blog. :] It was originally pink too, but the white flare covered it up. Oh well, I kind of like it better this way. In case there's any graphic designer out there, this made using GIMP and Picnik, two of my favorite programs. 

Anyways, this is our first Saturday posting so I didn't want to do anything really big quite yet. I ave decided to bring one of my favorite blogs into light; Reasoning with Vampires. 

For all of you Twilight fans out there, DON'T ever read this blog. Filled to the brim with more than hundred mistakes you should never get away with as a writer, this blog is fun to read and surprisingly educating, in it's own way. 

I switched off between wondering how by Jaf did Stephenie Meyer get away with this and laughing at how horribly pathetic Belward really is. (Since they apparently can't live without each other, I felt it was appropriate to classify them as one person.) Dana, the writer of the blog, is one of the most sarcastic, yet utterly hilarious, person you will ever meet/read about. If Stephenie Meyer is your idol, you might want to check out this blog first. Maybe you'll realize you're better off aspiring to be Dana than Stephenie. Not only does Dana know the difference between first and second person, but she can actually hold an audience too!

If you have time on your hands and want to read something interesting, read a few posts at Reasoning with Vampires. Thanks guys for your time and remember, keep writing!

Finding Inspiration

It's already Friday and four days into NaNoWriMo. Plus, it's a cause for celebration; it's our first Friday! Yay! *momentary pause for applause* Again, Fridays are surveys, interviews, new authors, etc that relate to that week's topic or a specific post that was made. I hope to be able to have some inspiring writers come on and you know, inspire you. (Inspire is, after all, the word of the week.) So, back on topic, it's Friday! I went and asked a few people ways that they found inspiration and compiled a big list of ways to get new ideas. So, enjoy!

1. Browse Deviantart.com      _amayanieva_
2. Listen to Music (Pandora, IHeartRadio, Jelli)     _amayanieva_
3. Look through WeHeartIt.com     _amayanieva_
4. Browse through pinterest.com     Kaye Dominique
5. Google Quotes     LightningNinjaShinigami
6. Check out Buzzle.com for quotes     Hawk Eyes
7. History class or reading about historical events
8. Looking at pictures and deciding how they came about
9. Dreams
10. Watching random people and coming up with stories about their life
11. Reading poetry
12. Drawing/Sketching, various forms of art
13. Writing off of already created art pieces
14. Go for a walk
15. Experience the kind of things your characters are (If your MC climbs a tree, go climb a tree. Though I wouldn't recommend this to those of us with little to no hand-eye coordination.) 
16. Asking yourself a what if question
17. Asking someone else a what if question
18. Look at a list of baby names
19. Fall in love with your character
20. Think about things that you would like to do
21. Ask an elder questions about their life
22. Wander around your public library
23. Type random things into Google
24. Try new things
25. Get adequate help from a trained professional (Sorry, you might just have to make due with a fellow writer :)

You can do any of these or some of your own, or maybe even just wait for inspiration to find you. The biggest for me is usually dreams. There's so many different ways you can look at dreams and although you do have to wait for night, so many different dreams you can have. I would keep a dream journal or mentally file them somewhere in your head, that way, later on, you can look through them and get inspiration.

So have a nice, writing-filled Friday everyone! Good luck and keep writing!

Are there any other ways you get inspiration?

Tentative suggestions

So, inspiration. If you're like me, inspiration can come from anything, whether it's the numbers on your digital clock or some crazy stunt your family/friends pulled.
But if you're not, here's some common ways to find inspiration:
MUSIC. The mood of a song can determine the mood of your scene. Like, there's a vast difference between Owl City and Black Veil Brides. Although I don't keep track of music genres (rock, heavy metal, country, etc.), I do keep track of the melodies/lyrics. For a happy scene, I'd recommend:
1. Britt Nicole (Headphones, How We Roll)
2. Owl City (Galaxies, Designer Skyline, To The Sky)
3. Carrie Underwood (Crazy Dreams, The More Boys I Meet)

For a love scene:
1. Owl City (Honey and the Bee, Deer in the Headlights)
2. Allison Krauss (When You Say Nothing At All)
3. Diamond Rio (Beautiful Mess)

Inspirational:

1. Superchick (Hero, We Live, Get Up)
2. Aly & AJ (Rush, No One)
3. The Afters (Beautiful Words)

Heavy, like rock music (you know what I mean):
1. Skillet (The Last Night, Monster, Falling Inside the Black)
2. Black Veil Brides (Fallen Angels, Perfect Weapon)
3. Sanctus Real (I'm Not Alright)

You can probably tell I love music, by now. And like I said, I don't keep track of just one genre, more just the feel of the music.

