Tip for those of you just starting out: study the texts of your favourite authors.
Every time I’m writing and I get to a really important scene, I always pause for a moment and think: OK! How do you want this to happen? Sometimes the answer is instant, but sometimes it takes me longer. When that happens, I usually take out my favourite books and start going through random scenes. Not because I want to copy the works of those writers, but because they are a source of inspiration for me.
For example, I want my character to have a certain Hermione in her. She’s intelligent and has a strong personality, but she also has a more sensitive side. For all intents and purposes, Hermione was one of my best friends I had growing up and I adore her. She changed the world for smart girls. But is my character the same as Hermione? No. Hermione has a reasoning ability that mine doesn’t, she always knows about what’s going on in front of her nose. My character is sometimes a bit lost.
But studying Hermione can help understand how to show the reader that my character is intelligent.
Study your favourite characters
My relationship with Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy books was love at first page.
Oh oh! Book Alert! OOk, let me tell you about Vampire Academy. There was a time, I’m still at that time, when I liked vampires. Blame Twilight, blame the Vampire Diaries, blame True Blood.
I liked it, but I wasn’t obsessed. Until I read Vampire Academy. First the main character has nothing to do with Bella or Elena. Rose is sarcastic, funny, rebellious and impatient. Not to mention the quality I admire most about her: she is overprotective of the people she cares about.
It was love at first page I’m telling you. And her relationship with Dimitri? Don’t even get me started on that… (I honestly don’t understand why Vampire Academy isn’t a bigger phenomenon than Twilight).
Back on topic, since I like Rose’s character so much, I wanted my character to have a certain dose of her, especially that sarcastic humour.
So now I have Hermione and Rose Hathaway as sources of inspiration.
Study your favourite relationships
The relationships I love reading the most, are the ones that I can really feel the chemistry between the characters through the pages, so I’ll use Tris and Four from Divergent as an example. When I’m in a more romantic scene, I scour the pages of Divergent and see what it is about Roth’s writing that makes me love these characters together so much.
But my character is also a bit unstable because of what happened to her. And the best example I know of instability is Katniss from Hunger Games.
Besides having a Rose and Hermione as character personality inspiration. I also threw a little of Katniss and Tris to show instability and romantic love.
But when I say show, I don’t mean I used the same situations. See it as sort of a test, analyse it and then explain in your own words.
The advice is to look for exactly what you like about the writer and try to understand why you like it.
My opinions on some of the books I mentioned:
I will mention Harry Potter a thousand times in this blogger so you don’t need to know my opinion.
And obviously, you already know what I think about Vampire Academy!
Now, I referenced Twilight up there.
I read Twilight when I was in a not so good phase in my life. And that is, Bella’s attitude towards life, and a bit towards Edward. In the second book, I identified a lot with what she was feeling. Not that I was hopelessly in love with a vampire. But I wasn’t stable either. That identification made me love the books at the time. And while I still do, I sometimes feel like telling Bella to fight Edward a little more. A little bit of heat and emotion never hurt anyone.
Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins.
I don’t know anyone who hasn’t read all three Hunger Games books in over a week. They are addictive, really addictive. Believe me, I tried to save the second book to read after the movie came out, but I couldn’t. And the third one I read almost in a day. Who doesn’t want to read about the cruelty of a world that forces children to fight against each other? I know I do!
The thing is, humanity can be cruel. We don’t need to look twice at gladiators to discover that maybe we’re not so incapable of these atrocities. Suzanne Collins really delivers a message worth reading about the problems of war and the importance of love and selflessness.
Patricia Morais is a Portuguese writer and author of the World of Shadows series. She believes she doesn’t spend enough time in front of her laptop, so she occasionally publishes writing advice as well.
