I have been so neck deep in reworking my book that I haven’t got round to updating this blog but just thought I’d pop in to mention a couple of things that have really helped me recently.
I’ve joined Pinterest where I am doing valuable research for the book and also creating a bit of a ‘mood board’ which is just a collection of images that gives me Aghni feels. I find that a quick visit to this board usually sparks my imagination and gets the creative juices flowing if I’m struggling. Here’s some of my faves*:
Mid-Sept, I attended an ‘Inside Fictional Minds’ workshop in Brum organised by Stephanie Hutton and Liz Kay. Here’s the blurb.
I wasn’t sure what to expect but realised through the course of the day that my characters’ past had to be defined in subtle ways to make the present realistic. Although I knew and understood how the past shaped their psyches, I wasn’t always passing it on to the reader. It wasn’t a cue to bore them with pages of exposition but to drop hints here and there to put their behaviour in context. It helps in every scene to ask a lot of questions. Why is the MC doing this? How did they get to the point that they want this? What do they hope to achieve by doing it? This is a good way of not writing half baked plotty things that don’t seem true to the character’s back story.
After the course , I started a brand new scene which IMHO, nicely links my MC’s behaviour to her past. All in all, a thumbs up! There will be more events in the future I hear so please do keep an eye out if you’re pondering about how to really flesh out your characters. It was organised by The Writing Kiln and this is them :
The other thing that’s really helping me out is a simple one that anyone can do.
Stay off Twitter!! 😁😁
*Credits: These are the links to where I found the non-Pinterest pics but I’m not sure who the artists are. If anyone knows, please give me a shout and I’ll post a link.
https://detechter.com/karna-the-lone-son-of-kunti/
Kiira Rhosair, bookworm and YA fantasy author 