Another source of inspiration is REAL LIFE. I get quite a few ideas looking at my family or friends, or even random strangers. Like, I based my MC's sister of of my real sister. My MC has a love of art, just like my mom. Lines of dialogue, plot ideas, personality quirks, all can come from around you. What I do is, whenever my brain sparks off an idea because of my surroundings, I write it on my arm in pen. I don't go anywhere without a pen. This way, I don't forget my idea before a more convenient time comes around. I can write it on my arm during a test at school or doing my chores.

Third- READING/TV. It feels unfair to group something as mundane as TV with glorious reading, but I must, to keep this post shorter than a mile long. You can get a general stereotype, like the nagging wife, the grumpy old man, the wise, blind person. Or you could come across something unique and refreshing, and want to try and do that. For example, you think of all mice as rodents/pests. Then I read The Tale of Despereaux, and it's really sweet towards mice. Or, you think of imaginary friends for little kids, until you read The BFG or maybe Bridge to Terabithia. Or that biology is boring, until you read Leviathan. The possibilities are endless. For TV, Warehouse 13 or Eureka on SyFy are awesome. Mythbusters is good, too.

To recap, music + real life + books/TV = common inspiration. I just gave you a ton of ideas, now pick up your pen, or sit down at your computer, and WRITE.
And a semi-relevant quote for you to think over~
"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living." -Dr. Seuss

It’s actually a lot harder to write about inspiration than you might think. I am lacking in inspiration on inspiration. In any case, it’s not as if you can force inspiration on yourself.

For those of you who are interested, I’m going to start with the etymology of the word “inspiration”. For those of you who aren’t, I’m going to start with it anyway. The word originally comes from the Latin verb “inspiro” meaning “I breath into” (or other things along those lines). Over time, inspiration has gone from that to that gigantic thunderbolt that hits us from time to time – and some of us more than others.

Like I said, inspiration can’t be forced – but we can find it in the most unlikely places. It means that the best way to find inspiration is to be open to everything and be ready to try everything. It also means that sometimes, the best way to find inspiration could be in what we’ve conditioned ourselves to be the ways in which we are most susceptible to being inspired, like, for example, by reading music. I’m just going to give a few ways in which inspiration has struck me and various of my friends. I’m not saying that this is going to happen/will work for you, since I’m known to have a seriously hyperactive imagination and can be and have been inspired from things as mundane as a Twix bar.

First port of call: music. I think just about every writer I know turns to music as an aide to writing. For some people, just turning on a CD and jiving around the house is enough for half a dozen plots to come galloping into their heads, but I’ve always found that music is more helpful for inspiring a mood than inspiring a whole story. The actress Anne Hathaway said that she used to listen to sad songs on her iPod just before a shoot where she was supposed to cry, and it worked. Obviously, it’s not going to work for everybody, but the type of music you listen to will have at least a subconscious impact on the mood of the scene you write. If it’s a really tense, action-packed scene, it’s going to help you a lot more if you’ve got music with real tension playing in the background than if you’ve got Holst’s Venus from the planets serenading you at your desk. Similarly, it’s going to make things a little tougher if you’re trying to write a really moving and deeply emotional death scene with house or techno thumping away in the background (unless your character dies in a nightclub). If you’re writing a high fantasy book, you’re probably better off not listening to rap nonstop unless it’s a part of the world-building – film music would be a better bet. Of course, these aren’t hard-and-fast set rules or anything; they’re just suggestions.

Like I said earlier, I get inspired to do stuff off the weirdest things (like when I decided to teach myself Korean because my favourite boy band is Korean… which looks normal until you factor in that this actually inspired a desire to learn at least a little of nine different languages in nine months). I can usually pinpoint my primary source of inspiration in any one novel or series I’ve written/am writing. My primary points of inspiration tend to be one of three things: an idea for a character, a memorable quote from a character, or a crux encounter or situation. I am the kind of person who will be listening to people talking and suddenly get out my mobile or my notebook – whichever’s nearest – and record a couple of lines of what’s being said or done with the merry thought of: “that is going in my next novel. Thanks, darlings!” (No, really, nobody is safe.) Real life experiences, either of yourself or those of others, are all part of a huge inspiration pool just waiting to be fished. If you hunt around enough, there is bound to be one experience that somebody’s had that just jumps out at you, slapping you around the head like a wet fish and yelling “pick me! Pick me!” in an imitation of Eddie Murphy voicing Donkey in the Shrek films. Whatever form or shape the lightning bolt comes in, take it. Several of my friends have been extremely amused to find variations of silly things they’ve done in various drafts of what I’ve written. Quite apart from that, there are people are there with the most extraordinary life stories. I remember going on Cracked.com once and seeing this thing about real life events compared to similar things in films and why the real life ones were so much more badass. The number one rated one – and I kid you not; I just wish I could remember which one it was – was just… well, basically, this guy had the most incredible war adventures, and there’d been a film made about them. People thought the stuff done in the film was absolutely incredible, especially since it was based on real life… and it then turned out that the events from real life had been hugely toned down in the film rather than racked up because the producers and the guy whose life they were basing the film on thought it would be pushing the bounds of credulity too far to put out the actual truth.

The actual truth was so inspiring it had to be toned down to make fiction that most people thought was beyond the bounds of reality. What does that say about the kind of inspiration we can find right in front of our noses? IT’S AWESOME. If you start looking at it that way, everyday life is FULL of little things that we can use as sources of inspiration. Sometimes, it’s the kind of bolt-of-lightning inspiration we get that makes us go “OH-oh-oh!” Sometimes it’s more like: “Hmm. I think I could use that.” Nobody and nothing is safe. Inspiration can take you ANYWHERE.

There’s a honeybee trying to find the window to go outside and this is my first time blogging. I’m hoping it’s going to discover the way out soon because it’s an endangered species. Happy writing, everybody!

-Kirky^^

Inspiration

We all have those days where nothing comes out. Not even any word vomit. All you've got is a blank page, and every time you type three words you delete four. Or maybe you've got a writer's block that's been lasting for weeks. So how can you get inspired?

To be honest, I think you can find inspiration anywhere. While you're watching TV, when you look at a picture, even when you're just walking down the street. But one of the ways I find inspiration most often is simply by reading other books. Sometimes, reading another book might give me an idea for a single sentence, or maybe it'll remind me that there's something missing in my own book. Some people have said that they read a book that changes their lives, and they want to be able to do the same with their own book. Maybe you see a book's success and find that you want that, too. Whatever the reason, reading a good book always seems to give me inspiration.

And, of course, there's the obvious - music. I tend to listen to Florence + the Machine or The Fray when I'm feeling stuck. (I also like to listen to the song Sail by AWOLNATION, regardless of how weird it might be.)

Welcome

Welcome to Cherry Tree Notes, a blog for advice, writing, and writing advice. Ever wondered how to find inspiration or how to create the perfect heroine? Has your villain been eluding your MC for too long? Has your hero's love interest lost the love? We'll address these questions and many more here at Cherry Tree Notes.

Mondays through Thursdays check in for advice about various writing topics. We start with inspiration this week and work our way into novels. On Fridays, we'll have interviews, surveys, new authors, and more. We finish out the week on Saturday with a day devoted to whatever the assigned author decides!

So if you're a beginning writer looking for advice or a pro with some to give, this is the place for you. By  the time you leave, we hope you've gained something from your visit. Thanks!

Our blog was thoughtfully designed by Zoey, a big round of applause for her if you please! It's beautiful!

Now, our writers...

Andri - Expert on character creation and development, and plot.


Kirky - Expert on grammar, editing, and fantasy. (Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none)

Kristi - Expert on general brainstorming, (basic) graphic design and writing by hand.

Midnight - Expert in spelling, descriptions, and vocabulary.

Nata - Expert on poetry, endings, and beginnings.

Zoey - Expert on character voice.

Just so you know, expert looks so much more impressive with a capital E. To find out more about our authors, please visit the Author's page.

So, if you have fallen in love with a fictional character, your plot's in shambles, or your MC is ignoring you after you have sympathized with their enemy, check back to see the cure for your troubles. Thanks for visiting and hope to see you again soon!